Evil

[robvalue]

Thanks for your reply No problem.

Yes, you can objectively compare an action to a set of criteria. It's just that no one agrees on the criteria. There are huge numbers of ways of measuring happiness/wellbeing/human success/societal strength etc. So to objectively assess an action we must give weighting to all these things. If you ask 100 people, you'll get 100 different weightings probably. I don't understand how anyone can insist there is a "correct" weighting.

I don't think you've addressed this: am I more moral than people who eat meat? Right now, society will say no. In the future, they may look back and say yes.

And with intent, two identical actions get different scores depending on the intent. So measuring the morality of the action is not objective, unless you also somehow include this intent in the formula.

To me, the idea of objective morality means any action has a morality score which is not dependent on opinion. I'm saying that if there is such a way of grading actions, it is meaningless because almost everyone is going to disagree with every grading.

Even as a society, what we see as important changes all the time. So if we came up with a grading system based on everyone alive today, it would change if we did it again in 10 years time.

We may have to simply disagree. I'm not understanding your usage of the word "objective", simply because objective implies it's not dependent on opinion or who observes it. 100 people will have 100 different ideas of how actions should best suit us as a society, even among one society, and so will each have a different opinion of that action. To say there is an objective rating is to somehow give the neutral universe an opinion. An uninvested party can only grade morality against a set of criteria we give them. What do we give them? It's not the same as giving this party some way of weighing things, which will produce an objective answer for any particular item. Morality is not so easily weighed.

If you can give me any specific example of an action and how it is objectively rated as a certain amount moral/immoral (I hope we can agree actions are not simply good, bad or indifferent but are in degrees) I'll be very interested. Something non trivial that involves at least some conflict of interest between different forms of good/bad outcomes.