Although they might not care to agree with this characterization of their work, most philosophers regard moral statements as similar to opinions in that they are statements of belief about behavior preferences. Just as public opinion researchers will ask people if they prefer one presidential candidate to another, or whether abortion is right or wrong, philosophers will abstract moral words as the particular kind of qualifications of behavioral descriptions that turn them into preferences. Saying abortion is wrong is the equivalent of saying “It is my opinion that no one, regardless of their opinion on the matter, should have an abortion. Their preference should be not to have an abortion, and I am certain about that. You can list me as ‘very certain’ rather than merely ‘somewhat certain’.” Philosophers disagree among themselves about whether moral preferences are matters of taste, or instances of universal rules, just as opinions are sometimes statements of personal preferences between brands, but are also sometimes statements of presumably disinterested preferences, as when a respondent opines that affirmative action is good or bad, acting for a moment as if this were not also a matter of self-interest.
Philosophers also disagree over whether self-interest is to be treated as a cause or as the substance of a moral opinion. In the first case, the moral qualifier "should" is what makes the statement moral, as when one says, “Maybe cheating will raise your grade, but you shouldn’t do it” and in the other case "should" is a redundant term, as when one says, “You shouldn’t cheat because you will get caught” which is to say nothing more than that cheaters get caught, which is not a moral statement but a prudential one. Opinion researchers run into the same problem when they ask people if they approve of something or someone. They sometimes presume that the opinion is based on the information provided in the question, and sometimes they treat the opinion as independent of the information provided within the question. If people are asked if they approve of the death penalty, some opinion researchers will treat the opinion offered as a definitive answer, subject only to aggregation so that one can know how many people say they approve of the death penalty whether they “really” do or not. Saying so is information. That is to treat analysis of the meaning of the question as unnecessary because the opinion is nothing more than the answer to the question, and so is like a “should” that remains unanalyzed. This happens when respondents are asked if they are “happy”. If they say they are, then they are, and the issue is which are the demographic characteristics that correlate with happiness. On the other hand, there are opinion researchers who are more concerned about meaning, about what leads to the answer. Does respondents approve of the death penalty even if it has no deterrent effect, and even if asked if they would accept as an alternative the idea of life imprisonment without parole? That is like treating a moral question as a prudential one. It makes a difference if you say I am happy because things could be worse or say that I am happy because I know that God loves me. Opinion polls tend to simplify complex questions for the sake of the comparability of data, but they do not therefore oversimplify the question of the relation of facts to moral words. They simply do not resolve it, however much opinion researchers think themselves to have cut the Gordian Knot of moral philosophy by asking people what they think and figuring out what group of people thinks what, nothing to be said beyond that.
Philosophers tend to view moral words as particularly powerful kinds of words because these words are directed at compelling obedience and replacing weaker imprecations. They are powerful because they are categorical and exclusive: they do not compare with other words, and they always take precedence over them. This is true in any number of moral theories, ranging from Kant, who regards moral words as not subject to empirical dispute, but matters of the internal logic of free will, and so taking precedence over all other kinds of words, and Moore, who thought that goodness was a distinctive and incomparable quality of objects and occasions that could be accessed by a moral sense that was equivalent in nature but not object to an aesthetic sense.
An example of the power of the philosophical view of moral language is the fact that a sociological investigation of moral words cannot itself be undertaken without setting aside the moral prohibition against asking empirical questions about moral words. The categorical objection is that there can be no such thing as the empirical investigation of "should" words, since whatever is the usage of "should" words does not legislate what "should" words should mean. But this is to confuse two different usages of "should": one, the moral meaning of a moral compulsion to action, and the other, the linguistic usage of a term for a moral compulsion to action. Maybe you should morally only use moral language under certain circumstances that are defined philosophically, as when you say, with Kant, that a prudential judgment is not a moral judgment and so should not be called one, but it is an empirical question whether or not people do use moral language in a way Kant might or might not think philosophically appropriate as to the strength or empirical content of the invocation of moral language.
"Should'' has taken on such strong meaning among philosophers that it is a never ending chain of categorical exclusions of lesser concerns. It raises the stakes on an issue to the point where the behavior in question becomes an obligation rather than a matter of prudence. Such a posture leads to the creation of controversies over nothing. A philosophy professor in the Eighties declared that a person has the right to be afraid of black people which he thought liberated people from political correctness, when all that is meant by the invocation of morality and all the professor meant is that there is some evidence to suggest that some suspicion of some disreputable dressed Black people is reasonable, which is an empirical matter rather than a moral one, unless every epistemological warrant is turned into a moral one. It can be said, then, that the philosophical position on moral words leads to a philosophical cul de sac: there is nothing to discuss under the heading of morality unless something that is not morality is imported into the subject matter.
