Your patience for long discussions with clueless people (even just as a reader) far exceeds mine. And that's probably a good thing, since errors should be examined and understood.
I basically agree with your view of morals as very strong preferences where we care about other people's conduct. But unless I missed something, you basically treat this as a purely individual thing, and I don't think it is. Morals are cultural artifacts. Nobody teaches you to prefer chocolate to vanilla or blue to red; those are purely personal preferences that you are free to decide for yourself. But people don't make up their moral beliefs from scratch. You are taught that it is wrong to lie, steal, or murder (among other things), and you are also taught various moral responsibilities that society expects you to live up to. You may disagree with some of what you're taught, but your culture still sets the standards even if you choose to rebel against some of the details. (That society may preach rules that few people actually adhere to, such as the rule against telling lies, is an interesting side topic, but not, I think, one that invalidates what I'm saying.)
I think Hannah's comment about procreation is interesting, but not really relevant as presented. The desire to reproduce is not based on a moral belief, it's a physical drive to mate. Where it actually relates to morality is that most societies surround sex with a great number of rules about who you are or aren't allowed to mate with and under what circumstances. Many of these rules make good practical sense: inbreeding has nasty consequences that were probably observable in ancient times even without the explanations provided by modern genetics; monogamy makes for a more stable society by enabling most men to find mates; being faithful to your spouse makes it easier to tell who the father actually is for each child, and thus keeps lines of inheritance clear; prohibiting pre-marital sex limits procreation to committed relationships to prevent men from making children they aren't obligated to support (a concern which has been reduced by the availability of highly-reliable contraceptives in just the last sixty years or so, leading directly to a more relaxed attitude toward pre-marital sex among the boomers and the generations that have followed them). So these moral rules are not simply arbitrary; they exist to promote specific purposes in line with other preferences that people will tend to have (like not wanting your wealth to pass to another man's child). There's more going on here than just personal preferences, but on the other hand, at the societal level, morality still consists of choices made based on what people collectively valued and wanted at some point in the past, as modified by what people have collectively valued and wanted more recently.
"Preferences" is a gross oversimplification, or at least lacks clarity. I pretty much agree with your entire second paragraph. I think people are predisposed to pick up and respond to local and cultural norms, and that guilt, shame, and social reinforcement all serve to motivate people to comply with the status quo and not simply act exclusively on whatever idiosyncratic personal preferences they happen to have. We are cultural organisms and this is reflected in our psychology.
I don't typically get into much detail about this because the battles over the nature of morality in metaethics are typically so shallow on the psychological front that there's little opportunity to do so, but to assuage your concerns: No I don't have a naive and psychologically misguided view about moral psychology that ignores culture.
I also agree moral rules are (usually? almost always) not arbitrary, but I think they can be arbitrary and there wouldn't be any error if so. Also, "arbitrary" is one of these funky terms philosophers throw around, often as a sneer, without it being all that clear what they have in mind.
Excellent, per usual. Thanks!
Your patience for long discussions with clueless people (even just as a reader) far exceeds mine. And that's probably a good thing, since errors should be examined and understood.
I basically agree with your view of morals as very strong preferences where we care about other people's conduct. But unless I missed something, you basically treat this as a purely individual thing, and I don't think it is. Morals are cultural artifacts. Nobody teaches you to prefer chocolate to vanilla or blue to red; those are purely personal preferences that you are free to decide for yourself. But people don't make up their moral beliefs from scratch. You are taught that it is wrong to lie, steal, or murder (among other things), and you are also taught various moral responsibilities that society expects you to live up to. You may disagree with some of what you're taught, but your culture still sets the standards even if you choose to rebel against some of the details. (That society may preach rules that few people actually adhere to, such as the rule against telling lies, is an interesting side topic, but not, I think, one that invalidates what I'm saying.)
I think Hannah's comment about procreation is interesting, but not really relevant as presented. The desire to reproduce is not based on a moral belief, it's a physical drive to mate. Where it actually relates to morality is that most societies surround sex with a great number of rules about who you are or aren't allowed to mate with and under what circumstances. Many of these rules make good practical sense: inbreeding has nasty consequences that were probably observable in ancient times even without the explanations provided by modern genetics; monogamy makes for a more stable society by enabling most men to find mates; being faithful to your spouse makes it easier to tell who the father actually is for each child, and thus keeps lines of inheritance clear; prohibiting pre-marital sex limits procreation to committed relationships to prevent men from making children they aren't obligated to support (a concern which has been reduced by the availability of highly-reliable contraceptives in just the last sixty years or so, leading directly to a more relaxed attitude toward pre-marital sex among the boomers and the generations that have followed them). So these moral rules are not simply arbitrary; they exist to promote specific purposes in line with other preferences that people will tend to have (like not wanting your wealth to pass to another man's child). There's more going on here than just personal preferences, but on the other hand, at the societal level, morality still consists of choices made based on what people collectively valued and wanted at some point in the past, as modified by what people have collectively valued and wanted more recently.
"Preferences" is a gross oversimplification, or at least lacks clarity. I pretty much agree with your entire second paragraph. I think people are predisposed to pick up and respond to local and cultural norms, and that guilt, shame, and social reinforcement all serve to motivate people to comply with the status quo and not simply act exclusively on whatever idiosyncratic personal preferences they happen to have. We are cultural organisms and this is reflected in our psychology.
I don't typically get into much detail about this because the battles over the nature of morality in metaethics are typically so shallow on the psychological front that there's little opportunity to do so, but to assuage your concerns: No I don't have a naive and psychologically misguided view about moral psychology that ignores culture.
I also agree moral rules are (usually? almost always) not arbitrary, but I think they can be arbitrary and there wouldn't be any error if so. Also, "arbitrary" is one of these funky terms philosophers throw around, often as a sneer, without it being all that clear what they have in mind.