What would be the harm?

[bennyboy]

Similarly, for your objection to hold...  

1. The proposition "oxygen is valuable to all creatures dependent on oxygen" cannot be true.
2. The proposition "fire extinguishers are good for extinguishing fires" cannot be true.
3. The proposition "all things that come from a mind are subjective" cannot be true.

Let the conflations of meaning begin, eh?  Not like I asked you to pin down what you meant.  Why don't you also add:

4.  The proposition "We can sell oxygen, so it is a good" cannot be true.
5.  The proposition "The value of the Korean won is about 1/1000th that of an American dollar" cannot be true.
6.  The proposition "There's a word spelled g-o-o--d" cannot  be true.

Your blanket statement I can match with the same accusation: If "good" is determined in terms of function (as in your first two points), then literally every state is "good" for something else except perhaps heat death of the Universe by total entropy, since every possible state of matter is a functional precursor to some other. In order to say any particular state is good or bad, which we must since anything objectively considered must have state in order to be observed as such, we must therefore find some way to bridge "is/ought."

My view is that we bridge this gap by a communication and subsequent negotiation about our feelings about things.  Seeing babies cry makes me feel bad, so I say, "I think we shouldn't poke the baby."  A few people nod assent, and a moral rule is born: "Don't poke babies."

In your long rants about the categorizations of those "moral theorist" guys, what you haven't done, so far as I can tell, is to show any way to create a bridge between "is" and "ought" without predicating that on feelings about things, or ideas about feelings about things.

What ought Julie and Mark due?  What does your magical rightness-in-the-ether that a functional personal will see, but a dysfunctional person will perhaps not see, dictate in this case?

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Your idea, for example, that morality is all about feelings..that's much better than this blanket subjectivism in principle, but the flaw in this is that it may in fact be the case that our feelings are..themselves, grounded in some external and true referent.

I've already said that our evaluations can be considered objective in that sense-- that they are an expression of our genetic reality. We could imagine a hypothetical series of states, interactions between genes and environmental states, going back probably even before the existence of DNA strands on Earth.

If you want, you can resolve it this way:

1. morality is a mediation among feelings, ideas and physical states

Then: "feelings are an expression of instinct, predicated on DNA, in turn predicated on physical states

2. Morality is therefore a mediation among physical states over various scales of time-- essentially it is a statistical comparator between those past states which allowed or harmed the persistence of the human species, with environmental considerations (including the behaviors of other humans) today.

But then, we come to the question-- ought we to give a shit about any of that? Ought we to shoot 50 people in a mall because we're unhappy, or ough we not to? Ought we encourage world leaders to engage in nuclear holocaust, or ought we not to?