I’d be interested to see how you’d want to characterize the truth of normative claims. As I mentioned in the original post, I don’t find deflationary accounts of truth to be satisfying — when I’m talking about truth, even for normative propositions, I think I’m talking about something more than what the deflationists are talking about.

One response I’ve heard to the case of the people getting cingulotomies (I think that’s the surgery you bring up at the end) is that most physical pains have two components — the bad feeling, and a certain nonconceptual sense of bodily injury. It may be the latter factor that causes us to regard bodily pains as located in particular parts of us which are being injured, while mental pains are not located in such a way. A cingulotomy eliminates the ability to feel the badness, but does nothing about nociception (the nonconceptual experience of bodily injury).

There is a theory of the correct calibration of the moral capacity, and one arrives at the theory through a process of reflective equilibration between science and moral experience. But the theory of correct calibration–the theory that describes and prescribes a reliable method for responding in the right way to reasons–can’t be confused with the method in action, which is almost entirely a matter of sentiment.