Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

Let's say one of the facts of the observer (or the imaginer) is that they personally don't feel any shame, in fact, don't think it's wrong for them to do this at all.   Where does the badness come from then, or is it there at all?

It's an imposition of others-- either a definition of the word "bad," or an attempt by others to elicit feelings by manipulation.

Take in case the abortion issue. Is abortion "bad?" It is a kind of Shrodinger's cat-- it is both bad and not-bad (or maybe even good) until the question is brought into resolution by asking a particular individual. For example, if you were a biologist watching in horror as the greedy humans you mentioned destroy our rivers and oceans, you might be tempted to go full-on 12 Monkeys and release a virus that made most of the species infertile. In that case, you might see abortion, miscarriage, murder and sterility as tremendous goods.

The rivers, themselves, are in danger.  If whatever position you hold on some other thing requires you to argue counterfactually for rhetorical effect here, I worry for that other position.  Isn't it simpler to concede that things can be in danger without that being an issue of moral import in and of itself?  That, like your own ideas about beating a man in a coma..any moral import comes from how and by what the beating is delivered?  If a moral agent like us is altering the flow and capturing the headwaters and failing to prevent evaporation as a consequence of poorly implemented irrigation plans - then we might say that the danger a river is in is an item of moral import.  If a mountain rises up and creates a rain shadow...not so much.

This is why context is important. In the context of the majority view of the human species, foulness of vital necessities is bad-- river water, air and so on. Very, VERY few would argue otherwise. But is it intrinsically bad? No-- only in that context, or that of other organisms who depend on the same resources for their health and survival.

What about an organism that found our water and atmosphere intolerable? Presumably it would recoil in horror, then get to the task of removing all the icky organic organisms, and reconstituting oceans and air to its own "good."