Where moral judgment is concerned, it’s logic all the way down. [..] And since grinding up the universe won’t and shouldn’t yield any miniature ‘>’ tokens, it must be a logical ordering
The claim seems to be that moral judgement—first-order, not metaethical—is purely logical, but the justification (“grinding up the universe”) only seems
to go as far as showing it to be necessarily partly logical. And first-order ethics clearly has empirical elements. If human biology was such as to lay eggs and leave them to fend for themselves, there would be no immorailty in “child neglect”.
Child neglect implies harm. It is the harm that is immoral. If humans left young to fend for themselves, there would be no inherent harm and so it would not be immoral. We always need to remind ourselves why we consider something to be bad, and not assign badness to words like “child neglect”.
The claim seems to be that moral judgement—first-order, not metaethical—is purely logical, but the justification (“grinding up the universe”) only seems to go as far as showing it to be necessarily partly logical. And first-order ethics clearly has empirical elements. If human biology was such as to lay eggs and leave them to fend for themselves, there would be no immorailty in “child neglect”.
Child neglect implies harm. It is the harm that is immoral. If humans left young to fend for themselves, there would be no inherent harm and so it would not be immoral. We always need to remind ourselves why we consider something to be bad, and not assign badness to words like “child neglect”.
That’s kind of what I was trying to say.