You said most of those questions make no sense to you so I tried to make sense of them myself and thought I could as well write down my thoughts.
Regarding your own questions. I believe that there are some genetically hard-coded intuitions about how to approach and respond to other primates. Why would we want to wrap that into some confusing terminology like moral philosophy?
You further say that you cannot easily change those intuitions. That is correct, but do we want to change them? Does it even make sense to ask if we want to have different intuitions?
I think that if we face conflicting preferences we don’t want to change or discard the preferences with less weight but simply ignore them temporarily.
We are humans and that means that we are inconsistent agents without stable utility functions. Do we want to change that?
Further, I don’t think that our “morality core” is all that important. We are highly adaptable and easily catch cultural induced memes that can override most of our “morality core”. Just see how many people here claim that they would be killing the fat guy when faced with the trolley problem. That is a case where high-level cognition, cultural and academic “memes” hijack what you call our “morality core” in an attempt to resolve conflicting preferences by favoring the one that we assign the most weight.
Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?
I have no idea, I upvoted your post because I have the same question.
I believe that there are some genetically hard-coded intuitions about how to approach and respond to other primates. Why would we want to wrap that into some confusing terminology like moral philosophy?
Your comment seems to be a response to lukeprog’s questions, rather than to my question.
You said most of those questions make no sense to you so I tried to make sense of them myself and thought I could as well write down my thoughts.
Regarding your own questions. I believe that there are some genetically hard-coded intuitions about how to approach and respond to other primates. Why would we want to wrap that into some confusing terminology like moral philosophy?
You further say that you cannot easily change those intuitions. That is correct, but do we want to change them? Does it even make sense to ask if we want to have different intuitions?
I think that if we face conflicting preferences we don’t want to change or discard the preferences with less weight but simply ignore them temporarily.
We are humans and that means that we are inconsistent agents without stable utility functions. Do we want to change that?
Further, I don’t think that our “morality core” is all that important. We are highly adaptable and easily catch cultural induced memes that can override most of our “morality core”. Just see how many people here claim that they would be killing the fat guy when faced with the trolley problem. That is a case where high-level cognition, cultural and academic “memes” hijack what you call our “morality core” in an attempt to resolve conflicting preferences by favoring the one that we assign the most weight.
I have no idea, I upvoted your post because I have the same question.
Why, to disguise it of course.