General question about the possibility of objective moral truth

[Michael Wald]

Before we talk about the question of making moral judgements of good or bad we need to first establish what morality is. The question takes it for granted that morality is understood by all, and I don't think that's right. So what is morality? It is a determination as to how things fit into certain value sets. Let's say I value human life. As such a moral action would be one that would promote that value of human life. If I don't value human life, then I have no reason not to kill people. As such I would not find it immoral to kill someone. You might disagree with me, and there we have a conflict.

Is either party OBJECTIVELY right? Well, in the sense of "does some external force give a damn" then the answer is no. Neither party has a more valid set of values in this particular situation. However we as humans have evolved as a cooperative social species. Those of us who don't value life don't generally live to tell about it. Those of us that don't value positive social structures generally don't survive to reproduce. As such you could say that we share a similar set of values that lead us to generally similar moral judgements.

I'm not so sure if we can say that people who don't value positive social structures don't survive. Actually my impression is that we have plenty of people of this kind in this world.
At the end my whole question comes up to find an argumentation not for those who keep social rules, but for those who don't. It's very frustrating if you have a real criminal in front of you and you try to explain him that (and why) his behavior is really wrong, while he just denies that there is an objective way to proof that. Of course we can still punish him. But I also want to show him that he himself knows that his behavior is wrong.

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Just try not to fall into the trap of thinking something has no value just because it isn't the end-all answer to everything. There was a time where the supposed author of morality was apparently more concerned with what people ate, wore, and who they had sex with, than to really solve the problems of Humans being treated like chattel. I was in a discussion with another user named Rekeisha, where he just kept reapeating that because morality isn't absolute, there must be no value to it. It got so irritating that I just gave up on the discussion.

In general the value of something is set from outside. And it is usually set by comparing things. Also in the case of moral. What is bad in our eyes we define through comparing it with what we think is good.
Of course, the moment we say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, we are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. We are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said "New York" each meant merely "The town I am imagining in my own head," how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if morality meant simply "whatever each nation happens to approve," there would be no sense
in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other. Or let me say it this way: If the behavior of Mother Theresa can be better and that of Adolf Hitler less good, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be good about.