Subjective Morality?

[Angrboda]

The word "good" can be used to describe objective AND subjective phenomena. Language has got you hung up. You can say, that piece of cheesecake is "good"-- that refers to your subjective experience. You derived pleasure from it. When you say "Michael Jordan is a 'good' basketball player" you are referring to something objective. He isn't good at basketball in your opinion because there are objective criteria for measuring his goodness.

Michael Jordan is good by established rules.  That's because basketball is a subset of life.  We can say so-and-so is a good salesperson, or perhaps even a good parent, by similar methods.  But when we want to talk about how to live IN GENERAL, we have a problem-- there is no definite context.  It's like telling kids they have to make their own rules, and then saying, "Nu uh uhhhh. . . some rules are right and some are wrong."  It doesn't make sense.

It's easy to do the same with specific mores-- I can say "Not picking up after your dog is bad," and we can agree on that rule, and then it's pretty easy to take pictures of people not picking up after their dogs.

A symphony is a bunch of marks on a paper, or certain frequencies of sound traveling around an auditorium.  They are an expression of an artist's ideas and feelings about the organization of sound.  However, to say therefore that music is objective would be a misrepresentation.

And a moral realist would argue that there exists an objectively existing context in which moral propositions are either true or false. The moral realist may be wrong about that, or she may be unable to demonstrate that satisfactorily, but it would be incorrect to suggest, as Rob has, that such a position cannot be defined or coherently maintained. It can. I'm not clear whether you are making a similar objection to that which Rob has made. Are you?