Objective Standard for Goodness!

[bennyboy]

I think Desire Utilitarianism is a very good attempt at an objective standard.

The author, Alonzo Fyfe was a member on the old Internet Infidels Discussion Board before it melted down. I developed a lot of respect for this guy when I was there. That doesn't make him infallible; just thought I'd throw that out there. I personally admire this guy for his logical thinking and intelligence.

I think you could simplify this position a lot, because in essence, it seems to be a very-well worded way of saying that (and I'm reading between the lines here) absent an alien entity which may impose goodness, we may simply conflate subjective intent with its objective mechanism.

In other words, desires, while not uniform across the species, are themselves objective in the sense that no conscious agent is ultimately responsible for them.

The problem is that Jew killing, child rape, and voting for Trump all seem then to callable by the term "good," though most sensible people would support none of these things as good.  I suppose we could extrapolate the average desire of the human species and say that whatever goals we collectively have could be called good, not for the individuals, but for a kind of archetypal Man of which we are all one face. In the end, our current mores in combination with the laws of a democratic people probably approximate that state reasonably well, actually.

In fact, it might be that BY DEFINITION, we always achieve this kind of definition of goodness as a species, by definition.