Is it true that there is no absolute morality?

[bennyboy]

Personally, I can say without handwringing that killing a baby is a bad thing - even if that baby might grow up to a Real Bad Guy™, and that feeding starving people is a good thing, even if they turn into useless moochers.  

Yeah, but what if you knew ahead of time? What if you could see all those people with the foreknowledge that they'd be gassed or whatever?

If there are moral facts, our moral opinions either correlate to them, or they don't. Having a moral microscope would be fantastic, just as having a scale to weigh apples is fantastic.   Perhaps our senses (or perhaps something else that we possess) are that microscope, and more than that...at least in some cases, sufficient?  They provide us with moral opinions that correlate to moral facts.

Morality is still a word, and we still get to define it. If you called zebras "wiggles," you could then say there are no zebras after all. But I'm fairly confident asserting that for any definition of morality, so long as it relates to behavior and a sense of right and wrong, there is probably a hypothetical best action for each agent at each moment in time.

Maybe not all the time, maybe not compellingly, maybe bad things might happen someday in the future, maybe there are things we don't know...but the moral opinion that murder is bad correlates to a moral fact of the matter - even though we may have evolved the opinion for reasons unrelated to -why- it's bad by reference to the fact.  What do you think?

"Murder" is a loaded word, and normally carries bad connotations-- it's almost like saying "a killing which is bad."

This is hard for me to argue, because it goes back to an earlier kind of objective morality I mentioned, and I don't want to be accused of equivocating on it. I've already argued that any species-wide social instinct based on a sense of balance among individuals must be called objective, since it must have evolved before the birth of any individual person, and is therefore a product of the environment and not of human agency.

I'm not so sure, for example, that it would be morally wrong for members of an oppressed population to come to the conclusion that they must escape their chains by murdering their oppressors; people must have some instinct to do so, as liberty affects their genetic fitness. Please do note this is an aside to our current discussion.