The exclusivist theory of moral words is that they are powerful when they drown out other understandings, as when a religious preacher makes it impossible for you to think of yourself as other than a sinner and then makes it difficult for you to think of yourself as other than saved. Marxist theory may be said to be powerful in a similar fashion because it allows every human activity to be seen in terms of economic exploitation or alienation. Moral language can be said to be powerful in this fashion when it makes people find it difficult to imagine an alternative way of doing right, and so freezes them into their preconceptions of how to do the right thing that it becomes hard to see how they could do otherwise even if they wanted to. I could not but sacrifice myself for my child-- or, in the case of Abraham, sacrifice my child to God. The Kantian sense of the word "should" has that force.
An alternative interpretation of moral words is that they are extremely weak words. They do not take precedence over anything, but are simply intensifiers of conventionalized feelings when those feelings are being recognized as conventional. Moral words are ways to call attention to the fact that the opinions offered are regarded as respectable, whether or not they are ever acted upon or whether they describe how people think they will act. In actual usage, "should" is simply a way of emphasizing common-sense and clichéd judgments, turning them into proscriptions which have no performative effects, words that simply instruct that a formula of words is offered as appropriate to the occasion. People shouldn’t cheat on their wives even if people do; people shouldn’t cheat on their income taxes, and respect themselves for thinking they should not cheat on their income taxes, even if they do because they need the money and so make an exception for the rule.
A way to resolve the differences between the two theories of moral language is to find the circumstances under which one or the other theory obtains. Moral words have a trump like power, we can suggest, not when they exclude alternative meanings or experiences, which is the usual philosophical way of dealing with the question, but when the moral words distinguish between meanings. As is the case with all language, a moral word means something powerful only if it denies an available alternative interpretation, and so emerges as something other than a cliché. Alienation means something only if it is opposed to an idea of consumer satisfaction. The obligation to save a child is powerful because it points to the sacrifice of a parent's life as a real even if a worthwhile sacrifice. Language is, in general, powerful to the extent it is on the knife edge of choice. Moral language, in particular, is powerful when it emphasizes that choice is a knife edge. Being good means something when there are no rewards in goodness, for otherwise it means something else. Kant's definition of morality serves this understanding, even if the word "should" itself takes on an exclusivist aura, ridding the verbal battlefield of its enemies, rather than continuing in the struggle with them.
Religious language, which easily gets reduced to a set of pieties, is a particularly good example of language which becomes powerful when it is seen as making distinctive statements and so is other than self-referring. In “Leviticus”, for example, members of the priestly class may not be physically deformed or blemished and are enjoined not to deal with dead bodies. Such an injunction is merely self-referring if such injunctions are taken as statements of the obvious, as is validated by the history of the Jewish priesthood, where it would be offensive for a member of the priestly class, to this day, to perform funeral rituals, and where deformity seems a dead letter, having no content. But consider what such an injunction is denying. It says that priests cannot function in funeral rituals when other priesthoods may have regarded burial as a key function of religious life. Certainly Durkheim did. The injunction not to deal with such rituals suggests a revolutionary redefinition of the priesthood as concerned with other than funeral rights, just as the injunction that priests may not be blemished or deformed suggests that there were other sets of priests which were so, and so reminds us of the fact that in many preliterate societies albinos, hermaphrodites, epileptics, and other special people took on the priestly role. The Biblical injunction therefore has real significance and resonance in insisting that priests are ordinary rather than deviant people and are agents who deal with events in this world rather than the next.
The same is true of more contemporary usages of abstract and morally laden words. Equality is an empty word unless a distinction is made between equality between individuals and equality between groups, since there are active proponents of both of these senses of the term. Similarly, a sense of freedom becomes more powerful if the sense of freedom as the self-determination of a national people is distinguished from the sense of freedom as that is established by the democratic government of a people. You have to conceptualize both senses of freedom to understand the tradeoffs that often have to be made between them. Then you are using moral language properly because you know what you are giving up when you embrace national identity rather than democratic institutions, however much “democracy” has become a term embraced by contemporary Arab revolutionaries without understanding what it means other than as a reference to power to themselves rather than the elite currently in power. The strength of the claim of national identity and democracy are each made clearer when one claim is distinguished from the other.
