What would be the harm?

[The Grand Nudger]

I have to say that the Merriam Webster dictionary seems to have little interest in the finer points of moral ontology.

"Fail" implies a goal.  But if one has no particular destination, how can one be said to "fail" to arrive there at all?  Can it be that I'm walking my dog, and something in the Universe pops ups and says, "Fuck you.  You didn't arrive at Disneyland.  You've failed!"  Has a homosexual person "failed" to be straight, if he doesn't see being gay as a failure?  Has a chronic masturbator "failed" to keep it in his pants, if he enjoys what he does?  Has a fat person "failed" to stay thin, even though he loves food and thinks he looks like a badass sumo-wrestling mofo?

Sure, fail implies a goal.  Both consequentialist and deontological ethics propose explicit and implicit goals.  

To say that the goals are objective is to say that something in the Universe is intrinsically goal-oriented.  But how would material interactions be said to be right or wrong in any regard?  What would such a Universal goal even look like?

A goal doesn't need to be universal for there to be goals in the universe, or for those goals to be objective, or for a failure to reach those goals to be objectively assessed.  

I'm not sure that I'd even say that evolution itself is goal-oriented.  I'd say that all goals as we see them are reverse-engineered: I get a terrible feeling when I see a child harmed, and know that most people also do, and so I infer that our evolutionary history has arrived at a "goal" of preventing harm to children.

An intuitionist would tell you that this is your ability to make moral observations.  You see the bad, and it wrenches your guts.  You asked me what bad was, in this leadup, but if I could point at some kid getting stomped by a group of adults it very much seems like you would say "ah, yeah, okay, i see it."  So.....?  

I then take an additional step: having inferred a virtual goal, I will start planning the process of conformity my nature, with the understanding that this is likely to reduce stress or induce happiness.

Sure, you'd want to reduce your discomfort. Sometimes, anyway.

Is there any of this that you are online with?

You sort of blew it on a couple points, but in the main, yeah..sure.  Is failure the only sense you saw that referred to a meaningful objectivity? How about inadequate, injurious, invalid, and incorrect?