Moral Acts

[robvalue]

I thought you were saying that there could be a single, correct way to measure wellbeing. Now you're saying there could be several correct methods? How can it be objective? If you're just arbitrarily picking one, then sure. It's then objective, based on whoever makes that decision. But which is the best? How do you determine how good any of them are?

I'm saying that reducing wellbeing to a number is a highly subjective process. I could come up with ways of doing it right now. Hundreds of different ways. How exactly do we decide which are acceptable?

The problem is that saying a way of measuring wellbeing is "correct" implies a specific goal, or set of goals. What are the goals? What is wellbeing? What are we trying to achieve? It's so vague that this really isn't clear.

I think we're having a fundamental misunderstanding, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. I was using the idea of "rape being right" to show that the idea of a moral fact is not a coherent concept. Morality is about deciding how to make decisions, and that involves valuing things in different ways. You also seem entity concerned with the outcome of actions, and the intentions behind them don't seem to matter. To me, morality is much more complicated. So we're probably not even discussing the same thing.

Again, here's a simple scenario. My child has some weird disease, so that it will die at the age of 15, and will be in a certain amount of pain. It's possible to administer a drug that will reduce the pain by a certain amount, but will reduce the lifespan to 10.

What is the "morally correct" decision? If morality is supposed to be objective, it must be able to answer moral dilemmas. If it can't, it's not morality as found in real life. I would say there is no morally correct decision. It's a matter for debate. If there was a "correct" decision here, it would be of no consequence because people would generally ignore it, as you would do with the rape thing. The correct decision would just be dependent on the method used to work out wellbeing in each case, and different methods would produce different answers. Who picks the method?