Objective Morality?

[theVOID]

There is a coherence to this view of moral realism that is attractive. Personally i've always sat on the fence wrt realism v relativism v nihilism, all seemingly having points in their favour but also flawed, although I have tended to nihilism.

Depending on the definition of morality I'm either a moral realist (with the definition I presented) or an error theorist.

Moral relativism and subjectivism seem like pointless exercises to me, they should really just call it what it is, personal/cultural opinion - saying there is anything 'moral' about the opinions of an individual or a culture just because they have values is to me absurd.

If we can 'ground' morality in observable facts which are driven from desires or pleasures, which lead to actions involving value etc, it does rather suggest that we could be acting immorally by eating animals, doesn't it? It would be hard to grant desires to vegetables and some animals but not to all animals.

Sure, we could be in certain circumstances. As long as the animals have some conscious values and aren't just acting out evolved programming they need to be considered, so slugs, bacteria, chickens etc are out of the equation for me, anyone can do what they like to them. Someone who abuses chickens isn't so much doing anything morally wrong in my view but they are doing things that would seriously make me question their sanity and what positions of responsibility they are given.

Objectively I enjoy steak but the cow presumably does not?

Would the cow have lived at all otherwise? No, and it would also live a better life than if it was in the wild, free from hunger, disease, predators and dying of starvation once it becomes to frail to keep up with the herd. Farming animals provides them with a better quality of life and the only reason we do such a thing is because there is a pay off for us with the meat we consume - It seems to me rather clear than a farmed animal has a higher quality life, relative to both it's existence in the wild and the fact that it likely would have never existed at all - the fact that it has to be consumed as a result of this process doesn't undermine that. Obviously this excludes battery farming, the animals there have pretty miserable lives and I avoid eating battery farmed meat whenever possible.

Furthermore what about actions and their consequences (wrt value) that involve only involuntary responses (ie those which we do not desire but are compelled to do, ie flight or fight response, breathing etc). How would these be factored into such an outlook?

Fight or flight is a bit of a two sided coin, in one instance it is possible that this is done irrespective of value, a result of evolutionary programming, on the other hand more intelligent creatures do so to protect their value for life either through a conscious consideration of value or as a result of learned behaviours for avoiding pain. Suppose you can either kill or be killed, while killing someone else is generally wrong, killing in self defence doesn't change the outlook of the situation, either way someone will die and malicious killing worse in terms of negatively effecting the values of the people involved. Once someone has made a decision to kill you for all intents and purposes the choice to end life, the negative action, had already been made, whether or not you can manage to off them first isn't something that changes that and it's less bad in terms of values than premeditated murder.

Breathing doesn't seem to be an issue to me in regards to morality, it's not an interaction between value systems.