This is where the main problem is:

So if objective moral facts do actually exist, which is the premise of the counterfactual here, then the relativist must be incorrect about something. But what, exactly, are they incorrect about? It can’t be their original judgment that torturing puppies is wrong, since that’s equally true given realism. Instead, all they’re actually incorrect about is whether that wrongness is subjective — they believe the property they’re talking about is a product of their own individual stances, when in reality, it’s just an objective moral fact. So once they learn that moral realism is true, what they realize is that, in some sense, they’ve been caring about objective moral facts this whole time, since it turns out that’s what wrongness actually is.

BSB seems to take the relativist and realist to both agree that puppy torture has the “property of wrongness” and then the dispute is over how to cash this out. The relativist is opposed to puppy torture, they care that it doesn’t happen, but they misidentify the wrongness with their attitude or opposition, when in truth the wrongness is actually referring to an objective moral truth.

The problem with BSB’s remark is using property talk to treat judgments of “wrongness” in such a way that “wrongness” becomes separable from attituddes/values/preferences, such that the relativist can be “incorrect” about what’s driving the judgment that puppy torture is “wrong.”

It looks like BSB thinks that both relativists and realists come at the question of whether puppy torture is wrong in a kind of stepwise process:

(1) Have the intuition that puppy torture is wrong.

(2) Seek an explanation for why it’s wrong. We know it’s wrong, it’s just a matter of figuring out what philosophical account explains this.

I grant that this is the way a mainstream analytic philosopher who lands on relativism might approach things, but it isn’t how I or others here appear to be approaching the matter, and it’s not how a relativist “must” approach the matter. Instead, what I and others are doing is finding that we oppose puppy torture, and then when we speak of things being right or wrong this is what we intend to convey when using ordinary language phrasings.

There’s no placeholder. It’s not that I think puppy torture is “wrong” in abstracta, first, then there’s a separate, distinct question about whether this wrongness that I’m picking up on is reducible to my values or is instead some kind of objective fact. No. When I say puppy torture is wrong, this just is an expression of my attitudes and values, full stop. There’s no ambiguity here, no reasonable possibility of me being “wrong” about this. When I say it’s wrong, I am not theorizing about what wrongness is. I’m just stipulating that my use of moral talk is a way of expressing my preferences. Being a “relativist” as an individual speaker doesn’t require or presuppose some kind of semantic theory about the meaning of ordinary language terms among ordinary language users, or a theory about the meaning of ordinary moral claims themselves, and so on.

Again, I am happy to grant that that is what an analytic relativist might be doing, but this is precisely my problem with analytic approaches to metaethics. They depend on what I take to be an objectionable emphasis on moving from a theory of moral semantics to a metaethical or conceptual thesis about the nature of moral truth, as if the nature of morality is contingent on how people (in this case, untrained English speakers) happen to talk. BSB seems to be so entrenched in this 20th century language-based approach to metaethics that this approach keeps being projected onto and imposed on those of us who are defending antirealist views in metaethics, when we’ve largely moved past this approach.

Now, why do I think the property talk is fishy? Because I think the property talk is doing much of the lifting (I won’t say heavy lifting; I think it’s doing some medium lifting here) of allowing BSB to dissociate what I and others mean when we speak of things being wrong from talk of wrongness, by treating “wrongness” as a placeholder term where different theories can be slotted in for it, and treating us as being potentially mistaken about what “the” property or properties are that best characterize this approach.

In a way, it’s a kind of top-down approach to devising an account. We start at the top level with first fixing our use of terms: “puppy torture is wrong.” We agree on this. And, critically, realists and relativists alike will affirm that we care that it’s “wrong.” Then, because our commitment to it being “wrong” is fixed, BSB can argue that we have mislocated wrongness in our values, when it is instead located in the objective wrongness of puppy torture. Since our commitment to it being “wrong” is locked on the first-order moral claim “puppy torture is wrong,” and because we’ve already granted we care about this truth, if we’ve mistaken about the referent of the truth, then we’re still committed to caring, but we’re wrong about what it is we’ve cared about all along.

By analogy, suppose I and another person both agree that we care about what’s in a particular box. So we both affirm:

What’s in that box is important to me.

I think the box has X in it, and they think the box has Y in it.

Now they argue:

“We’ve both agreed that what’s in the box is important to us. However, while you think that the important thing in the box is X, it isn’t X, it’s actually Y. So since you agree that what’s in the box is important, but you’re wrong that the thing in the box is X, actually what’s important to you is Y, so you should care about Y.”

This is the mistake BSB is making, because I don’t just care about whatever is in the box, regardless of whether it is X or Y. Instead, my position is this:

X is what’s important to me, and I believe X is what’s in the box, so “What’s in the box is important to me” is only conditionally true on the thing in the box being X. If it turns out to be Y, I won’t care about it.

Transposing this over to talk of moral values: when I say that puppy torture is morally wrong, I am not dissociating in some abstract context the notion that “puppy torture is wrong,” and thinking this is true, whatever wrongness turns out to be, then happening to think what this wrongness consists in is my preferences. Instead, what I am saying is “Puppy torture is against my preferences,” and that’s just what I mean when I say it’s “wrong.” There’s no placeholder content in “wrong” for it to possibly be objective wrongness instead.

The result of this is that if we go all the way back to the start of this response, where I quoted BSB, we can now see what the problem is. Here’s the remark again for reference:

So if objective moral facts do actually exist, which is the premise of the counterfactual here, then the relativist must be incorrect about something. But what, exactly, are they incorrect about? It can’t be their original judgment that torturing puppies is wrong, since that’s equally true given realism. Instead, all they’re actually incorrect about is whether that wrongness is subjective — they believe the property they’re talking about is a product of their own individual stances, when in reality, it’s just an objective moral fact. So once they learn that moral realism is true, what they realize is that, in some sense, they’ve been caring about objective moral facts this whole time, since it turns out that’s what wrongness actually is.

No, I am not incorrect about anything here. My language is “pre-reduced” in advance: my talk of puppy torture being wrong just is talk of my personal preferences. There is no gap between my preferences and the meaning of the term. There is no reasonable possibility of me being incorrect, in virtue of my own commitments or ways of speaking, about “whether that wrongness is subjective.” There is no such thing, on my view, as “wrongness,” apart from subjectivity from the very outset of describing my stance and what I take (my, at least) moral claims to mean. As far as anyone else saying that puppy torture “is wrong,” well, it’s an open question to me what they mean. And they are welcome to tell me.

My way of approaching metaethics is thus not vulnerable at all to this objection from BSB. What any given instance of “puppy torture is wrong” means is, to me, an open question contingent on the communicative intent and philosophical commitments of any given speaker. There is no free-floating “puppy torture is wrong” sentence in abstracta about which BSB and I could disagree; I just reject outright that there are any meaningful sentences or claims outside some context of usage. There are only facts about what I mean, what BSB means, and what anyone else means, and we can simply report, or stipulate what is meant by any given usage of “puppy torture is wrong” that is the present subject of discussion.

BSB seems to not understand this, and I think this is partially rooted in misguided reification and property talk rooted in mainstream analytic philosophical methods.

So it’s not that I just have some inchoate sense that there’s something fishy about the way BSB is approaching the matter. It seems very clear to me what the problem is. I could be mistaken about all of this. And, as a final note, when I say it’s fishy I don’t mean to impute intent on BSB. I don’t think BSB is being e.g., suspicious or sneaky or anything. I think BSB is employing a different metaphilosophical approach to my own and that BSB’s mistakes are located in those metaphilosophical differences.