"It is striking to me that people who want to think more carefully about moral issues seem to feel little inclination to read the academic literature on this subject. There are in fact specialists who consider these issues; why reinvent the wheel?"
Morality seems to be a bit like evolution: everyone thinks they understand it. (Language is another thing that very smart and well-informed people think they can pontificate about despite not knowing anything beyond their own anecdotes. People claim that English is the language with the most words (cite your source!), that English has no rules and so is hard to learn, that speaking different languages makes a big difference to how one thinks, etc.)
One almost never hears people say something like "I don't want to talk about meta-ethical issues until I have become acquainted with the basic literature on the subject". Of course, people can have a purchase on some moral questions without knowing the philosophical literature, but some purchase on specific questions of normative ethics is very different from an understanding of the difficulty and intricacy of questions in meta-ethics.
How to get acquainted with meta-ethics, i.e. the area of philosophy that deals with explaining the nature of the ethical realm, e.g. whether ethical statements are true relative a culture or else empirical generalizations or the result of a priori intuitions? Try the Stanford and Routledge Encyclopedias of Philosophy (don't trust Wikipedia for philosophy) or start with Peter Singer's Oxford Readings in Ethics. From there, move to something more sophisticated of your choosing (e.g. Harman, Tom Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Allan Gibbard). You might think that you already understand ethics better than these philosophers (some people on this blog seem to think so). If so, then reading this stuff will force you to confront the objections of good philosophers, and so help to hone and refine your position. Also, this stuff is not hard to read--use the encyclopedias above to look up any technical terms you don't know and you''ll be fine.
"It is striking to me that people who want to think more carefully about moral issues seem to feel little inclination to read the academic literature on this subject. There are in fact specialists who consider these issues; why reinvent the wheel?"
Morality seems to be a bit like evolution: everyone thinks they understand it. (Language is another thing that very smart and well-informed people think they can pontificate about despite not knowing anything beyond their own anecdotes. People claim that English is the language with the most words (cite your source!), that English has no rules and so is hard to learn, that speaking different languages makes a big difference to how one thinks, etc.)
One almost never hears people say something like "I don't want to talk about meta-ethical issues until I have become acquainted with the basic literature on the subject". Of course, people can have a purchase on some moral questions without knowing the philosophical literature, but some purchase on specific questions of normative ethics is very different from an understanding of the difficulty and intricacy of questions in meta-ethics.
How to get acquainted with meta-ethics, i.e. the area of philosophy that deals with explaining the nature of the ethical realm, e.g. whether ethical statements are true relative a culture or else empirical generalizations or the result of a priori intuitions? Try the Stanford and Routledge Encyclopedias of Philosophy (don't trust Wikipedia for philosophy) or start with Peter Singer's Oxford Readings in Ethics. From there, move to something more sophisticated of your choosing (e.g. Harman, Tom Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Allan Gibbard). You might think that you already understand ethics better than these philosophers (some people on this blog seem to think so). If so, then reading this stuff will force you to confront the objections of good philosophers, and so help to hone and refine your position. Also, this stuff is not hard to read--use the encyclopedias above to look up any technical terms you don't know and you''ll be fine.