practical behavior that supports personal or collectively held values in situations where there may be critical consequences (at least more critical than flavor choice).

my main objection is i can't grasp the concept of right and wrong existing at all without referencing an exact context. perhaps just my mental shortcoming, but the notion seems completely nonsensical to me. i'm unable to attach any meaning to it. like 2 + 2 = red

i'm also skeptical of your personal view because i think that it would be impossible to build a system from ANY moral axioms, objective or otherwise, that wasn't mostly gray area. our actions, and thier context and consequences are all fluid. how can attached moral judgements be binary for ANY action? is there always a tipping point/line in the sand? it's like at what exact percentage of certainty does an atheist/agnostic become a theist?

a weighted answer with objectively built in tipping point?

i guess we should kill about half the people on earth then. murder the chinese!

So men should rape as many women as they can so we can have as many births as possible?

I've only skimmed this thread but I'd just like to say that you don't need to be a moral objectivist of any sort to retain the ability to reason logically and validly about moral issues. Relativism only entails that any moral argument will contain in its premises some statement of preference. You can reason objectively about morality with people who accept some or all of your premises. People who do not accept these premises - people whom you might call "evil" or "immoral" - are not wrong or mistaken about something in the way that, e.g. flat-earthers are. They are simply our enemies.

Agree... agree... agree... wait, what?

This. EVERY action is in a grey area. Words like 'right' and 'wrong' don't have much significance because the meaning of words are just as fluid as actions - in this thread alone we've had several quite different definitions of morality or what constitutes 'moral' behaviour'.

Like saying: "I had AQo and this guy went all in - was I right in folding?" Virtually meaningless without context

Don't take this as overly nitpicky - I genuinely dont understand..

This seems to include choice of career (for example). It's not really a moral question is it? (Obviously it can be if you're tossing up between aid worker and hitman, but in general).
I dont think right or wrong is divorced from context. I've been trying to make that clear in the 'stealing for fun' vs 'stealing to feed starving kids'.
I think it is mostly gray areas. This was what I meant above about moral vs ethical questions (with the caveat that the jargon as I use it may well be bunnyspecific).

Moral questions are things like "Should I kill an innocent" (with no other contradictory moral imperative) - and have yes/no answers. The actual, difficult choices we face are ethical ones - "Should I lie to prevent assault?" for example.

When many black/white questions impinge on a situation it is necessarily gray in my view and we are very unlikely to consistently hit on the correct answer. Nonetheless, we are still faced with binary choices even in these gray situations:

"Do we pull the trigger or not?"
"Do we point to where the innocent escapee is hiding or not?"
"Do we buy the expensive, efficient car or the cheap, environmentally unfriendly one?"

These all have contexts and multiple, competing principles at work. Moral objectivism doesnt make any of these things easier - nor does it guarantee we'll be able to work out the right answer. The sole claim is that, in two morally identical hypothetical situations where one guy pulls the trigger and one doesnt - someone is behaving morally and someone isnt.

Because actions can be binary. We either run into the burning building or we dont. If we dont, we either run for a hose or we dont. If we dont, we either phone the fire brigade or we dont. Etcetera.
As an aside, I was a very uncertain theist, so I dont accept that the scale is one of certainty.
An objectively correct one. It's not built in, because we may well make different choices from one another without knowing who is correct.

I agree. I am not suggesting there is no context - merely that when that context is given, the answer is objectively correct or not. (Like your poker example - if you're pretty sure the guy hit his flush then yes, it is right to fold).

Pretty much my response too.

The point is that a meta-ethical relativism does not imply some kind of a live-and-let-live to-each-his-own moral slackage. People with irreconcilable moral preferences (if they are not hypocrites) will inevitably meet in some kind of conflict. That is just a fact of life. I mean if someone disagrees with you about a moral premise as fundamental as "you should not cause suffering to sentient beings needlessly," what else would you call him but your enemy? If you do not act to thwart his moral preferences, you are acting incongruously with your own.

Agree with most of the above Hail Eris, although I don't think it makes me a hypocrite that I'm not picking fights in the street and writing letters to the Government because we have 'irreconciliable moral preferences'. In fact, as a relativist it would possibly be more hypocritical to get into conflicts (except intelligent discussions :P) about subjects I believe to be open to interpretation.

Relativism is just a theory about the semantic content of moral statements. It does not recommend or prohibit any course of action. Anyway, some moral preferences are clearly more strongly held than others. There are some that I would enter a conflict to defend and others that I would not. In any case the question of truth does not enter into it.

This is very close to my position too (although I'm a moral objectivist). Ultimately, I dont think the metaphysics of morality is terribly important in terms of what we actually do to pursue enacting the moral code we believe should be adhered to.

I struggle to understand a subjectivist in favor of punishment (as opposed to deterrence) - since by assumption the criminal's moral code is no less privileged than the judge's. Nonetheless, I daresay there's some justification somewhere (and the subjectivist can always shrug and say 'that's what I believe, whatareyougoingtodoaboutit?')

Firstly, the Greek Stoics were the first to put forth arguments against slavery. They advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings, and consistently critiqued slavery as against the law of nature. So Bunny, how exactly would you define the people of Ancient Greece as being more enslaved than the people of Ancient Egypt?
Bringing up Hitler is largely missing the point. 5% of the human population feel no empathy at all, and would largely be categorized as sociopaths or psychotics. They are incapable of behaving in a manner that - facilitates the survival of the species/that we consider moral - due to a lack of oxytocin production in their brain and their blood. Oxytocin is the molecule responsible for a predisposition toward empathetic/moral behaviours. Now if there is any candidate in our history that would fall within this 5% - Hitler and his delusional tendencies would be at the top of that list, rendering your example down to an utterly inapplicable attack on 'evolutionary reasoning'.

