Answering R. Scott Smith on subjective morality

 This is my reply to an article by R. Scott Smith entitled

Making Sense of Morality: An Introduction to Naturalism 

January 25, 2021/ R. Scott Smith

What should we make of these noncognitivist views? First, by reducing away any cognitive content from moral sentences, they end up being merely descriptive. But, morality deeply seems to be about what is normative, or prescriptive.

"Seems"?  Surely you have something to ground objective morality more than this?  

It also "seems" that Leviticus 21:9 is mere barbarism from an Iron Age culture.  Is "seems" sufficient for argument, yes or no? 

If people protest against a miscarriage of justice (e.g., an unarmed African-American man who was walking down a street, but was murdered by white men), they are not merely emoting. Instead, they deeply believe there was an injustice done, which is why they are upset.

But "deeply believe" doesn't an objective moral make.  The Nazi's "deeply believed" that the Jews deserved to be exterminated.  Christian Reconstructionists "deeply believe" that replacing all American law with the moral commands of the Pentateuch would be morally good.  But surely Christian moral scholars could not possibly agree on whether it was good.   Thus leaving skeptics no reason to think that God's absolute viewpoint is in there somewhere.

Second, moral judgments are not identical with feelings or commands, for the former can occur without the latter.

The show me a moral judgment that isn't identical with a feeling or a command.  Good luck.

We do not need to have any feelings when we state, “Murder is wrong.”

False, feelings reduce to 'thoughts', so you are saying we don't need to have thoughts when we state "murrder is wrong".

But even assuming your logic is correct, then we also don't need to have any feelings when we say "some moral situations would justify disobeying the law and committing vigilante justice."

But again, the wrongness of murder is inherently tied to the moral goodness of the law that is making such killing illegal.  If state law criminalized use of deadly force in self-defense, the fact that it thus became "murder" would not convince most Christians to conform, most would still use lethal force if they thought doing so was necessary to save them from an immediate threat of death or great bodily harm.

So then you can know that murder is sometimes morally good if you can spot moral flaws in the law which criminalizes certain types of killing.  What constitutes a moral 'flaw' is, of course, relative.  But that hardly means it is pointless.  Your liking the taste of some food that others hate is equally subjective, yet that doesn't require that it is flawed.

That's a big problem with you moral objectivists: you always act like the subjectivity of a moral opinion means that opinion is somehow defective.  Not at all. One parent in the neighborhood has her own dogmatic belief that the kids shouldn't be playing outside after 7 p.m., the parent down the street has the same attitude but her limit is 8 p.m.  These moral stances are subjective, but that hardly means that either of them are "flawed".

So stop telling yourself that "subjective" equals "flaw/defective".  It doesn't.  Even if it would make things difficult for inerrantists.

And, we can have feelings without moral judgments.

Sure, but not when it comes to morality.  If the store owner feels like he should call the police about the teen who stole a soda, I'm not seeing how that could possibly be distinguished from his moral judgment that such theft be prosecuted. 

Third, there is no room for any moral education or training on these views, since there is no cognitive content to learn and therefore no real moral disagreement.

No, moral disagreements don't require that at least one party hold to a moral that is objectively real or transcendent.  see above example about parents disagreeing about the latest time in the day to allow their kids to play outside.  Each parent can profitably teach their subjective moral to their kids, even if there is no god who has an absolute time for kids to stop playing outside.

But, this result undermines any training in moral virtue, such as in why we should address examples of injustices in society.

No, there is nothing about subjective morality that "undermines" requiring kids to obey their parents' subjective morals.  The only question is where we draw the line, and this, again, is subjective.  You continually presume that if the moral in question is not objective, then it is either wrong or pointless to deal with it.  This is absurd.

It also wouldn't matter if you were correct.  I too hear about racism in America's police department, and guess what:  I don't "address" those "examples of injustice in society", in the serious way that you obviously intended the word "address".  I might mention some such examples here or there, but I don't "address" them seriously. My life has enough of its own issues without needing to "address" such issues.  What are you going to say now?  All atheists who don't participate in political protest rallies aren't living consistently with atheist morality?

It also does not do justice to the fact that many of us do disagree morally. This is plain to see when we look at the many social and moral issues we deliberate and debate.

Once again, the moral disagreement between two persons doesn't have to implicate objective morals before their disagreements on it can be profitable.  Such as the child who doesn't want to wear the particular shoes the parent wants them to wear.  I can't see any divine oversight about such a trifle, and yet even most Christians would say the parent should discuss this with the child, since maybe one of them will discover some truth (i.e., the shoes give the child blisters, or the child is lying about the blisters, etc).