Thoughts on Moral Philosophy

People may say those sorts of things, but it is easy to find poor representation for any position. Relativism/subjectivism as they are put forward by moral philosophers are a very different thing, and are less (or not at all) susceptible to the kinds of concerns you raise.

The persistence of intractable disagreement is the tip of a bigger iceberg for reasons to doubt moral realism; I share your view that it is not very strong evidence, but there are other reasons, and the overall picture seems to me to overwhelmingly favor the antirealist position. At the very least, the persistence of disagreement can spark a broader discussion about how one would go about determining what the allegedly objective moral facts are, and I don’t think moral realists have anything very convincing to say on the epistemic front.

Then there's the fact that they seems to be denying people the ability to claim anything is right or wrong, except for them personally or from within the perspective of their culture,  whilst simultaneously claiming the relativity or subjectivity of morality universally.

Some relativists may do this, but relativism as a metaethical stance does not require or typically entail the claim that people don’t have the ability to claim anything is right or wrong except with respect to that person’s standards or the standards of their culture. 

Insofar as relativism includes a semantic thesis, the thesis is that as a matter of fact this is what people mean when they make moral claims; not that they lack the ability to do otherwise. In other words, the relativist might say “when people make moral claims, they intend to report facts that are implicitly indexicalized to themselves or their culture’s standards.” The semantic aspect of relativism is about the meaning of ordinary moral thought and discourse; it isn’t (necessarily) a strict requirement that nobody could speak or think differently.

Relativists can and do acknowledge the existence of people who don’t speak or think this way; after all, they often find themselves arguing with moral realists, whose reflective moral stance is that there are non-relative moral facts. The relativist might adopt an error theory towards these people.

I’m not entirely sure I understand the last part, about simultaneously claiming the “relativity or subjectivity of morality universally.”

Well, a lot of people who support relativism/subjectivism just want us to be more respectful of other people's perspectives and cultures or believe that we should stay out of things that aren't our business - if they actually saw a women being stoned to death for adultery, their position would change pretty fast.

It may be that some people’s relativism is really just a clumsy and roundabout way to endorse tolerance towards others, but that’s a problem for these people’s views, it isn’t really a problem with relativism as a metaethical position; relativism as a metaethical position doesn’t entail and isn’t really about tolerance.

Also, when you say that people’s position would change pretty fast, do you mean that they’d endorse some form of realism? People whose apparent metaethical standards change when asked about atrocities may very well be confused, as the question may give the rhetorical impression that if they don’t object to atrocities in the realist sense, that they don’t object to them at all. This simply isn’t the case. Relativists who fold under pressure when presented with atrocities don’t need to: nothing about relativism requires that one be any less opposed, disgusted, and outraged by stoning adulterers.

In any case, what kind of people do you have in mind? Are these laypeople who don’t study metaethics? I study metaethics, and I am an antirealist; my particular stance is different than relativists/subjectivists, but I share with them the denial that there are objective moral facts. My metaethical standards don’t change in response to people pointing to actions I oppose; my opposition to those actions is fully consistent with antirealism.

Well, most people agree that the Future Tuesday preference is objectively wrong or bad or mistaken.

Do they? That’s an empirical question. In any case, even if most people did, I’d just say these people are mistaken. Most people agreeing on something is at best very weak evidence for whatever it is they agree on. I’ve discussed the Future Tuesday indifference scenario several times and have yet to hear a good explanation as to how one extracts towards objectivity, or external reasons, or justify claiming the agent in the scenario is “irrational,” etc. The typical response I get is simply that it “seems intuitive” or something like that. Should we take other people’s intuitions to be probative of the truth? If so, why?

FWIW, I don’t even think the type of moral realism Parfit was going for is intelligible. So when people report that they intuit implications from the Future Tuesday thought experiment, I’m not entirely clear on what it is they’re claiming seems to be true to them; that is, I don’t think it even makes sense to say something is objectively right or wrong. Happy to discuss this further!

Finally, regarding what I think may be going on: it seems far more plausible that people reading the scenario are projecting their own notions of what would or wouldn’t be rational onto the agent in the scenario, and mistakenly thinking that there is some stance-independent standard of what is “rational.” In other words, they’re actually just imputing their own standards onto agents without realizing it. Personally, I just don’t think there’s anything irrational about future Tuesday indifference.

If we concede that some non-moral preferences are objectively better than others, then analogously it seems plausible that some moral preferences could be objectively better than others.

Unfortunately, I also do not agree with this. It’s not just that I don’t think it makes any sense to describe some preferences as objectively better than others. It’s that even if there were objective nonmoral normative facts, I don’t think this provides much support for moral realism.

 I’m also simply not sure it’s true that moral facts are similar to preferences. I am not sure that’s true, and I am not sure that if it is that whatever respects in which they’re similar provide much a reason to take moral realism seriously. After all, unicorns are quite similar to horses, but the existence of horses is hardly a good reason to think the existence of unicorns is plausible.

Consider a hypothetical society that had a completely distinct sui generis category of norms that aren’t moral norms, they are, say, “zephyrian norms.” Zephyrian norms developed over the centuries in this society in response to a wide array of considerations, and are built around regulating and maintaining social order through adherence to various rituals, taboos, and ceremonial practices. For instance, one important zephyrian norm revolves around never wearing the color blue, because it is intrinsically unzephyrian to do so.

I take it you and I would find “zephyrian realism” utterly implausible. There’s just no reason to think it’s objectively bad to wear blue, or to sing the Hymn of the Aegis every 7th moon. Yet if we grew up in a society with zephyrian norms, we may regard them as distinct from and just as important as moral norms.

And we could argue that, if objectivism about preferences is true, then it seems plausible there could be objective zephyrian facts about what we should or shouldn’t do. Of course, zephyrian realism is false; there are no objective zephyrian facts. 

That there might be some other normative facts does very little to increase the plausibility of zephyrian realism. I think the same holds for moral realism. Even if preference realism were true, none of us would be tempted to take zephyrian realism much more seriously. Likewise, it's not clear why preference realism should does much to render moral realism more plausible.