Subjective Morality?

[bennyboy]

Why is it not possible to to refer to moral ideas bereft of feelings?  If I tell you that skullfucking your neighbor is wrong because it will hurt your neighbor - which part of this claim is an expression of my feelings on the matter, or..if you prefer, which portion of this statement depends upon my feelings on the matter?  Suppose I do have feelings regarding the matter, if my feelings changed, would the fact that skullfucking your neighbor will hurt your neighbor change.  I suspect that we're simply describing how comfortable we are with doing some fucked up thing based upon our opinions of the matter.  That is an entirely separate issue to -any- of the claims made by these positions - and applies to all of them equally.  That's a comment about the agent, not the system.

Suppose I used to eat meat, but then I decided that enclosing animals in tight quarters and shooting them in the head with a bolt gun to put them on a bun was too painful an idea for me? Would my vegetarianism be a moral position? How far from skull-fucking is that, really, and how acceptable is it to you? I'm pretty sure you're okay enough with it to buy a burger.

What if I decided (rationally) that reducing meat consumption would free up crop lands to produce more grain and legumes for people to eat, thereby reducing the net suffering in the world? Wouldn't this still require me to care about reducing suffering-- because I dislike suffering?

Is there a moral truth about killing animals? Is one party horrendously wrong, but nobody will "get" that it's them? Or is it that some people, when they think about it, are deeply repulsed by the idea, and some much less so? Or perhaps that their enjoyment of meat (read: the feelings they get when they eat meat) are so important to them that they're not willing to consider it?

As for skull-fucking your neighbor. There are all KINDS of feelings about this involved. If people were emotionally neutral on it, then they wouldn't feel the need to make rules about it. The same goes for all kinds of harm: I fear death, so I accept abstinence from murder as part of the social contract, even though people leave their fucking shopping buggies in the middle of the aisle every day. I very much dislike pain, and in fact when I recognize pain in others, it causes me distress; I do not want either to feel or to inflict pain, so I happily accept rules to that effect.

That's the first question, yup.  Do you think that you are in a state of belief.  You indicated earlier that even asking the question was absurd..ofc you are.  If that was an earnest response (and it certainly seemed like it, lol) then welcome to the cognitivists club.  There are error theorists, subjectivists, non naturalists, and realists in here.

No, I'm pretty that didn't happen. I don't think I would call that question absurd.

You seem to be doing this weird Socratic moving of goalposts. Is this another one of those threads where you keep arguing, but don't actually have a point you are trying to assert? Let me ask you bluntly-- what's your position?