In modernity at least, moral values are incommensurable, insofar as they are generally internally coherent, and no standard prior to and independent of their first principles can adjudicate between competitor theories. Hence the shrill, circular debates which make no, and simply cannot, progress in politics. I think moral utterances are appropriately conceptualised through an emotivist conception of use: as being used to express preference and attitude, and to make the person under conversation register that preference and attitude, while the sense/reference of the words nevertheless being inherited fragments from (more than anything else, in the Western world) Christian Aristotelian. The question then turns to one of where the preferences and attitudes with ostensible moral form come from, and how we should evaluate this second-order phenomenon.
Generally people have very different meta-ethical positions from each other, so moral terminology should be dissolved and replaced with its underlying semantics for the sake of clarity in most conversations.
In modernity at least, moral values are incommensurable, insofar as they are generally internally coherent, and no standard prior to and independent of their first principles can adjudicate between competitor theories. Hence the shrill, circular debates which make no, and simply cannot, progress in politics. I think moral utterances are appropriately conceptualised through an emotivist conception of use: as being used to express preference and attitude, and to make the person under conversation register that preference and attitude, while the sense/reference of the words nevertheless being inherited fragments from (more than anything else, in the Western world) Christian Aristotelian. The question then turns to one of where the preferences and attitudes with ostensible moral form come from, and how we should evaluate this second-order phenomenon.
Generally people have very different meta-ethical positions from each other, so moral terminology should be dissolved and replaced with its underlying semantics for the sake of clarity in most conversations.