Metaethics Part 1: Cognitivism/Non-cognitivism

[John 6IX Breezy]

Cognition is objective, in a sense, as everyone has it, but each person's experience of cognition is different/subjective, therefore no objective morality, only subjective morality, so a moral claim can make sense to one person, but perhaps not to another person, so saying "I don't see how moral claims can't make sense cognitively" implies an optimism bias.

I would argue that morality is neither objective nor subjective (if such a thing is possible), rather it is artificial. They are the rules to a game—the fitness game in our case. And saying A person shouldn't murder is no different than saying A bishop shouldn't move perpendicular in chess. Games can exist at many levels and for different reasons. And I think it's more useful, and perhaps only possible, to tackle localized games rather than universal ones.

The idea of fitness payoffs helps explain why morality appears to change across cultures and across time (and even across individuals). These are localized games that are testing different strategies to achieve fitness (or some other goal). Fitness is necessarily something that changes according to fluctuations in the environment (including social environment). Therefore, one social environment requires one set of moral behaviors and another doesn't. And much like a genetic trait, any individual with a moral strategy that differs from the group either succeeds and becomes dominant or disappears from the moral pool.

ps. I think from a metaethical stand point I'm doing two things: Firstly, rejecting that there is, or at the very least can discover, a universal objective morality. Second, removing the truth/false value from moral statements—to say a moral claim is true is no different than saying the feathers on a bird are true.