If there’s a tree in both the territory and my map, that’s just the usual state of affairs. But when I talk about the tree, you don’t need to look at my map to know what I mean, you can just look at the tree. Morality is different—we intuitively think of morality as something other people can see, but this works because there is a common factor (our common ancestry), not because you can actually see the morality I’m talking about.
We could theoretically cash out statements about morality in terms of complicated evaluations of ideas and percepts, but this can’t save the intuitions about e.g. what arguments about morality are doing. Unlike the case of a tree and our idea of the tree, I think there really is a mismatch between our computation of morality and our idea of it.
If there’s a tree in both the territory and my map, that’s just the usual state of affairs. But when I talk about the tree, you don’t need to look at my map to know what I mean, you can just look at the tree. Morality is different—we intuitively think of morality as something other people can see, but this works because there is a common factor (our common ancestry), not because you can actually see the morality I’m talking about.
We could theoretically cash out statements about morality in terms of complicated evaluations of ideas and percepts, but this can’t save the intuitions about e.g. what arguments about morality are doing. Unlike the case of a tree and our idea of the tree, I think there really is a mismatch between our computation of morality and our idea of it.