Though Bongo is surely right there would be moral sentiments even without language, now we are dealing with something identified: specific emotions like empathy, sense of justice, disgust, indignation, pity. Yeah those would exist without language. And yes, language has made things much more complicated, and the preoccupation with analyzing sentences makes it even even worse.

If people can realize all that without looking at the very nature of communication, that would be great, but in my experience most people feel hesitant about scrapping so many centuries of philosophy and need to see how the language makes such a mess of things before they can truly feel comfortable with it. If Bongo is ready to scrap language analysis now and drop all the silly -isms, I'm preaching to the choir.

The 'meta' implies that the discussions of ethics can be separated entirely from normative moralizing

If the meta in metaethics meant that, I'd say it's impossible, for roughly these reasons.

What I was thinking of with the "group mind" is that it can be tempting if one is flamed by a few people in a group, to feel as though the whole group is on the attack.

It is meaningful wherever it is meaningful to discuss whether there are wants people should and shouldn't have.

But why would one use it on a site that supposedly tries to dissolve problems using reductionism as a general heuristic?

It is no more a philosophical puzzle that needs dissolving than prices are a philosophical puzzle that need dissolving.

I am also using the term "free will" because people model their decisions according to that vague and ultimately futile concept.

I think that the concept of "free will" may indeed be more wholly a philosopher's invention, just as the concept of "qualia" is in my view wholly a philosopher's invention. But the everyday concepts from which it derives are not a philosopher's invention. I think that the everyday concept that philosophers turned into the concept of "free will" is the concept of the uncoerced and intentional act - a concept employed when we decide what to do about people who've annoyed us. We ask: did he mean to do it? Was he forced to do it? We have good reason for asking these questions.

But if possible (if I am not too lazy) I avoid using any of those bogus memes.

Philosophers invent bogus memes that we should try to free ourselves of. I think that "qualia" are one of those memes. But philosophers didn't invent morality. They simply talked a lot of nonsense about it.

Of course, it is real. Cthulhu is also real, it is a fictional cosmic entity.

Morality is real in the sense that prices are real and in a sense that Cthulhu is not real.

Some people talk about money in the way that you want to talk about morality, so that's a nice analogy to our discussion and I'll spend a couple of paragraphs on it. They say that the value of money is merely a collective delusion - that I value a dollar only because other people value a dollar, and that they value a dollar only because, ultimately, I value a dollar. So they say that it's all a great big collective delusion. They say that if people woke up one day and realized that a dollar was just a piece of paper, then we would stop using dollars.

But while there is a grain of truth to that (especially about fiat money), there's also much that's misleading in it. Money is a medium of exchange that solves real problems. The value of money may be in a sense circular (i.e., it's valued by people because it's valued by people), but actually a lot of things are circular. A lot of natural adaptations are circular, for example symbiosis. Flowers are the way they are because bees are the way they are, and bees are the way they are because flowers are the way they are. But flowers and bees aren't a collective delusion. They're in a symbiotic relationship that has gradually evolved over a very long period of time. Money is similar - it is a social institution that evolves over a long period of time, and it can reappear when it's suppressed. For example cigarettes can become money if nothing else is available.

And all this is analogous to the situation with morality. In both cases, there's a real phenomenon which some people think is fictional, a collective delusion.

In contrast, religion really is a collective delusion. At least, all those other religions are. :)

Can you give an example where the use of terminology derived from moral philosophy is useful instead of obfuscating?

The term "morality" is not derived from philosophy. Philosophers have simply talked a lot of nonsense about morality. This doesn't mean they invented it. Similarly, philosophers have talked a lot of nonsense about motion (e.g. Zeno's paradoxes). This doesn't mean that motion is a concept that philosophers invented and that we need to "dissolve". We can still talk sensibly about velocity. What we need to dissolve is not velocity, but simply Zeno's paradoxes about velocity, which by some accounts were dissolved as a side-effect of the creation of Calculus.

Consider the the trolley problem. Naively you kill the fat guy if you care about other people and also if you only care about yourself, because you want others to kill the fat guy as well because you are more likely to be one of the many people tied to the rails than the fat guy.

That is an example of the philosophical nonsense I was talking about. If you want to dissolve something, dissolve that nonsense. In reality you are no more likely to push a fat guy onto the rails than you are to ask for the fat guy's seat. In reality we know what the rules are and we obey them.

I don't see how it could be helpful to add terminology derived from moral philosophy here or elsewhere.

Again, the relevant terminology, which in this case includes the word "murder", is not derived from philosophy. Philosophers simply took a pre-existing concept and talked a lot of nonsense about it.

Consider the Is–ought problem. The basis for every ought statement is what I believe to be correct with respect to my goals.

Actually, I think that the use of the word "ought" in relationship to morality is very confusing, because "ought" means a lot of things, and so if you use that word you are apt to confuse those things with each other. In particular, the word "ought" is used a lot in the context of personal advice. If you're giving a friend advice, you're likely to talk about what they "ought" to do. In this context, you are not making statements about morality!

The person to blame for the confusion caused by using the word "ought" in talking about morality is probably Hume. I think that it was he who started this particular bit of nonsense going.

If you want to reach a certain goal and I want to help you and believe to know a better solution than you do then I tell you what you ought to do because 1.) you want to reach a goal 2.) I want you to reach your goal 3.) my brain does exhibit a certain epistemic state making me believe to be able to satisfy #1 & #2.

Here you're talking about giving personal advice to somebody. This is a separate subject from morality.

