Moral rules vs moral sense

[Whateverist]

The only thing I agree with here is that the situation is analogous to correct use of English.

First of all, there is a difference between formal knowledge and formal training. For example, studying the rules and standards on your own is the same as acquiring formal knowledge, but it is not formal training.

What I meant was it is possible to be an expert speaker of English without formal knowledge of the parts of speech and how they are supposed to function. I don't think it is a matter of whether you study the subject on your own or in a formal setting. I'm saying you needn't acquire the formal analytical knowledge of the parts of speech in order to speak it expertly. Those who grow up where speech patterns are atypical will become expert speakers of some aberrant dialect even if they never seek to analyze the dialect formally.

Secondly, without there being such a body of formal standards, any aberration would be impossible to identify. Try to converse with a child to see how many times they use the language incorrectly and you promptly correct them. For example, using "gooder" instead of "better". Every time you correct them, you are imparting a piece of formal knowledge and that is not possible without such knowledge being codified.

This is a good point and one I failed to address. Yes, both in acquiring a moral sense and in becoming an expert speaker of a language, there is a period of acquisition when the mature practitioners around you help you acquire their expertise. However it wouldn't matter if any of those practitioners had any formal, analytic understanding of their expertise so long as they were expert practitioners.

In early childhood one isn't too worried about fine tuning: "kicking isn't nice", "don't bite Billy", and so on. Inevitably this gets generalized into something like the Golden Rule. Likewise we correct poor language use but most of us would not need to consider what is wrong with "gooder" in order to make the correction; so not knowing how to classify formally what is wrong with it is no hindrance to providing the guidance needed to raise another expert speaker.

A more interesting question for me is what role a formal, analytic understanding should play in our actual use of language or moral choice once we have matured into expert practitioners ourselves. Surely thinking incessantly about the formal structure of what you are saying would be a great distraction in communicating what you have to say. In the end one would like to benefit from expert usage for the sake of effective communication, not for the sake of show casing the manner of speech. Perhaps the situation is parallel for morality. In the end I want to conduct myself in a way that is respectful of everyone, but myself included. I wouldn't wish for a world in which everyone was continually engrossed by the possible ramifications of every action. I would wish for them -and so too myself- some degree of spontaneity and playfulness. So perhaps it is best if moral thinking too becomes transparent in the end.

Interesting to learn more of your personal history. I've got to get going to work but more later.