I'm not really familiar with philosophy, so I don't know what term describes my view on morality. But to describe it, it's something like, all moral claims can be broken down into non-moral claims; moral language/concepts are 'shorthand' 1/
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You can say basically the same things in non-moral frameworks as you can in moral frameworks, and this is *preferred*, because all moral frameworks are really incoherent. Morality isn't fundamentally real, it exists sort of as a "layer on top of" social reality.
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Most questions about meta-morality or whatevs do better when u taboo all moral language and see what the questions resolve to without that. Unconditional "shoulds" make no sense to me, and if u remove that you just get a bunch of if-thens, which are more sensible and functional.
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A *ton* of the fuzzy, counterintuitive, and paradoxical moral questions (including lots of utilitarian thought experiments!) only feel that way because they're pointing at the failures of the moral shorthand, gesturing to the fact of information loss as we skipped over steps.
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Once you have your "if-then", how do you decide if your "then" is desirable? It requires a value judgement, and then you're back in the realm of making moral claims (note: not incompatible with the position that morality isn't "real". I don't think your position is coherent.
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saying 'if I kill this person, then they will be dead' instead of 'don't kill' doesn't tell us anything about morality, nor is it sensible or functional
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You're absolutely right. There are no shoulds nor needs without a goal. That's something environmentalists in particular fail to understand: for many of them, if you scratch the surface enough, you realize they think Nature would be better without humans, but that means no goal.
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what if you have the same “if” but lots of people disagree on the “then” of that particular condition? this seems to be the crux of moral questions to me — sure some are poorly defined and can be broken down but there are some issues that inevitably reduce to a moral question
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The "shoulds" are the patterns people find in the morals that they notice to somehow work.
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If you're interested in where this idea comes up in academic philosophy: Immanual Kant pretty much drew up the same distinction you are drawing here, with different conclusions. What you call if-thens, he called "hypothetical imperatives" (if you want X, you should do Y)
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Sometimes attempting to narrow down to if/thens presents as a way to dampen anxiety (at least with the AI researchers I worked with)
Respecting other’s emotional health seems like a “morality” you subscribe to, though probe the edges of. 🤷♂️
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