Subjective Morality?

[vulcanlogician]

It's a statement of belief. "I believe I'm looking at a cat." or "I believe that what I'm looking at is a cat." or (if you like) "I believe the cat is there."

I'm not so sure that's true.  It assumes some archetypal cat-truth ontology that is either true or false.  But "I'm looking at a cat" is true if you're having that experience, whether it's in a dream, in the Matrix, or in a material monist Universe.

Where we go wrong is in conflating contexts.  If I see a dream cat, and think it's walking down Main Street, I'm still very much seeing a cat.  But nobody else is likely to say that they see it.

Belief is a properly basic term.

The term “belief”, in standard philosophical usage, [does not] imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it's the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk. Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/

My cat example tried to respond to your previous post where you said you had sensory impressions of eyes, fur, etc. If you see a cat (even in a dream) you believe you are looking at a cat... even if the cat is imaginary. But this is getting needlessly confusing.

If you see a cat on your kitchen table and you say "There is a cat on my kitchen table"--that is a belief statement.

Let's look at a different example. Let's say you have a wild and crazy party at your house one night. You and a friend of your wake up at 7am after having passed out on the living room floor. Rising up from the floor, you and your friend find that you are quite hungover and the two of you decide to go into the kitchen and make some coffee to alleviate your massive headaches.

As you walk into the kitchen you are greeted with the strong, odious stench of vomit.

1) If you turn to your friend and say, "Blehhhhh!" this is an expression of your reaction to the smell. (This is what the non-cognitivist thinks that moral judgements are.)

2) If you turn to your friend and say, "Somebody threw up in my kitchen!" This is a belief statement. You are taking a cognitivist mode of thinking. Even if you walk into the kitchen and see a pile of vomit on the floor, your saying, "Somebody threw up in my kitchen," is still a belief statement. You are not expressing a reaction to the vomit, you are expressing a belief about its existence/how it got there. In other words, you are a cognitivist about the puke.

3) To anticipate a potential objections from your direction: Why can't it be both? When if you walk into your kitchen, encounter the smell and then say: ""Somebody threw up in my kitchen. Blehhhhh!" You would still be a cognitivist in this case, but you would have simply tacked on an expression of disgust to your belief statement.

Now let's go back to morality. When someone says, "It was wrong to for you to feel up that girl while she was sleeping. That's disgusting!" Here is a belief statement (maybe) coupled with an emotive statement. To the non-cognitivist, both of the sentences mean the same thing. They are both emotionally expressivistic in nature.

To the cognitivist, the two sentences are different in nature. The first sentence is a belief statement. The second sentence is expressivistic. (Both cognitivist and non-cognitivist agree about the second sentence, btw). Even if you admit to being a cognitivist, that doesn't make you a moral realist. You could, for instance, be a relativist or an error theorist. BTW, which are you?

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To a realist such as myself, I distinguish the two sentences. If I say the first sentence, ""It was wrong to for you to feel up that girl while she was sleeping." Someone could ask me: "Why is it wrong?" And I could answer: "Because it undermines her autonomy" (Kantian ethics) -or- "It was contrary to her wishes that you do so," (desire satisfaction theory). The point is: there are reasons.

If I say the second sentence: "That's disgusting!" I could not provide reasons as I could with the first sentence. That's because the second sentence is expressivistic. I merely added my emotional reaction to the belief statement, but the second sentence is NOT a belief statement.

Also, it's worth pointing out that there are more sociopaths out there than we like to admit. Only people with a moral compass CARE about the girl's autonomy. There are a great many people who only find fault with the act because they are conformists. We're not talking about them. We're talking about people who actually care about the wrongness of the action. Do THEY make belief statements when they deliver moral judgements?