Isn't it that some players first hear of the nash eq. and think "This isn't useful to me because my villains don't the Nash strategy?!"

I hear this a lot from certain players.

I think we should start from observing the fact that in the example you were hoping to set up there is no moral foundation. Other than a few answers that I am suggesting are partially conditioned and not free to explore the example you set up.

But if we can understand and agree that there is no moral foundation, that in itself may inspire certain understanding.

But we have to see it first for what it is, like the nash eq., without saying its not useful therefore kill or be killed.

We should make room at least for the possibility of no moral foundation if thats what the example suggests.

If we clearly see that, we might be able to make specific and intelligent extrapolations, like game theory does with eq.

Yeah, this.

The term 'objective' leads to a lot of confusion imo. Sometimes it is used in the sense of "mind-independent" and there doesn't seem to be any way there could be a mind-independent morality (even a theistic morality is dependent on the mind of god), but sometimes it is used to mean something like "non-arbitrary" which is much easier to defend.

However, I notice that you seem to think that a requirement of an 'objective' morality is that every possible person will accept it. This requirement would make subjective a lot of the things we call objective facts - the Earth being more than 10,000 years old, for example.

Anyway, my take on it is that for any 'ought' statement in any context (engineering, medicine, game theory, car maintenance, morality) we can logically derive it from a combination of some other basic 'ought' statement and one or more 'is' statements. E.g.

Car Maintenance
P1) I ought to keep my car in working order
P2) My car is low on gas
C1) Therefore I ought to put gas in my car

Game Theory
P1) I ought to maximise my payoffs
P2) I am playing non-iterative Prisoners Dilemma
C1) Therefore I ought to defect

Health
P1) I ought to avoid getting sick
P2) These berries are poisonous
C1) Therefore I ought not eat the berries

Morality
P1) I ought not cause another person to suffer
P2) Killing this chap will cause him to suffer
C1) Therefore I ought not kill him

None of these examples is mind-independent, but really only one of them gets attacked as non-objective. It is common for people to insist that moral oughts must be, or derive from, a fully fundamental and self-evident set of axioms. I think this is a double-standard. No-one worries about whether they are intellectually justified in being a game theory realist. Of course, it is interesting and likely productive to question the underlying assumptions for any of these examples, but the universal problem of skeptical regress should not be treated as fatal to one example and not to the others.

It does confuse you because you are using the definition used in philosophy. As you are aware words are given different definitions in philosophy. It's wrong to use those definitions which are specific to philosophy in ordinary discussions like this where everyone else is using the everyday definition.

In philosophy a proposition is objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent". That's not so for the rest of us because we are using the usual dictionary definition of "objective" ie uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices or similar.

Again, I have to return the other point I made. If you remove all reasons for morality, you will not find reasons for morality. I know you are asking questions, but if you assess your own questions more carefully you will find that they are dangerously close to becoming arguments. Also humans are a fairly utilitarian species, we don't really saddle ourselves with unnecessary morality unless we can afford it. Few people cling to dresscodes when these threaten their lives, but it takes a very rare person to "kill for utility" outside groups. This tells me that dresscodes are likely much less useful than rules against killing.

Even if we remove empathy, it would be extremely stupid to kill a fellow survivor when stranded on a lone island. I did survival exercises in the military, and being more than one greatly increases your chances of success.

But I don't think it makes sense to remove empathy. I think empathy and utility go hand in hand. We are a social species. We can't even grow to age without the help of others. Without the group we would not exist. Morals are the glue that binds us together... without morals, no group and thus ultimately without morals -> no humans. Sure, ant-colonies work... but they are far more effective per energy-resource than we are.

So, I figured that it might be worth seeing what Cwocwoc posted, given that morality is his favourite subject. The chance of him saying something intelligent or on topic must surely be higher than usual.

Swing and a miss.

Me: "Objective" can cause confusion because there are two different senses of the word.
Cwocwoc: You are confused because there are two different senses of the word.

Pillock. Back to Ignore.

Not two "senses" but two very distnct and different meanings. It's true of lots of words used in philosophy (as well you know). This is necessary in order to make philosophy a rigorous academic pursuit.

