Evil

[Mudhammam]

You agree that what morality actually is gets discussed a lot and no one can agree exactly what is important within it, and to what extent. To say it is objective is to suggest there is a "right answer". But in what way is it right?

In the way that it is true. The culture that ISIS, for an obvious example, wishes to impose - a theistic morality by the way - is inferior to any of those that does not treat its "enemies" (who, for the most part, are only viewed as such due to petty theological disputes), or adulterers, or homosexuals, or freethinkers, etc., in the most cruel and barbaric manner, stripping their neighbors of all human dignity and inflicting rape, human trafficking, death by crucifixion, beheading, stoning, etc. To say that "judgment of these actions as morally wrong and worthy of repercussion is a right judgment" is to say that the preceding statement is actually, i.e. factually true - that these are crimes and that these people ought to be confronted and stopped, regardless of the spinelessness and moral confusion of some on the left.

I wonder if you are thinking of objective morality being the final limit of what our human experience will approach. This however still doesn't make it "right". I have no idea what you mean by "right".

I'm not sure what you mean by the final limit but if you mean something like a peak in happiness, creativity, productivity, etc., then I do not know how one could deny it to be right to say that this would be good - or that the opposite states (misery, starvation, stagnation, etc.) are neither better nor worse.

If morality is objective, you could somehow measure every interaction in the universe and give it a "morality rating". But what would this mean? How can you rate something until you've said what the standard is? I hold that morality is a judgement of an action, not an objective measurement such as velocity.

Whenever you say racism is wrong or that some act or value system is better than another, you're using a sort of "moral rating"; in terms of knowledge of the standard, it's not as if I'm claiming that we can know what the Good actually is apart from its apparent (and vague) reflection in rational thought and action - but so what? Why does one need to apprehend the whole in order to make a distinction between its parts, or have in view the object directly to grasp its effects?

You talked before about morality being "what is expected". This requires someone to do the "expecting". Is this a human? If so, why? What about a vastly more intelligent alien, who might expect us to act in a totally different way? Expectation is entirely subjective, even once a vague goal such as "wellbeing is good, harm is bad" has been laid out. And then, wellbeing of what? Humans? Animals? Plants? Rocks? We have no idea what wellbeing means to rocks, if it means anything. But this alien race might do, and so expect a totally different set of actions from us, even with our same goal.

I don't think reason is subjective, so, to the extent that any being possesses reason, and uses it rightly, I don't think there will be disagreement about what constitutes value and ought to be treated as possessing such. It's our inability to know all of the facts, and to reason infallibly, that causes most disagreements. As Socrates allegedly said, I think in much truth, "There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance." You even answer that question yourself here:

This comes back to knowledge. We may be acting the best way we could be expected to with our knowledge, but it's still not the "most moral" because we lack vital information.

Gonna do that fucking video soon

Looking forward to it! :-)