You haven't demonstrated that the basis for every ought statement is what you believe to be correct with respect to your goals. If your goal is to kill as many people as possible, you ought not to pursue it..that is the there are oughts about the nature of an end and not just about how to achieve it. This is a very well known issue in moral philosophy called the categorial/hypothetical distinction.

Well, when you have something substantive and meaningful to point to let me know. I suggest tabooing words like "ethics", "morality", "should", etc. If you can give me a clear reductionist description of what you're talking about in metaethics without using those words, I'd love to hear it.

And that's what morality always was in the first place. It's a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do. No one would be convinced by "I don't want you to kill people", but if you can convince someone that "It is wrong to kill people", then you've created conflict in that person's desires.

This is a widespread but mistaken theory of morality. After all, we don't - and can't - convincingly say that just any old thing is "wrong". Here, I'll alternate between saying that actually wrong things are wrong, and saying that random things that you don't want are wrong.

Actually wrong: "it's wrong to kill people." Yup, it is. You just don't want it: "it's wrong for you to arrest me just because I stabbed this innocent bystander to death." Yeah, right. Actually wrong: "it's wrong to mug people." No kidding. You just don't want it: "it's wrong for you to lock your door when you leave the house, because it's wrong for you to do anything to prevent me from coming into your house and taking everything you own to sell on the black market". Not convincing.

If there were nothing more to things being wrong than that you use the word "wrong" to get people to do things, then there would be no difference between these four attempts to get people to do something. But there is: in the first and third case, the claim that the action is wrong is true (and therefore makes a convincing argument). In the second and fourth case, the claim is false (and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument).

Sure, you can use the word "wrong" to get people to do things that you want them to do, but you can use a lot of words for that. For example, if you're somebody's mother and you want them to avoid driving when they're very sleepy, you can tell them that it's "dangerous" to drive in that condition. But as with the word "wrong", you can't use the word "dangerous" for just any situation, because it's not true in just any situation. When a proposed action is really dangerous - or really wrong - then you can use that fact to convince them not to pursue that action. But it's still a fact, independent of whether you use it to get other people to do things you want.

And that's what morality always was in the first place. It's a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do. No one would be convinced by "I don't want you to kill people", but if you can convince someone that "It is wrong to kill people", then you've created conflict in that person's desires.

That's one of the things morality has been, and it could indeed be the main thing, but my point above is it all depends on what the person means. Even though getting other people to do something might be the main and most important role of moral language historically, it only invites confusion to overgeneralize here - though I know how tempting it is to simplify all this ethical nonsense floating around in one fell swoop. Some people do simply use "ought" to mean, "It is in your best interest to," without any desire to get the person to do something. Some people mean "God would disapprove," and maybe they really don't care if that makes you refrain from doing it or not, but they're just letting you know. These little counterexamples ruin the generalization, then we're back to square one.

I think the only way to really simplify ethics is to acknowledge that people mean all sorts of things by it, and let each person - if anyone cares - explain what they intended in each case.

No, scratch that. The reason ethics is so confused is precisely because people have tried to simplify a whole bunch of disparate-but-somewhat-interrelated notions into a single type of phrasing. A full explanation of everything that is called "ethics" would require examination of religion, politics, sociology, psychology, and much more.

For most things that we think we want ethics for, such as AI, instead of trying to figure out that complex of sundry notions shoehorned into the category of ethics, I think we'd be better off just assiduously hugging the query for each question we want to answer about how to get the results we want in the "moral" sphere (things that hit on your moral emotions, like empathy, indignation, etc.). Mostly I'm interested in this series of posts for the promise it presents for doing away with most of the confusion generated by wordplay such as "objective ethics," which I consider to be just an artifact of language.

I was referring to only fully logical arguments. Obviously it is possible to prevent someone from murdering by expressing extreme disapproval or locking them up.

OK, allowing that the examples may have been poorly chosen - the main point I'm making is that people often a) say they want something, b) act in ways that do not bring about what they say they want.

Your response above seems to be that when people say "I want to be thin", they are speaking strictly in terms of preference: they are expressing that they would prefer their world to be just as it is now, with the one amendment that they are a certain body type rather than their current. Similarly when saying they want money.

There are other cases where volition and preferences appear at odds more clearly. People say "I want to quit smoking", but they don't, when it's their own voluntary actions which bring about an undesired state. The distinction seems useful, even if we may disagree on the specifics of how hard it is to align volition and preference in particular cases.

I'm not the first to observe that "What do you want" is a deeper question than it looks like, and that's what I meant to say in the original comment.

When you examine it closely "do people actually want to smoke" isn't a much simpler question than "should there be a law against people smoking" or "is it right or wrong to smoke". It is possible that these questions are in fact entangled in such a way that to fully answer one is also to answer the others.

By contrast, if I suddenly decide that I want more money, I have a number of avenues by which I could arrange that, at least on a small scale. It would be mistaken of me to conclude from this abundance of available financial opportunity that everyone chooses to have the amount of money they have, and that people with less money are choosing to take fewer of the equally abundant opportunities they share with the rich.

This all seems true with the exception of 'by contrast'. You seem to have clearly illustrated a similarity between weight loss and financial gain. There are things that are under people's control but which things are under a given person's control vary by the individual and the circumstances. In both cases people drastically overestimate the extent to which the outcome is a matter of 'choice'.

Wants are fairly straighforwads, but oughts are often tangled up with society, manipulation and signalling. You appear to be presuming some other definition of ought - without making it terribly clear what it is that you are talking about.

Again, whether you ought to do what you want depends on what you want.