[Serious] The Good

[The Grand Nudger]

(As an aside for Khem, imagine a world in which people like to die, like to be stabbed, and prefer dysfunction to order and well being.  In such a world, that which you identify as harm would no longer be considered harm and would no longer be bad.  Thus it is our living in one world rather than the other which makes what you have identified as harm in your set of morals as harm and therefore bad.  But morality isn't simply an accidental set of circumstances which give rise to certain empirical truths and not others.  If morals are objective, and harm being bad is an objective feature of the universe, then there must exist some necessary feature other than the mere contingent facts of existence which results in, say, killing someone being bad in one world, and killing someone not being bad in the other world.  If there is no necessary reason for the facts being one way rather than the other, your moral theory collapses as it depends upon identifying contingent facts as necessary ones, which is simply a mistake.)

Yeah, I can imagine a world like that, and there are situations in this world like that.  Killing someone can be bad or not bad here in this world.  You're thinking of moral absolutism.

Moral realism asserts that there are facts of a matter that establish the hypothetical conclusion, and if in your estimation any such fact is a contingent fact, well..that's okay, so long as it's a fact of that matter. There could be some other world or some other situation in which those aren't the facts of that matter, and in that world any conclusion based on those now-non-existent facts couldn't be established.

The example of what people like isn't necessarily the best, that would be a fact of the person, not the matter - but we do use those facts to modify realist conclusions. Boxers like to box, after all. Even here, many harmful things aren't considered harmful, or meaningfully harmful, and then there are valued and necessary harms. We could propose some person who was depressed and wanted to find a way to get someone else to kill them for relief to create a set of circumstances such as the ones you refer to above. Would it be absolutely bad to be that other person? I think it's hard to make that case. Is there some set of circumstances in which it would be bad to be that other person? Plenty. We could repeat the question in reference to the soon to be dead-ed party as well and get the same answers. Absolutely bad to try to get someone else to do that? No. Some set of circumstances in which it would be? Plenty.

The difference between clinical assisted suicide and asking a friend to feed you some thing they don't know you're fatally allergic to. The difference between knowingly taking a life in a mutual act with great consideration beforehand, or drunkenly pulling out your pistol and shooting the guy because he offended you. Not only is there a factual basis as to why this thing x is or could be bad, there are factual modifications and circumstances that lead to either conclusion.

Realism, not absolutism. I suppose that we could put "if" in front of every realist statement and "in this world/circumstance" at the back, and "so far as we can tell" as a summary, but that would be unwieldy.