Why be good?

[henryp]

The faulty assumption here, is that other humans being harmed is bad.

But that's not an assumption, it's a direct consequence of the fact that morality requires minds to apprehend it, and minds of sufficient complexity to do so, in all our experience, require human meat bodies to exist. If you want a system of morality you need thinking agents capable of considering it, and so therefore their survival is paramount to maintaining that system.

Also though, what else would you consider morality? Absent references to moral actors and what directly impacts them, what would you consider moral? And in what way is morality meaningful at all, if it either does not deal with moral actors, or deals with them in such a way that things they can only ever interpret as bad are somehow good?

What we'd do in your line of thinking, which I think starts out right, is determine what we need to do to assure we don't feel pain (if we care about that).  If the best way is to form a global team human with a bunch of rules that say 'no hurting' eachother, then so be it.  But that's fairly impractical, inneffective, and certainly not the only path.

As we've seen through out history, a popular solution is to amass a bunch of power to protect yourselves from others being able to hurt you.  Another is to form small groups that takes care of themselves.  

So what we're talking about here with your reality based system isn't really related to morality.  It's just self-preservation.  Because from the actual framework, being a brutal dictator is just as legit a solution as being a hippy in a commune or being a psychopath mass murderer who doesn't view his own death as a particular problem.

I'm sorry, what? Being a brutal dictator doesn't involve causing people pain? Who is the dictator being brutal to, then? And if it's just, like, rocks and stuff, then where is the disparity that shows my moral system ends up with people being hurt?

1) I may have missed some of the context that says we HAVE to have morality.  I was just perusing some of the later posts. 

I'm looking at things from your only absolute'ish statement, that my experiencing pain is undesirable to myself, and I want to avoid it.  From that starting point, we're not developing 'morality,' as much as looking for a solution to the problem.  

I think the logical way forward would be looking at a solution as a practicality rather than establishing a fictional morality.  With my goal of preventing my own pain, one way to go about that is a system where we all prevent eachothers pain.  Ironically, by threatening pain upon those who cause others pain.  But that's not really morality, that's the rule of law.  The difference being that you are motivated by avoiding punishment rather than caring whether others experience pain.  

So, I guess personally, I think the idea of morality is nonsensical.  
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2) I was proceeding under the idea of the goal being avoiding pain for myself.  Again, you haven't really said why we have to care about others.  You say it's because that's the only way to establish morality, but there's nothing saying morality has to exist.