Is it true that there is no absolute morality?

[bennyboy]

That's right.  The kind of objective moral truth I'm talking about-- that of a hypothetical best action at all given moments-- is useless in establishing and acting on a moral system.

If objective moral truths are useless in establishing and acting on a moral system then...perhaps, you're not talking about moral truths at all?

Well, there is intent and outcome. I'd say that a subjective moral truth, if you can call it that, is about intent; an objective moral truth would have to be about the outcome-- basically, whatever you think is right, there is an ACTUAL best act you could take at a given moment.

Please note that I'm not really sold on this idea-- I'm just looking for a kind of morality that could sensibly be called "objective," apart from the super-obvious "morality is the human capacity for acting on a sense of social balance," which is more true by definition than by proof.

What I think would more closely speak to potential objective moralities...is why you leveraged infanticide as the hook of the dilemma, and not just any baby, Hitler.  The "cure all diseases" part is explicit and fits with the metrics- this would be a selectively advantageous outcome.  But killing a kid...and why hitler?  Those two probably have moral opinions behind them...it would be those statements, themselves...that were the moral opinions in question.

My point is that on different scales, killing a kid is clearly immoral, killing a kid if it will save millions might be moral, but saving millions if they start an intergalactic war of carnage and planetary destruction would, if you knew the outcome, be immoral.

I might even go so far as to say that intent must be completely divorced from objective morality.

I don't know why the timescale is important at all?  Can't an action be the "best" for that moment?  Do we have to save the universe to present a clearcut example of "best action".  I'd aim lower, our day to day lives, our common interactions.

Well, this is the problem with my theory, isn't it? To have a maximally best behavior, there still has to be some goal by which the behavior's goodness is measured, either immediately or at different time scales. And unless there is a non-arbitrary time scale to choose from, at least that part of the equation must be subjective: "I think we should look at moral consequences as they affect a single lifetime" or whatever.

Another possibility would be to have a kind of conditional subjective/objective pairing. So you could say, "Given goal X, there should be a hypothetical maximally perfect behavior Y at any given moment in time." So the goals of the morality are then subjective, and the (objective) moral facts would be those actions which, almost certainly unknowingly, would have the best chance of leading to that goal.