Quote from: abitpeckish on May 19, 2013, 03:30 pm1. Good/Correct: The absolute maximum amount of well-being for all conscious beings.2. Bad/Wrong: The absolute maximum amount of suffering for all conscious beings.I could not agree with you more; the details are arguable, but based solely on this point I would not only vote for you for president, I would go so far as to run your goddamn campaign and rig the election if necessary to get you into office. ... Yes, well, what can I say; "morality is relative?" :PQuoteThe bar you are setting for objective morality cannot be cleared by ANY field of science. Your method can be used to demolish the "right"-ness of anything, really, and yet I don't think you would find it reasonable to apply it to medicine. Why? You mention "radically different" outcomes. The outcome is the point, and "putting it aside" is to remove all meaning from the question at hand. It's how we understand which ideas are better or worse than others. So yeah, Hitler may have been moral "by his own standards", but we can reasonably know that his morals were dramatically, horrifyingly wrong.You make an excellent point, you really do. In fact this very point has been like a vice crushing my soul at every turn my entire life: what I desire -- some sort of metaphysical purpose or reason or "divinity" if you will -- not only doesn't exist, it outright cannot exist. We simply "are"; and then one day we "are not." Anything further is an attribution lent by our fundamental mechanism of understanding. Hence, "subjective."I agree with you completely. Yet I don't see how the majority of the race being biologically "wired" to appreciate one end more than another makes the pursuit of that end any less subjective. A sadist that made all life on earth suffer unimaginable agony until we all expired for his/her amusement would be just as moral, as far as I'm concerned; I'm quite glad that most people don't feel that's desirable, but I'm still not seeing how the fact that our biology is composed of the same matter as that which the rest of the universe is, makes the more popular composition -- namely that joy is good and pain is bad -- better than the alternative? (is that a run on sentence? If it isn't, it probably should be, hah)I guess in short what I'm getting at is that I don't believe "right" and "wrong" exist at all, and I seem to continually forget that people use those words very differently than I do.