Moral Acts

[The Grand Nudger]

I thought you were saying that there could be a single, correct way to measure wellbeing.  Now you're saying there could be several correct methods?

Wasn't that your suggestion up above?  I was agreeing.

 How can it be objective? If you're just arbitrarily picking one, then sure. It's then objective, based on whoever makes that decision. But which is the best? How do you determine how good any of them are?

I'm sorry, this line of questioning seems fractured.  I think that the way(s) we measure the effect of poverty is/are objective, for example.  No single person makes that decision, and an objective decision or conclusion isn't one that a person just makes.....?  The methods and conclusions are constantly reviewed and refined.  IDK if we'll ever have a best, but what does best have to do with it?  

I'm saying that reducing wellbeing to a number is a highly subjective process. I could come up with ways of doing it right now. Hundreds of different ways. How exactly do we decide which are acceptable?

Is there some reason we have to pick one?  If hundreds of studies conclude, for example, that rape is harmful....it might be that one study captures a specific factor better than another study, but the prepoderence of the common conclusion, based upon verifiable evidence, is that it's harmful.  That it's harmful is enough to conclude, objectively...in a moral system based upon human wellbeing, that it's immoral.  

The problem is that saying a way of measuring wellbeing is "correct" implies a specific goal, or set of goals. What are the goals? What is wellbeing? What are we trying to achieve? It's so vague that this really isn't clear.

The goal of every moral system appears to be the wellbeing of it's adherents.  People disagree upon how to best pursue that goal, or what wellbeing is,but the goal itself is fairly uniform.  Similarly, human wellbeing isn't quite so vague and fluid as to allow for rape as an effective way to increase human wellbeing. 

I think we're having a fundamental misunderstanding, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. I was using the idea of "rape being right" to show that the idea of a moral fact is not a coherent concept.

You finding another way to say somehing you've already said does';t establish it any more than the last time.  Why is it not a coherent concept? It may be incorrect, it may be innaccurate, perhaps we possess no moral fact of the matter, perhaps an objective morality is beyond our grasp...but incoherent?

Morality is about deciding how to make decisions, and that involves valuing things in different ways. You also seem entity concerned with the outcome of actions, and the intentions behind them don't seem to matter. To me, morality is much more complicated. So we're probably not even discussing the same thing.

We haven't really discussed intentions, I don't know how you'd know my position on that or what difference it would make in context.  People do bad things with good intentions, and sometimes manage to do good things with bad intentions.  If you intend o save the world by raping someone, ala your previous example..I'd call it an immoral act with good intentions.  There's not much difficulty in separating the issues on that count.  

Again, here's a simple scenario. My child has some weird disease, so that it will die at the age of 15, and will be in a certain amount of pain. It's possible to administer a drug that will reduce the pain by a certain amount, but will reduce the lifespan to 10.

What is the "morally correct" decision? If morality is supposed to be objective, it must be able to answer moral dilemmas. If it can't, it's not morality as found in real life. I would say there is no morally correct decision. It's a matter for debate. If there was a "correct" decision here, it would be of no consequence because people would generally ignore it, as you would do with the rape thing. The correct decision would just be dependent on the method used to work out wellbeing in each case, and different methods would produce different answers. Who picks the method?

Some dilemmas may have no morally correct solutions.  If there is no morally correct solution, it;s not a moral dilemma, it's not a moral anything at all - or..alternatively, you simply have no morally acceptable options in that situation.  That an objective morality might exist does not mean it would be applicable to each and every situation in life.  Hell, not every situation in life is a moral situation.  Now, as to the rest, just because people might ignore an objective moral statemen doesn't make it any less of an objective moral statement.  I do that all the time, as I mentioned before.  The last part keeps cropping up, but no single one of us decided the subject of morality.  It just came out in the wash that morality centers around different takes on human wellbeing, how to pursue it, how not to be the douche that fucks it up, etc. Right and wrong seems to be a list of whats harmful and helpful...no matter how a person conceptualizes it, and if theres -any- objective way to measure what harms and helps..then an objective morality is possible. If there are hundreds of ways...it's not only possible, it's potentially robust.

More robust than any "well, that's just, like, your opinion..man" retort could possibly hope to call into question. Imagine a person fielding that one with regards to some other subject of inquiry with hundreds of avenues of study, all of which coalescing on at least some common thread...like, for example, what I would call the inassailable fact of the harm that rape does to the individual and to society. If that's not enough to make the immorality of rape a moral fact of the matter, what could be? Repeat the question with any fact of any other matter.