(Mis)use of Language and Rhetoric, re Rightness
There's a common kind of rhetorical trick, in which someone sneaks an evaluative claim in, like "a wolf in sheep's clothes," as though it were certain and absolute. They then carry on to convince those listening of something which they couldn't argue for if it were clear that this claim isn't true in the same way, or with the same force as stabler kinds of truth.
Colloquially there are quite a few different words that are used to refer to different kinds of evaluative statments. From a technical perspective, a musical performance might be described as "wrong" or "poor," variously on the basis of strict adherence to the specification (the written piece of music) and of the performance's expressiveness, beauty, etc. Optimality and fitness often take quite a few adjectives, eg. "beautiful," "delicious", or for that matter "sexy," but also of course just "good" or "best." Strategic fitness in particular is often described as "right" (as in, "the right choice"), "smart" (same) or "effective."
"True," even when used consistently, means something fairly different for mathematical claims as it does for empirical ones. We also commonly use the words "right" and "wrong," though never "false" or "incorrect," to describe evil, sins, or moral failings.
Again, without becoming needlessly pedantic, we can notice that there are differences between different kinds of language for different kinds of rightness, and that words have a prototypical meaning. I think that one can "cheat" rhetorically by using one set of language which brings in intuitions about the strength and stability of one kind of rightness to bolster a different kind of claim. Furthermore, I'd say this isn't just about manipulative rhetoric, often the language a broad culture uses to describe one kind of rightness implicitly conflates it with another, eg. "this is the truth" (of a spiritual teaching).
Evaluative claims are often spoken with the same tone and language as empirical or logical claims, and as though they had the same "inescapability." There are contexts in which you can reasonably say "these are pretty much just the facts of the matter," which serve to say, ostensibly, "you ought to be compelled to believe this, due to the kind and strength of evidence for it." I believe it is usually inappropriate to present evaluative claims as though they have this same kind of compelling force.
I think people are sensitive to this kind of ruse only to some extent. I see quite a lot rhetoric, broadly in the context of morality and values, which makes this move and meets with no open objection.
I'll make here a moral claim: in the same way that it's wrong to deceive someone about some facts, whether by straightforward falsehood or by manipulative rhetoric, it's also wrong to cause them to believe evaluative claims using the sorts of rhetorical abuses I've described. Insofar as you respect the discernment, autonomy, and agency of the people you're speaking to, you should make evaluative claims transparently, and let people decide on their own two feet.
Now, there's nuance, and there are exceptions. The more that a frame is shared within some community, or the more that there's effectively consensus about what evaluative functions to use, the less it matters if we leave the evaluative functions out when making evaluative claims. It would be ridiculous to call it "rhetorically abusive" for a religious order, within its own community, to simply have shared assumptions about what is good and right. Nonetheless I think there's something pernicious about the "unknown knowns" of ideology and metaphysics, where the entire evaluative frame remains tacit, even if it's not contentious.
And then, what should we do when the evaluative frame is contested? Descriptively, when talking to others that one trusts and respects, people will generally surface the evaluative function as contentious. "In my opinion," "I've been told that," "the experts say x, but I'm not sure," and so on. I don't have a smack-down argument, but my sense here is that insofar as we want to cultivate a productive, healthy discourse, this kind of nuance and openness with respect to ambiguity and contention is broadly what we should be striving for.
(I'll also say, there's some rabbit hole here about socializing children, for which I just don't have an answer. One way or another, children will absorb moral intuitions, some of this is embodied and demonstrated, but a lot of it is also taught explicitly, and it seems pretty much impossible to try to teach precepts to children in a way that's nuanced with respect to a broader cultural discourse.)
One last piece: often people conflate, implicitly or explicitly, different kinds of evaluative claims. In particular often claims about what strategies are effective end up transmitted culturally in terms of morality, obligation, and sin. I'm thinking here about many people's relationship to exercise, diet, parenting, "financial health," etc. This will also be an important distinction to keep in mind when we talk about spiritual practice.
Taking a specific example: confusions regarding aesthetics
First: the point here is to say, "here's a nuanced case of misunderstanding the role and strength of certain kinds of evaluative claims." When we get to talking about spiritual truth later, I'll return to this question, of what kinds of truth and correctness apply when talking about morality, goodness, spiritual teachings, etc.
In music we have the concept of a "wrong note." A piece of music, as written or as transmitted in an oral tradition, defines a particular sequence of notes for certain lengths of time, and of course people constantly make mistakes and simply play a different note than what is expected. This sense of "wrong" is fine enough, and indeed in many contexts in music we just want to play the piece as written, or at least as written and interpreted within the bounds of the tradition. In fact in those contexts everyone will basically agree as to what "wrong" means, and what counts as a "wrong" note.
However, this evaluative function is only suitable in some contexts and not others. In jazz, many of the rules are relaxed, not into chaos but into a denser and richer structure. You will literally find jazz musicians saying that there's no such thing as a wrong note.1 2 In jazz improvization, if you play a wrong note, you can just about always recover it into a "right" note, with enough skill. Separately, much of the history of Western classical music, from Bach until Schoenberg in the early 20th century was a progressive elaboration and subversion of established structures. Most of the classical composers you know made their name by doing things that were "wrong" at the time, in tasteful and beautiful ways. This tendency can get arbitrarily wacky, see again Schoenberg's atonal work, free jazz, microtonal music, and even harsh noise3.
Here's a marvelous quote on the subject from Plato4:
Thus their folly led them unintentionally to slander their profession by the assumption that in music there is no such thing as a right and a wrong, the right standard of judgment being the pleasure given to the hearer, be he high or low. By compositions of such a kind and discourse to the same effect, they naturally inspired the multitude with contempt of musical law, and a conceit of their own competence as judges.
It seems obvious to me that there's something quite confused about this take. Maybe we can argue about good or bad taste, but "right" and "wrong" (note that another translation5 gives "as a thing without any standard of correctness") don't even make sense to me to apply to music. I would say that the goodness or rightness of music is a "matter of taste," that there isn't going to be something like a "right" answer, in the way that we find with mathematical or empirical claims.
This is a nice example to dig into because, I expect, almost everyone reading this will agree that Plato is doing something confused here. This is not just to say that he's mistaken about some empirical fact, but that his metaphysics is deeply confused, and perhaps wrong.
(Even if you believe that some people just have atrocious taste in music, it's still hard to argue that music can be "right" or "wrong" in a very strong sense here. If you disagree, imagine, as an example, if someone said that burritos were "wrong." Fine as hyperbole, but if this is said fully in earnest, clearly it's gotten something wrong metaphysically.)
More generally, we can ask, "in this domain, what kind of rightness do we observe?" In particular if we're concerned with evaluative claims, again, "what kind?" Is this a matter of taste? Is this about what choices are strategic, given some set of goals, but where the goals are "up to" each person? Do we believe that something is good or bad in a more stable sense, like morality (if we believe in morality as stable at all)?
To be clear, even in the weakest sense, to say that something is a matter of taste is not to say that it doesn't matter. A piece of music might be utterly lovely or even gobsmacking, even if I'm confident in saying that I'm no more "right" in finding it so than the people who don't, or that anyone can be "compelled by the evidence" to find it lovely, the way that they ought to be compelled by a mathematical argument.