Objective morality as a proper basic belief

[The Grand Nudger]

He was trying to keep his wife from harm.  Would that be moral under your axiomatic basis of harm? 
Can you please explain in the example where the harm or intention to harm was to meet your basis?

If he was trying to keep his wife from harm he wouldn't be cheating on her.  Kind of basic stuff buddy.  Deceit is a dead give away that a person knows what they're doing is harmful, in addition to being yet another vector of harm in and of itself. That you have to ask suggests that your moral agency is......lacking.

The question is whether a moral "fact" exists "out there" somewhere, like your example sign. I would say not. Rather, a given act has likely and also potentially unexpected / unknowable consequences that we have an imperfect ability to predict.

Dos our imperfect ability to predict the future change that, in the present, the act of rape is harmful?  

Torturing innocents for no particular reason is a highly contrived scenario that is unlikely to even happen, but if it did, it cuts so sharply to the needs of society that almost no one would imagine a possible excuse or net benefit and I can't imagine anyone ending up regretting stopping the torture for any likely reason. I mean, if the child grew up to be another Hitler, maybe, but this is stretching.

Even then you'd just be doing some bad thing x to prevent some future bad thing y.  It's a contrived scenario, sure, but we use contrived scenarios to show in stark contrast how principle plays out.  In practice most moral decisions are no more or less difficult than that contrived scenario, honestly.  The more difficult ones, however, can still be assessed...it;s difficult to imagine how we would successfully do so in the absence of some objective schema.  It would be an endless round of "well, I feel this, I feel that, a spirit said x, a spirit said y".

Back here in the real world where moral conundrums are more prosaic and hazy and our natural impulses are more unhelpful, I don't think there are signs on the horizon that will resolve when we get there. A better metaphor is that there's a foggy landscape that we are unsure of until we're past it and we can tell what it was like by the mud splatters on the car, the damage to the suspension, the dings on the body. Or the lack thereof.

Sure, past experience is helpful, I commented on that in another thread.  We create and play with moral hypotheticals now when we have time to consider them and file away answers to difficult questions for later use, when time is short or when or moral agency is compromised.

As a society we have the collective input of various actors to say, don't go down this particular road because beyond the likely consequences to you personally, which would normally be your personal problem, it will cause these various problems for us collectively. That's all morality is.

I think it's a bit more than that.  

Once upon a time we had different ideas such as that certain sexual activities were inherently harmful or that slavery was acceptable. Our understanding evolved and we changed. Someone a hundred years ago might have felt that a woman showing leg or someone enjoying jazz music was "clearly" a harm and would undermine society. Today we have evolved our understanding of these things. All of this sounds pretty subjective to me, but the subjectivity is beside the point.

Yes, they might have felt that, but could they objectively demonstrate it to be so?  This is the difference between a subjective and an objective morality.  We didn;t -just stop- or even evolve, in any meaningful sense..away from feeling that way, people worked hard at it, breaking barriers and removing objections.  They had no prior experience from which to draw upon, all prior experience conformed to the "woman showing leg bad" school of thought - and yet here we are. We posess a compelling moral argument based upon objective metrics, and this has lead us (or..at least, some of us) to repudiate those ignorant moral propositions of the past and call them for what they always were. Immorality masquerading as virtue. Showing leg doesn;t make the volcano god angry, jazz doesn't turn women into lustful race traitors.

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The man cheating on his wife is keeping her from harm.  That's an interesting assessment.  

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Reminds me of a co-worker of mine from a few years ago; he said if he didn't smoke, the rest of us would all be suffering for it. So in spite of that habit being harmful to himself and the rest of us, apparently he was sparing us a worse fate. But I'm not sure if the reasoning behind that is the same as this...

In that there -was- no reasoning behind either your coworkers claim or RR's post....they're -exactly- the same.