[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[The Grand Nudger]

I just lost an edit to my previous post, but let me see if I can recreate it.

Several points:

1) The fact that people can commit errors of moral reasoning doesn't in any sense imply that there is a truth underneath the errors.  The errors could rest on a solid foundation or no foundation at all.  You need to talk about what's true, not what's false.

Moral failure and moral disagreement also fail to imply that we aren't reasoning.  That we're left adrift with only our intuition to guide us.

2) Nudger and I have discussed this before.  His suggestion was that unnecessary harm was immoral.  At which point I asked him to objectively define harm, and he substituted damage.  Unfortunately this doesn't work as there is damage that is not harm.  I damage my toenails by cutting them, and my hair likewise by cutting it, but there has never been any harm resulting.  The problem is that harm is a specific type of damage.  It's damage with something extra.  And I believe that something extra is personal preference or value.  Nobody cares that the lamb is eaten by the lion, so the damage to the lamb has no moral significance.  People do care if you eat them because they value staying alive, and that creates the concept of harm.  As I pointed out to Nudger last time, there are some people who would like to be dead, so killing them isn't harm.  

Here again I think that there are probably great objections to harm based moral systems, but whether cutting your toe nails is meaningful or relevant damage to moral systems probably isn't one of them.  I personally don't see the difference between necessary harm and harm - myself..it''s just something I like to include as it's a common notion.

I'd call doing bad for a good reason - doing bad.  

3)   I have a friend who is a consequentialist and would assert like Nudger has that harm is objective.  I also know people that agree with me that harm is a subjective measure.  These disagreements are common and are well known, so anybody that's telling you it's definitely objective is likely blowing smoke up your ass.  And even people who agree that harm is objective can't agree on some basics.  Consequentialists like my friend assert that the morality of an act depends only on the actual consequences, and intentions are irrelevant.  So, in his view, someone who accidentally kills someone has acted worse than someone who tries to kill someone but fails.  Others argue the reverse.  At the end of the day, one thing is clear.  People who are arguing the point are arguing a point of view, not some readily recognizable true fact.  And mere points of view won't feed the bulldog.

People who argue that 2 and 2 is 4 are also arguing a point of view.  One which isn't readily obvious to a great many small versions of ourselves.  Moral disagreement does not imply or prove moral subjectivity.  There will be moral disagreements regardless of whether there are or aren't any moral facts of any matter. No matter how many examples of moral disagreement we care to dredge up, the objection will always be a formal logical fallacy.

That being said, the consequentialist above isn't described as having any disagreement with moral objectivity.