(April 19, 2017 at 6:26 pm)Crunchy Wrote:(April 19, 2017 at 5:13 pm)mh.brewer Wrote: Right or wrong in relation to a human thought or action. Are you being purposefully obtuse?No, are you?
Thought or action concerning what? Are we talking about your thoughts on Geography? The action of swimming? No, when discussing morality, we are talking about what is good for people. If you can understand that, then you may understand the rest of the post.
The problem with this post of yours is that while geography or swimming are objective facts -- South America is, or a person is or is not drowning -- you cannot define a single act of man in the same stark terms.
Let us take killing, for this discussion. I think you and I would agree that killing another human being -- or even another nonhuman animal, perhaps -- is a bad thing. Let's stick to humans, though. Killing humans is bad; we agree that it is immoral, right?
Now, if that human is coming at you with a butcher-knife with obvious aggressive intent, you may well respond with force, and it may so happen that your forceful response results in his death.
Is that the same as you shooting him from your vantage point in a high-rise building? Is that the same as you deciding to save Mary Louise in a shipwreck even though you know it means he will die? Is that the same as you hiring an assassin to kill him?
Of course not is the answer to all those questions. Killing, in itself, may or may not always be wrong. But in either case, the context and circumstances inform the judgement. And that is inherently subjective.
As I said earlier, even a claim of moral objectivity is based on subjective premises. Morality is much more nuanced than you seem to think.
