Emotions are intrinsically good and bad

[Edwardo Piet]

If I say roses are intrinsically rosy, what am I really saying?

There's no revelation of truth to be found there, just a reworking of word forms.

Your analogy makes no sense.

The question there, is what "intrinsic rosiness" refers to.

If someone defines what intrinsic goodness refers to, and it refers to something real in the world. i.e. happiness (for example) . . . then than makes sense.

If someone just claims roses are intrisically rosy, then the question is what they actually mean.

"Just a reworking of word forms."

Words just refer to things in the world. "Goodness" refers to what someone thinks is good. "Evidence" refers to what someone thinks is evidence. "Yellow" refers to what someone thinks is yellow. It's not like someone has taken the word "yellow" and used it to refer to a black circle or something. Goodness already correlates with lots of positive things such as happiness, success, etc, etc. There are lots of ways something can be good or moral. So when someone says that they define morality to be whatever increases overall happiness in the long run (for example) then you can't say that what they refer to doesn't exist . . . if it does exist.

It's not like someone is just labelling something that has nothing to do with goodness. Because goodness doesn't only have one meaning anyway. And there's certainly nothing about happiness that says it can't be goodness.

No one ever has to prove whether their definition is the correct one. Definitions are premises, that can be accepted or rejected. Proving things isn't the point of definitions.

And it's also important not to confuse a semantic definition with a conceptual definition. When a philosopher asks what justice is they are not asking for a dictionary definition of the word "justice". They are asking what the fundamentals of justice is all about, and what justice should be considered to be about, and how it operates in the world.

The same is the case when someone says what they think real value or goodness or morality or whatever is. They're not saying "This is what the dictionary says it is". They're making a conceptual definition.

You can draw an analogy between health and ethics. No one has to agree 100% what health is exactly for it to be very clear that some things are definitely not healthy and some things definitely are.

And it's like, how you don't need to know what a perfect diet is in order to know that there's a clear difference between food and poison.

There doesn't have to be clear answers in practice for morality to be objective, definitions don't have to be proved (which never happens EVER with ANYTHING anyway!) for morality to be objective, and morals don't have to be universal for morality to be objective.

If the premise is that morality is whatever increases happiness overall... then that's a premise for you to accept or reject. It makes no sense to say that's not objective when there are objective answers to it. If what is meant by morality is whatever increases happiness overall in the long run, and there are right and wrong answers in principle to whatever increases happiness in the long run, then there are objective answers to those questions and morality is objective.