What does morality mean to you?

[robvalue]

I entirely agree it is subjective and relative.

My idea of morality is you judge a certain person by their own standards, and their own beliefs. So if someone is doing the best they can with what they know and are capable of, then they are being moral, even if the result is bad. If I did the same action as them, with far greater knowledge and skills, knowing what would happen (something bad), then I'd be immoral.

But to say "That would be immoral if I did it, so it's immoral for you to do it" seems pointless to me. The action is going to appear to different people all sorts of degrees of moral. But morality is meant to be a measure of how much a person is trying to do good, not how well they succeed by other people's standards. For one thing, this "standard" it's being held to is going to be the arbitrary one that happens to be held by whoever is making the judgement.

A super powered alien could turn up and declare the whole of humanity to be immoral because all our methods seem primitive to them and have caused unnecessary damage. Is that a fair assessment? I'd say no. We did the best with what we knew.

This is my take anyway To define morality any other way seems to defeat the whole point of it. We have plenty of other ways of measuring objective success.