Okay, I'm home from work now, and I think I hit most of the points I wanted to make. To make it clear, it's not necessarily that I believe in metaethical principles because of my ethical commitments. I mean, that's true, but it's more that, as a result of my rejection of positivism as self-contradicting, non-empirical principles must exist. Which metaethical principles I believe in is determined by my ethical commitments, a fact which is itself a metaethical principle, and thus determined by my ethical commitments. . . .

I would argue--even if I'm not sure how to demonstrate--that your position is necessarily inconsistent, in that insofar as we're having this conversation in language, it's always-already implicitly and intrinsically ideological; it's built into the landscape. From your perspective, what does it really mean to "understand" my position--we're just altering each other's brain chemistries by modifying the patterns of the photons hitting each other's retinae (retinas?), right? (Which, obviously, is going on, but that's not the point.)