To generalize, words can be said to take on their meanings when they make distinctions, and moral words, in particular, take on their meaning when they distinguish between real possibilities for the way people behave. That means, in turn, that people who have different roles in society, and so are interested in different outcomes, will choose different moral language to express their positions, which means, in turn, that moral language will be differentially distributed along class and other social structural dimensions. When Tea Party people say they want to be free to bear arms into churches and shopping malls they are saying something very different, given their own set of predilections, than if Coastal people say they feel more free when the government regulates the arms people can individually own. That people of different backgrounds will mean different things when they use powerful words is the normal expectation of sociological analysis.
Most of the time, words do not have very much meaning because they are equally usable by anyone, do not threaten any self-image any more than any other, and so are simply a reference to the respectability of the words rather than to why they give rise to respectability. They are true because they convey themselves as platitudes, which are true only in the sense that they seem true until they are investigated for their meanings. They serve the function of making people feel better about their verbal activities, rather than enhance people's understanding of what the words are putatively about. In short, words that are not in some context controversial are largely meaningless. “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” is a cliché that applies to words. They can be wrought so as to pleasure your prejudices. Listen to what people say when they visit relatives or go to a ball game.
That general feature of language is also the case with bio-ethical words. People invoke what "should" be done with elderly people not out of any great conviction but out of a sense of the normative: how other people will expect them to respond with words that are comforting and indicate sensitivity and consideration rather than as operatively meaningful choices at a decision point. Moral words allow people to appear tactful. They care about suffering people; they want them to get the best of medical and psychological advice; they want to defer to the patient as much control over their lives as possible. Moral words are not ideology or thrusts of the imagination but only ciphers, talk to keep talk moving along. They are in that sense "values": words with no referents except the inculcation of fellow feeling. In that case, moral words do the Durkheimian job of creating community but only by referring the community to itself, not to a transcendent principle, and so work as customs but not as language which has as its unique capacity the expression of distinctive meanings.
As a general rule, it seems to be the case that words are not very powerful unless it is proven otherwise. Words, for the most part, do not convey much distinctive meaning, even if a good deal of meaning is embedded in their creation and their history. Functionally, however, words are simply conversational counters, ways whereby people tell one another that they are each OK.
This view of the nature of language as powerful only when it is discriminating, and most of the time powerless, of the function of language as for the most part powerless, has behind it a significant sociological tradition. Language is governed by norms of custom rather than rules of reason, and this is true of contemporary as well as pre-literate life. Durkheim is correct in thinking customary life is alive and well in the modern world, and even to suggest that he is right in thinking that customary life is, to some extent, a necessary component of social life. The distinctive meanings of past or present usages are recoverable from their customary usages. This suggests that Levi-Straus and other followers of Durkheim are correct in saying that verbal usages contain meanings. But they are probably not correct in making the further claim that a contemporaneous custom must have a meaning. Customs are the absence of meaning, since they are the reliance on social affirmation of social ties as a substitute for meaning. Sometimes, I mean what I say.
Karl Mannheim was at the opposite end of the theoretical spectrum from Durkheim because he insisted on the priority of social structure over custom or culture, and insisted that ideas were responses to social situations. But even this exponent of the "rationality" of thought, who thought that thought, however obscure or mythical, could be traced to its real social structural interests, was forced to consider the anomaly of conservative thought, which was, for him, a kind of end category, the form of political thought that was the opposite of political because it had convinced itself, for good social structural reasons, not to think of itself as political. Mannheim was therefore on the edge of recognizing that there was a politics of platitudes, a language that did not convey political meaning but only political reassurance, but Mannheim, true to the rationalist that he was, considered this the discovery of the edge of the world, after which lay the abyss, rather than the discovery of a permanent characteristic of language. Mannheim foreshadowed Orwell and other commentators on the breakdown of language.
Philosophers, to repeat, treat words, for the most part, as kinds of opinion, or else are willing to go as far as Austin in distinguishing those utterances which are performative as having a special kind of meaning which cannot be reduced to statements of truth or of preferences as kinds of truth. Wittgenstein not only broke the ground for thinking of some words as other than opinions, but for thinking that all of language can be placed on a measure of the extent to which they are opinion-like, at one extreme, or grunts and other utterances at the other. Even statistical statements could be regarded as matters of confidence, as expressions of a kind of felt certainty, rather than as matters of truth and falsity. Moral language, in particular, fits Wittgenstein's model, some moral words on some occasions taking on meaning rather than social functions. There comes a point when you break through from saying the right thing to saying what you think is right, and there can be hell to pay for doing that, and it is not at all clear when you are fed up enough or find the right occasion or feel forced because of circumstances to say what you think rather than what you feel because you feel certain about whatever it is you think. Then language becomes fully moral, people taking oaths of service or speaking firmly to a spouse, or otherwise showing that they mean business.