[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[Angrboda]

If you want to peek at what I am arguing, consider Munchausen's Trilemma.  Words or concepts can acquire their meaning in one of three ways.  First, defined in terms of themselves, either directly, or indirectly, through a circular path.  Second, a word can rest upon an infinite regression of sub-definitions, which rest upon more sub-definitions, ad infinitum.  What's generally concluded is that both of these paths are vacuous.  The words don't in any real sense end with a definition.  The third leg of the trilemma is that definitions, concepts or whatever terminate in an indisputably basic fact.  Basic facts are known through apprehension, or intuitively.  You can't define what would constitute a basic fact, as that would lead to another iteration of the trilemma.  So the challenge for those who would argue that morals have an objective foundation is to confront an equivalent trilemma for morals and show either that there is a fourth option that hasn't been acknowledged, or that  there are basic, indisputable beliefs about morals that are objectively true.  Failing to do either is just wasting my time.

IMO this is too skeptical. Math and science can't survive this sort of skepticism. So why require moral realism to pass this test? Or... put a better way... since it is reasonable to assume math and science produce truth statements, isn't it unreasonable to apply a brand of skepticism that renders math and science fictions to moral realism?

There's plenty of debate as to whether mathematical objects are real or not. When you say that mathematics can't survive this sort of skepticism, you are implying that math does or should survive such skepticism when the reality is that there is considerable disagreement as to whether it does. Science is on a little different footing because it is based upon experience. Perception is a kind of intuition, but it is different in that the consensus is that our experience is caused by the existence of things independent of us, that something real is the cause of our experience (excluding certain religious positions for simplicity). When you show an apple to two people, both experience seeing a colored object in a way that immediately convinces them the object exists. Morals aren't experienced this way and are closer to mathematics in that regard. You show two people two men kissing. One person perceives nothing additional. The other person perceives that what he is seeing is immoral. That's not at all like the case of two apples, or the case like mathematics in which composites are built from simpler primitives which consensus experience / apprehension can be agreed upon. When something is supposed to be real, yet some people perceive it and others do not, I don't think the skepticism is unreasonable.

I also know people that agree with me that harm is a subjective measure.

Seeing the table in front of you is a subjective experience. That doesn't mean the table isn't real.

Causing someone pain has physically provable and observable consequences. If we (in some way... like being rational and sensible) can determine that interpersonally destructive behavior is wrong, the problem isn't that pain, suffering, or harm is subjective. It could theoretically be measured by a neuroscientist. It *IS* an objective phenomenon.

The problem is: how do we know pain, suffering, harm are bad. "We know it intuitively" is an okay answer... dissatisfying as it is. Think about holding your hand on a hot stove. If you could use one word to describe it-- either "good" or "bad"-- which would you chose? To me, the ONLY thing that could make holding your hand on a stove "good" would be like --- you win a million dollars if you can hold your hand on the stove for a minute-- like a game show or something.

But just a hand on a stove? Seems essentially bad to me...

You're confusing bad in the moral sense with non-moral senses of bad. It would be bad for me to put my hand on a hot stove, but it wouldn't be bad in the sense of being immoral. The problem comes in with whether what a person wants is relevant as to whether harm has been done. If I go in for surgery, and I experience pain during the surgery, that doesn't mean the surgeon harmed me in any way that is morally relevant. Let's say that my father is dying of cancer and is in terrible pain all the time and wants the doctors to end his life. So I sneak into his room one night and smother him with a pillow. Unbeknownst to me, in the darkness I had mistaken my father's roomate for my father and killed a man who was only in the hospital for gall bladder surgery. Does it make a difference to the morality of my killing that I killed him instead of my father? I think it does. Yet the difference in this case is the subjective wants and desires of the victim.