Why does science always upstage God?

[ayost]

How much simpler it is to consider that anything that increases the amount of suffering is morally bad and whatever decreases the amount of suffering is morally good?
Sure, suffering is somewhat subjective, but one can consider the average of humanity suffering instead and that is as objective as you can get, as it's not attached to any particular individual.

I wasn't trying to be cocky, I was just saying that we can copy/paste our favorite authors back and forth into perpetuity. I've read these positions and if I were to be convinced by them I would have been by now. I choose to believe the opposing opinion.

As far as your moral stance, let's take an easily real world example of anything that increases the amount of suffering is morally bad and whatever decreases the amount of suffering is morally good

There's a huge problem with the foster care system. Foster kids are subjected to terrible abuse. There is a lot of suffering of children at the hands of awful people. An unimaginable amount of suffering. We could reduce that suffering by humanely killing all of the foster children. Now, I'm assuming an atheist worldview here, so once they are dead it's over. They're orphans so there's no family to grieve. There's no God so there's no eternal suffering. They cease to exist so their pain is gone. By your definition, killing abused foster kids reduces suffering and is therefore morally good. Keeping them alive increases suffering and is morally bad.

Now, we can try to tip the suffering scale to the side of immoral and calculate the collateral suffering that may happen or any other arbitrary factor you want, but the truth is we don't have a Minority Report Suffering Meter that tells us the precise amount of upcoming suffering so it's all just hypothetical guesswork anyways.

Whether you like it or not, I just made the claim that killing foster kids is moral using your definition of moral. Would you agree, under those circumstances, that killing foster kids is moral?

Now before you say that would never happen it already does happen with abortion. We can hash out are fetuses babies, I guess, but I would be willing to limit my definition of "baby' to super late term abortions just to make my point.