That's exactly why I'm advocating a pragmatic approach to metaethics rather than a doctrinaire emotivist or natural-law approach. What is it that tells us that an instinctive revulsion at the idea of telling the truth to Kant's serial killer or euthanizing cognitively impaired newborns is enough to dispense with finessed ethical discourse in those cases, but an instinctive revulsion at LGBT people isn't enough to justify discriminating against them (us)? You could say "non-harm" but then who gets to decide what constitutes harm, other than, well, common sense? Increasingly I think that the answer boils down to "real life" and an everyday sense of having to share the world with people. (Although I think afleitch is getting at something almost Rawlsian; if you were behind a veil of ignorance contemplating life as an entirely hypothetical person in a homophobic society, you wouldn't know whether or not you were one of the LGBT people being discriminated against, and thus whether you might have very different ideas than the majority's about what sexual desires and behaviors are or aren't intuitive.)
Again, bear with me, grain of salt, bearishly tiring day.
You've pretty much nailed my views on this.
I am unapologetically Rawlsian on a number of issues to the effect it's made me re-evaluate my politics. I am not a free speech absolutist which is currently affecting 'the discourse' because I agree with Rawls' assumption that absolute free speech is neither an equaliser or meaningful to those who are oppressed. In terms of 'property' rights, that is a right to the 'personal property' of your moral capacity and self respect and so on.
To go back to the example (which I like because it flips convention); heteronormativity is to me as a homosexual personally counter intuitive. Heterosexual acts at a very base level to me have a level of sexual 'disgust' to them which should induce a fear of harm (!) But there is such an intuitive
obviousness to heterosexuality not being harmful and in fact being conducively good; love, marriage, children etc because human society is heteronormative, that doesn't require the applied reasoning that is required in the opposite direction. Also it's 90% of everyone I encounter.
But like many moral and ethical choices, applied reasoning can create a memetic intuitive response.
It's why it will be very difficult for traditional Christian sexual ethics once ground has been given, to argue against what is now seen as intuitive. 'Othering' or 'disgust' lose their power. Except in times of orchestrated moral panic by those in positions of power.
I think of myself as a base utilitarian; dealing with humanity as it is and looking for outcomes that optimise rather than maximise benefit. I like to think that we exist in a causal world and a morality based on 'useful' and 'non useful' behaviour seems the most open to both almost (general) immovable absolutes, and intuitional differentiation between people.
I agree with Sidgwick in that a reflection on ethics should be rooted in how people think about moral behavior and what they are presented with in their day to day experiences.
In your first post you hit upon the problem of reducing the limitations of ethics to thought experiments or the extremes of situations and then being stumped that they don't 'hold up' and therefore there must be something else or something more, and how that might just be a distraction.
When faced with extremes, human ethics, regardless of what you ascribe to
should buckle. Because we are psychologically not in a position to act either rationally or cognitively within any preferred framework when faced with those extremes.
Every single one of us is one heartbeat away from 'I killed him, oh god I killed him' as the result of an immediate extreme situation we find ourselves in. And good secular justice systems tend to be good at mitigating this when it happens. Our intuition is good at mitigating this, even if it is also an agency on making us respond in extreme situations in unexpected ways. Ethics, philosophy etc as 'closed systems' can have issues with this sort of hand waving. But they aren't hard and fast truths.
My own view is that there's subjective ethics in the sense that generally you know 'good' and 'bad' when you see it. And it makes sense to follow that, because in 95% of the situations you face, the human next to you will do the same.
In the same way you can't objectively measure what is art or what is obscenity. But 'you know when you see it'. It's generally intuitive, but with some collectivity; if enough people think the same, then you can reach or enforce a consensus. That in turn can feed back into forming an open or closed subjective view.
In the same breath, we tend to be more accepting of the subjective nature of say art and understand that any attempt to objectively classify it (from 16th century iconoclasm to the Third Reich) is totalitarian and also an affront to intuition. In part because we mostly see art as harmless or passive; it's not a proxy for 'morality'. Sometimes however, in moral panic, it is embued with that.
