Imagine that, for whatever reason, you were not aware of the existence of an entire academic discipline. They held conferences, had journals, published articles, taught courses, and had a rich history of thinkers contributing to the field that spanned several thousand years. This field was primarily concerned with a question that seems simple, but is surprisingly difficult to grapple with:
Which things are okie dokie, and which things are not?
This field is known as okics (pronounced oh-kicks). Many people who study okics are okie dokie realists. They think some things really are okie dokie, no matter what anyone else says or thinks. It's not a matter of social convention. It's not a matter of personal preference. Some things really are okie dokie and some things are not.
For instance, it is okie dokie to have a nap during nap time, but it's not okie dokie to take a nap during story time.
Such questions are normative. And while some people who study ethics have tried to take over the field of okics by insisting okics is just a branch of ethics, okicists insist that facts about what is "okie dokie" are sui generis. They are not merely a type of ethical fact. What would we make of this field? Would we take it seriously? Why would we be even remotely inclined to think anything is "really" okie dokie or not?
Think about all the parallels to ethics: you could have Boore's Open Question argument: "Is it true that having a nap during nap time is ok dokie?"
Many okicists point out that we should be non-naturalists about what's okie dokie, on the grounds that it does not look like we can equate the property of being okie dokie with any non-okic properties. One could always intelligibly question whether something is really okie dokie, for instance. So we should be non-naturalists about okics. And we can figure out what is okie dokie by using our intuitions.
And we could imagine discovering that children report that they have the phenomenology that whether something is okie dokie or not doesn't depend on their or anyone else's feelings. After all, whether it's okie dokie to take a nap during story time doesn't depend on their preferences! Sure, they might prefer to take a quick nap, but the teacher specifically stated that this was not okie dokie.
A lot of what goes on in ethics strikes me as being about as compelling as okics. It seems to take some body of language people use that probably emerged to navigate social interactions, regulate one another's behavior, and achieve various other social functions, and treat it like some kind of mystic cipher that unravels the deepest mysteries of the universe. It is really bizarre.
We could just accept that different people have different goals and interests. And we could recognize that there are facts about what norms and institutions are generally most conducive to our objectives, and we could focus on figuring out what those are. We don't need any mystic ciphers.