[Raak] Yes, the typesetters did me wrong. I think you're going to have to elaborate somewhat on your suggestion, though. If the sole difference between "X is wrong" being true and false is whether those with moral insight think it is, then that doesn't seem to me to be a very strong claim. Are you basically saying that things are right/wrong because most people (or most appropriate people) think so? But clearly this is quite different from normal propositions - for example, "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system" isn't true or false by majority opinion, and neither is "There is a God." Normally we think of propositions being things that people recognise the truth or falsity of, rather than things that they determine the truth or falsity of. Alternatively, if you think that those with moral insight are in fact not determining rightness/wrongness but recognising it, then that begs the question on what grounds these people see that X is right or wrong. Do they just "see" it with Enlightenment-style infallible conscience, with no further explanation? This is quite apart from the problem you suggest yourself, which is how to recognise those with authentic moral insight, and how to deal with the problem of disagreement over morality.
[Raak] I know you're not fully taking the position that there are naturally some people with greater moral authority, but it's interesting to compare with the libertarian worldview which (without knowing much about it) I would have thought would rely on the idea that morality is personal and subjective.
As you say, it doesn't advance things much to suppose there are those with moral insight, since it's basically a deferral of the question about the source of any objective morality. For "God", read "the enlightened". You thus can't move on to asking "how does one acquire moral insight?" without committing to the belief that there is such a thing, so a leap of faith would seem to be required. Definitely not one I'm prepared to make based on my experiences.
[Bm] Moral propositions (in the view I'm setting out) aren't true by virtue of being believed, they are true objectively, and those able to see them believe because they see them. How do they do this? Well, how do you (for example) recognise the ordinary physical objects around you? There's no "how" involved that we can say anything useful about (at least not until non-invasive brain scanning technology improves in resolution by many orders of magnitude). The same for moral perception. How people get to be able to have moral perceptions is more answerable in the here and now: upbringing, spontaneous revelation, or learning from enlightened people. [Projoy] If there is such a thing as moral authority at all, then some people will have more of it than others. I don't know where that "naturally" comes from: if it's an elite, it's one that anyone can join, the same as authority about temporal matters. There is indeed an act of faith involved: the faith that there are objective morals. But there is also an act of faith involved in the perception of physical truths. The main difference between the two is that most people's physical senses function at a high enough level that it is easy for all to agree on simple physical statements, while the same degree of consensus is lacking in the moral realm. One difference, at any rate. Another is that people are much more attached to their moral judgements than their physical ones.
[Raak] True, there needn't be a "naturally" although of course in the case of perception of reality there are real reasons why some people are naturally better at intuitive perception of reality than others (a minor example is perfect pitch). We don't necessarily know the nuts 'n' bolts reasons for these differences but it is something we can say with some confidence based on the level of agreement about reality and different people's success at perceiving intuitively that which we can independently verify: I sing a note. JLE says it's A, I play an A on the piano and it corroborates his statement. But crucially his doing this does not allow me to learn perfect pitch from him. If accurate perception of some kind of objective morality is a higher order skill of this type, it's then a reasonable speculation there probably is a hierarchy of people's ability to perceive moral absolutes.
In the case of morality this strikes me as considerably wilder speculation than making the same statement about perfect pitch. This might be for anthropic reasons, of course, but if so your line of reasoning becomes rather depressing for those who don't sense an objective morality, since it suggests they are missing something big and are never going to perceive it! (Slartibartfast would say, "Oh, no, that's just paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.")
...and of course something else follows from that line of reasoning, which is that if one is to have the best system of law, there are objectively people who are qualified to legislate and indeed, such a thing as government with objective moral force, whom we lesser mortals are insufficiently equipped to judge!
(Projoy) If intuitive means "knowing without thinking" then absolute pitch is intuitive. I have it, and always have had, and I can't quite understand why anybody who's had access to a musical instrument at an early age and is musical hasn't got it. It is, in my view, only a form of memory, motivated by a strong interest in the subject. Maybe its rarity is due to it having little evolutionary or survival advantage, unlike colour recognition. It's not much help, especially these days, to know that ex-GWR steam engines whistle in A flat (1st leger line above the treble).
(Projoy) Just seen your addendum. There are indeed people who are qualified to legislate, not because they have any superior sense of morality but because they understand the nuts and bolts of legislation and its effects (sometimes). Furthermore, we have asked them to do it, this being some sort of democracy.
[Projoy] But there are people who don't sense morality. They're highly exceptional: we call them psychopaths. Not sensing the objectiveness of morality or not believing in its objectiveness are different, and don't disqualify anyone from sensing morality. As for legislation, possessing sound moral judgement does not give anyone a right to order other people around. Indeed, the delusion that "if only everyone acted as I think they ought to the world would run a lot better, therefore they should be made to act like that" is a pretty clear sign of moral immaturity.
[Rosie] I think we did this discussion before and established that color recognition isn't really analogous to pitch recognition (because we can point at something and say "yellow", even when it's in shadow in a way that lowers the frequency to something we'd normally call brown). In a similar way, I hear a note in the context of a tune and can say "submedian" even if I can't say "Bb" or whatever it happens to be. Perhaps there is a window of opportunity very early in life to acquire perfect pitch (I'd be interested to know if there's any evidence that people who learn an instrument from, say, 4, are x times more likely to have perfect pitch than those who only start at 7, say), but from my perspective, I certainly don't think it's related to level of interest. An old music teacher of mine used to talk about an academic colleague of hers who was so envious of others' perfect pitch that he tried to learn it. He would play a note on the piano at the top of the college building then walk to the basement, brushing aside all attempts to engage him in conversation, all the while humming the note under his breath until he reached the piano in the basement. I understand he never achieved his goal :). [re: legislators] Yes, but good legislators can do their job in the absence of any moral principles. If someone told them to draft a law that compels everyone to kill their neigbour they could do that just as easily as drafting an obviously moral law. What Raak and Bm and Darren and I are speculating about is whether there are people objectively better qualified to frame the moral basis of legislation.
[Projoy] I don't think that's what I'm speculating about. (For what it's worth, I don't think any one person is more qualified to frame the moral basis of legislation than any other. To err is human, after all, and it strikes me that in order to define morality one must be infallible and therefore above the reach of mere morality. Am I making any sense or just rambling incoherently?) What I'm speculating about is whether morality and belief are the same thing. I suspect I may have to agree to disagree with Bm over that, because I'm still not convinced by his argument. The thing is, I'm reminded of Hofstadter, where he was talking about how a rock smashing a space probe may seem like a waste to us, but to a sufficiently intelligent race it may seem obvious that that's the most appropriate thing that can be done to it. The point I'm making is that just because humanity can't objectively decide whether X is wrong or right morally, it doesn't mean there isn't an absolute answer to the question which could be answered definitively by an intelligence with greater insight than ours, with rock-solid logical backup and an appropriate set of side-effects. Again, maybe that makes no sense at all. Part of the reason for saying all this is to expose the underlying thoughts which are running through my mind as I write these posts just to see if anything falls apart when they're examined more closely.