Critics since the 18th century have argued that slavery tends to ****** technological advancement, since the focus is on increasing the number of slaves doing simple tasks rather than upgrading the efficiency of labour. Because of this, theoretical knowledge and learning in Greece—and later in Rome—was not applied to ease physical labour or improve manufacturing. (http://web.archive.org/web/200804231...ticleId=223811).
Slavery eventually, on a large scale, becomes uneconomic because slaves have children; they need to be maintained and brought up for (say) 12 years before they yield an income to the slave-owner; also some will die late in childhood and that represents a dead loss to the business; also old slaves are non-productive but no one in European or American societies came to the extent of simply murdering them.

Additionally, the development of technology, especially after about 1720, rendered slavery increasingly uneconomic; the industrial revolution in Europe and America created machines that were far more effective than slaves in working round the clock, without illness, without complaint or possible insurrection, and requiring no caring or loss of conscience for religious folks.

Adam Smith also made the argument that free labor was economically better than slave labor, and argued further that slavery in Europe ended during the Middle Ages, and only then after both the church and state were separate, independent and strong institutions, that it is nearly impossible to end slavery in a free, democratic and republican forms of governments since many of its legislators or political figures were slave owners, and would not punish themselves, and that slaves would be better able to gain their freedom when there was centralized government, or a central authority like a king or the church.
You've grossly misinterpreted and misrepresented my claim here. I never meant to imply that freedom from slavery is the only or main cause of societal and technological development, but that it simply "contributes" to the survival of the species in the long term, more so than it inhibits it - via contributions to societal advancement and technological development, which outweigh the drawbacks.
Slaves also aren't needed because slavery tends to ****** technological development. Things aren't so black and white as you make them out to be. There are other factors that contribute to the reasons for abolishing slavery.
Incorrect. Morally speaking (as by my definition of morality), slavery inhibits, more so than contributes to technological advancement. Technological advancement enhances our chances of survival in the long term, thus making slavery an immoral behaviour.
I never said it did, I talked about a specific type of infanticide that relates to specific mutations like mental ******ation. I think that what you're purposely ignoring here is that a unique aspect of human infanticide is that selective killing of children is primarily based on gender, and not on specific mutations like 'mental ******ation', once again rendering your example moot. Additionally, you're use of the words 'extremely common' is grossly inaccurate with describing the commonality of infanticide - within any given population of a particular species. Only in fish is it relatively common, and even then, to use the word 'extremely' in describing this commonality would be incredibly inaccurate.
You're oversimplifying it, and largely missing the point. Once we have an overpopulated planet, all that it will do to our moral predispositions is that it will make us more competitive - as resource constraints will be greater. Whether this competitiveness will become so intense as to the degree of life or death/war between countries for resources - I do not know.
Rape and violent behaviour erodes trust and altruism within any given society. This means that the society develops slower (as there are fewer transactions between agents) and this means that technology develops slower, ultimately meaning that - in the long term - our chances of survival as a collective is reduced. So no, we shouldn't rape as many women as we can.

if it the decision pertains to values it can be.

i meant context that includes specific values. to put it another way i can't imagine how right or wrong can have any meaning without referencing values of some kind.

again this is what i don't get. the bare statement is meaningless to me. the situation it describes CAN'T EXIST divorced from other details. "should I" necessarily references some reason external to the statement. if the answer is no, logically there has to be an unspecified reason pertaining to values or goals or the will of god or whatever. the concept of morality as a standalone *thing* that attaches to specific actions just seems crazy to me. sorry

but the motives and context of our actions almost never are. at the extremes it can certainly become a matter of objective practicality (you could say objectively true for humans). killing a million productive scientists to save the life of one innocent is clearly wrong. killing a convicted murderer to save the life of a million productive scientists is clearly right (IMO, maybe you disagree that we can know this objectively). but then you have an unbroken fluid scale of possibilities in between. how does an objective morality - that exists even if human murderers and scientists don't - able to draw the line between what's right and wrong on the scale?

i never got that either : )

^^ Veeddzz is a smart ****in dood.

no you're oversimplifying it. i'm just mocking it. no offense

I was responding to this claim by you:
and pointing out that there was more slavery in Greece than in Egypt. Hardly anyone was a citizen in ancient greece and those that were nearly all owned slaves.

If your argument (that societies with more slaves advance more slowly, therefore slavery is immoral) is correct, then if the facts are actually reversed it would follow that abolishing slavery would be immoral.

Frankly I've never seen how all this evolutionary morality talk is anything but the naturalistic fallacy writ large. Sorry but I fail to see how the survival of the species is an a priori good. There are even people who argue that it is bad. You can describe the evolutionary processes that led to the development of moral cognition till you're blue in the face but you're not going to get truth values for moral statements out of it.

Agreed.

I am not a retributionist, but this is just a matter of picking sides. You will have certain moral intuitions and principles, however derived, and whichever side is most congruent with them will be the "privileged" side. The issue is not which side has access to the truth but rather which side shares your vision of the good.

I don't see how some other meta-ethical position will give you a better answer. If you ask a moral objectivist why he believes some people deserve to suffer, what justification can he really give you? We're getting pretty close to axioms.

What would such an argument look like?

Yeah, I feel struck dumb that VeeDDzz`can find his own arguments convincing.

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1902
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunta...ction_Movement
I do not endorse these positions (but the Benatar essay is well argued and thought provoking and worth a read).

Perhaps I am missing something here, but aside from VHMET, (which I don't take very seriously, personally) I dont see anti-natilsm or Benetar asserting anything like "the species should not survive".

Anti-natalists think human life is a net bad, so naturally they would prefer extinction, just not for the same reasons as the tree-huggers.