Thanks very much, I really like this, and you've explained it well. I still see one small problem in your example though. Your first 3 examples could all be classified as "selfish" in that they are sort of utilitarian toward the self first and foremost. I ought to keep my car in working order. Why? Because if I don't, my life will be more difficult. Same for maximizing my payoffs and preventing myself from becoming sick by eating the wrong berries. But the same argument cannot necessarily be made for "ought not make another person suffer". The question in my mind is still "why should we care if someone else suffers?" I realize this sounds savage, mind you, but I'm only posing this question to be the devil's advocate.

death is suffering then? or freedom from suffering (starving/cold etc)?

I see what you're saying....sort of. I mean, yeah, I'm trying to remove reasons for morality to see if there remains a reason that is an irremovable axiom. It seems like utilitarianism isn't a bad place to start in most situations, like the example of your military experience, and that makes total sense. I guess that also means that my island was sort of a bad example, because killing the other person would often not be the most utilitarian solution. Still, isn't it sort of dangerous to base our reasons for not killing upon utilitarianism? If we consider self-utility as separate from group-utility for the sake of experiment, is it not plausible to say that if the other person cannot help us in any capacity, and is thus useless to our self-utility, does there remain a reason not to kill him?

A quick hypothetical example that comes to mind would be like a very rich and powerful, totalitarian king who knows for certain that if he kills one of his peasants (and only 1) just for the hell of it, he will not be negatively affected in any way, not in the present or the future. He knows that his victim will be considered to have gone missing, and nobody will know what happened. He also knows that the drop in agricultural (or what have you) production from the loss of one peasant will be tiny, especially relative to the wealth that the king already enjoys. What good reason does the king have not to kill that peasant? And before anyone says it, it's safe to say that this king is not empathetic toward his peasants.

haha well that's interesting. I think I'd say that death = suffering though yeah. I sort of used death/suffering interchangeably, but you're right it's not exactly the same thing.

Let's take it to the extreme:

A group of two being stranded on an island, with food being not the immediate problem, and one person being injured to the point of coma. In addition to the coma, he's also devoid of all limbs (prospects of healing mean no increase in utility) and he's a 12yr old millionaire's brat (no prospect of intellectual stimulation/chance of survival-increasing wits). There is no conceivable objective benefit for the other survivor to keep the other person alive and tended for (to the extend that care is needed); the necessary care, however, constitutes a drainage of ressources.

Edit to add: In your example, the King may not have any valid reason for not killing the peasant, however, he apparently doesn't really have a reason either. So just upholding his "behaviouristic default" of not killing people at random might be a benefit.

Having missed the point completely the real pillock Zumby gets abusive and runs away.

I could easily change the examples to the second person in order to move these from selfish to altruistic e.g. change the health example to the perspective of a doctor. However, this wouldn't really cut to the heart of your objection so I'll move on having noted it:

Well I think we can use the same sort of structure as the previous examples. We can justify a "[therefore] I ought not make someone else suffer" by deriving it from some other desire. I think what you are asking for is a foundationalist justification: some sort of unassailable axiom from which the rest of our moral oughts can be derived. I am skeptical that such a foundation exists.

But as I said earlier, this "why" regress is just as much of a problem for more mundane forms of normativity, and therefore doesn't seem like a fatal objection. To see this more clearly, consider again your desert island. You are framing the question in terms of finding a (moral) reason not to kill your companion so that you might live. But this is begging the question by presuming that there is already a justification for the idea that one ought to preserve one's own life.

I think sometimes death is an end to suffering. Death for the middle class might be suffering.

Also because I don't think science has touched the afterlife, its an assumption to suggest death is suffering.

I think your question and example eventually points that out, if we don't nit pick the setup.

The issue is when worry the belief that death isn't suffering leads to murder and suicide. I think the opposite is true.

Well, I take it one step further. I say that without empathy we wouldn't have this utility. It is not "hen and egg", its an omelet of the constituent parts that has ultimately made us what we think of as human.

No king knows this, so I don't think your posed question makes much sense. That being said, there hasn't been a shortage of mad tyrants through the years.

I don't really think you can "disprove" moral standards by showing situations where people seemingly lack them however... the term itself exists because of that distinction. If everybody were seen as morally just towards eachother, a debate on morals would be be like discussing how nice it is to not be dead.