On Moral Authorities

[FallentoReason]

It's easy to talk about good and bad, and then to boil it down to help or harm; although you've already possibly excluded some people from the conversation with this distinction.

But since most people would agree it's about help and harm, I'm usually fine talking about that. But these are not well-defined, easily measurable concepts. For anything to be objective, metrics must be agreed. You can probably reach almost universal agreement that certain acts are always harmful, but apart from that, it's all one massive grey area. Everyone will have different ideas about exactly how much a particular thing helps or harms, or how you go about assessing those concepts. "Wellbeing" is again not a simple concept, and you'd have to agree how to measure it before you could begin to measure morality. If you can't measure, at least in theory, then it's not objective. We have ways of measuring aspects of reality such as length, and we all agree on ways of doing so because it has practical benefits. Morality and wellbeing are very different; it's the ways of measuring which are themselves the points of disagreement.

Before you even get into specifics, how do animals factor in? If morality is objective, we can decide, without resorting to opinion, how animals should be treated and valued relative to humans. But just like all moral questions, there is no right answer. There are people who say, "If your idea of morality isn't the same as mine, I don't care about yours". That's not being objective, it's being exclusionary and it never furthers discussion.

You've outlined some great reasons why consequentialism isn't a good way to think about morality. That's why I prefer deontology, such as Kantianism and consequentialism. For Kantianism specifically, you don't need to measure anything. It all comes down to logically achieving your will, which is a 'yes' or 'no' question without the gray areas.