“Perhaps Richard means that we could suppose that abortion is indeed prohibited by morality_Bob...”
That’s right. (I didn’t mean to suggest that there’s never any disputing what someone’s moral commitments are; just that this wasn’t supposed to be in dispute in the particular case I was imagining.) I take it that Sally and Bob could disagree even so, and not merely be talking past each other, even if one or both of them was impervious to rational argument. It is at least a significant cost of your theory that it denies this datum. (It doesn’t have to be ‘irrefutable’ to nonetheless be a hefty bullet to bite!)
I like your account of everyday moral disagreement, but would take it a step further: it is no mere accident that your Sally and Bob expect to be able to persuade the other. Rather, it is essential to the concept of morality that it involves shared standards common to all fully reasonable agents.
It’s worth emphasizing, though, that humans are not fully reasonable. Some are even irrevocably unreasonable, incapable of rationally updating (some of) their beliefs. So while, I claim, we all aspire to the morality_Objective norms, I doubt there’s any empirically specifiable procedure that could ensure our explicit affirmation of those norms (let alone their unfolded implications). Bob may stubbornly insist that abortion is wrong, and this may conflict with other claims he makes, but there’s simply no way (short of brain surgery) to shake him from his illogic. What then? I say he’s mistaken, even though he can’t be brought to recognize this himself. It’s not clear to me whether you can say this, since I’m not sure exactly what your ‘extrapolation’ procedure for defining morality_Bob is. But if it’s based on any simple empirical facts about what Bob would believe if we told him various facts and arguments, then it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to correct for the moral errors that result from sheer irrationality, or imperviousness to argument.
Could you say a little more about exactly which empirical facts serve to define morality_Bob?
“Perhaps Richard means that we could suppose that abortion is indeed prohibited by morality_Bob...”
That’s right. (I didn’t mean to suggest that there’s never any disputing what someone’s moral commitments are; just that this wasn’t supposed to be in dispute in the particular case I was imagining.) I take it that Sally and Bob could disagree even so, and not merely be talking past each other, even if one or both of them was impervious to rational argument. It is at least a significant cost of your theory that it denies this datum. (It doesn’t have to be ‘irrefutable’ to nonetheless be a hefty bullet to bite!)
I like your account of everyday moral disagreement, but would take it a step further: it is no mere accident that your Sally and Bob expect to be able to persuade the other. Rather, it is essential to the concept of morality that it involves shared standards common to all fully reasonable agents.
It’s worth emphasizing, though, that humans are not fully reasonable. Some are even irrevocably unreasonable, incapable of rationally updating (some of) their beliefs. So while, I claim, we all aspire to the morality_Objective norms, I doubt there’s any empirically specifiable procedure that could ensure our explicit affirmation of those norms (let alone their unfolded implications). Bob may stubbornly insist that abortion is wrong, and this may conflict with other claims he makes, but there’s simply no way (short of brain surgery) to shake him from his illogic. What then? I say he’s mistaken, even though he can’t be brought to recognize this himself. It’s not clear to me whether you can say this, since I’m not sure exactly what your ‘extrapolation’ procedure for defining morality_Bob is. But if it’s based on any simple empirical facts about what Bob would believe if we told him various facts and arguments, then it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to correct for the moral errors that result from sheer irrationality, or imperviousness to argument.
Could you say a little more about exactly which empirical facts serve to define morality_Bob?