What would be the harm?

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think so, no.  We don't generally consider them capable of rational failure.  They are not like us in that relevant way.  If they had a mind capable of apprehending moral value...and that mind was capable of a moral assessment in light of that moral information...then we might hold them morally accountable.  Since they don't, they can't..and we wont.  I'm super friendly to the notion of sliding the bar closer to us than others may think..and it;s noted that many animals express a sort of proto moral impulse often described as a sense of empathy.  This is generally thought to be the precursor of our own much more elaborate rational systems of morality - and it still informs us, deeply, with regards to it..though not always accurately.

By what criteria do you establish capability?  Is a rapist capable of not raping?  What if he was abused as a child?  What if he's just exceptionally sexually motivated?  What if he's struggled for years against a deep-seated hatred of women?

There could be many reasons that a person is incapable.  They could also be capable and just not give a fuck. You've asked a half dozen versions of this question and the answer has been the same very time. Are you expecting it to suddenly change?

Is rape still "objectively wrong" if not raping is just too darned hard for someone?  How about murder, or genocide?

OFC, why would their individual inabilities change the moral appraisal of the act?  It only changes how we view their culpability for it.  In much the same way as harm still being bad, but a lion not being held morally accountable for doing harm....and just to draw that one even closer into the realm of applied justifications, the harm the lion causes and our inability to sit it down and have a little chat being the impetus to kill the lion.

I think you and I probably have similar moral standards.  However, in my opinion you cannot see the difference between cultural normalization of ideas predicated on feeling, and actual objective mores (which don't really exist except in the sense that they depend on a feeling mechanism which predates each of us individuals).  Because certain mores are common enough, and you can see that they are common in your interaction with people in general, you believe that they are more than the linguistic expression of feeling.

I'm perfectly capable of seeing the difference between cultural normalization of ideas and an objective moral schema. It's an objective moral schema I use to address those abusive effects of the cultural normalization of ideas in the first place.  An objective appraisal that lead me to concluide that there was nothing wrong with what julie and mark were doing, despite the cultural normalization of a prohibition on incest as wrong with the significant added oomph of my own disgust. Objective moral systems are neither based in common agreement nor competently argued against on account of disagreement, nor are they predicate on how we feel about a given thing. 

To argue against a fact based assessment...you have to argue against the facts, Benny. You would have to show, for example, how some thing x didn't actually cause harm, or that to do x was to cause a greater harm than to not do x. Not that people felt different ways about x. OFC they do, we all have our very own feelers, ffs, lol. Why is this so difficult for you to comprehend?

Let me ask you this-- suppose we translated someone from a neolithic society or maybe from the bronze age, and we attempted to reconcile their views with ours.  Would you be so confident saying that some things are intrinsically wrong?

As confident as I am now, yeah.  Interestingly enough, we imagine that there's more difference between us than exists now or ever has.  We date full modernity some 50k years ago precisely because what artifacts we see suggest a global culture similar to our own.  I can't recall the name of the researcher who wrote a fairly demonstrative paper on this...but they took the case of inuit, a culture then frozen in the neolithic... who left infants out to die in the snow.  It seemed culturally monstrous to those who first observed it and remained as such in the public mind for some time until it was carefully established that in the conditions they found themselves in, with a scarcity of resources and facing an immensely harsh environment - they simply could not accept the care of the child without harming other children and tribe members.  What seemed a monstrous disregard for the life of an infant was a sober appraisal of the value of life and the need to protect it, even if it meant doing something that would be otherwise unthinkable.

Thus, the instrumental good of the bad....toward the common good. Something immediately recognizable to any westerner. Here, again, just as in the case of the fir exinguishere..we did not have a value agreement, there was a disparity of empirical and rational information leading us to a misattribution of the intent of their actions and because of all this...a mistaken assumption that we were in moral disagreement. Armed with that information and capable of a rational assessment we find that our underlying value is coherent.

Now, if we observed them doing this today, it would be monstrous, because those relevant factors explaining that instrumental good are no longer the case. Leaving children out in the snow has lost any cover it may one have once had. They could say "but we've always done it this way, it's our tradition!" and that wouldn't make a lick of difference.

Like the hunter gatherer transported into my fire room and shown the value of a fire extinguisher. Myself transported to that time or that age and supplied with the relevant knowledge, I could also understand why they do some thing I consider horrid. Now, that won;t..in the end, gaurantee that I agree with them..and they could still be wrong....and so could I in my own time with something I take to be good or bad.

These are all completely uncontroversial propositions in moral realism. It simply isn't what you think it is, you have idiosyncratic definitions for terms in established use...and unlike either myself or the neolithic hunter.... you refuse to listen to see whether or not your concerns or disparate valuation is an issue of information rather than an actual case of disparate valuation.

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Don't bring up a time test, he won't like that.

IKR, because I might just think that no thinking adult should need something this simple explained to them so many times, huh.