JnB

I've removed a couple messages from this room. Be aware that except for moderation purposes, all Stack Exchange chat rooms are public. Private conversations are best done off-site.

The problem is having one that is compelling to every being, both actual and hypothetical (so, including sufficiently conscious animals, advanced AIs, aliens, supernatural beings like demons or gods, etc). For instance, nobody cares what toaster-oven-preacher has to say about right and wrong, even if his labeling system is internally consistent and objective.

One could similarly have other objective moral systems - ones that maximize net total happiness, or one's personal happiness, or minimize net total suffering, or personal suffering, or maximize knowledge and understanding of the natural world, or to obey an authority, avoid punishment, etc.

@songmorning I don't think having objective morality is the problem. Toaster-oven morality (act to maximize the total number of toaster-ovens in the world) is objective in the sense that the question of whether a given act is "toaster-oven moral" has an objective yes or no answer - despite the potential usual difficulties with implementation and ambiguity of definition (which type of factory is most efficient? / do the toaster-ovens have to be functional? etc).

When a person disagrees with me that s/he "needs to do [X]," then maybe they disagree that [X] is necessary for [Y] and [Z], or maybe they disagree [Y] and [Z] are of interest, or maybe they misunderstand what I am implying [Y] and [Z] are in the given context.

In my experience, the word seems to work like one of those context-dependent things. When I say "you need to do [X]," what I really mean is "you need to do [X] in order for [Y], [Z]" where [Y] and [Z] are clear from context and are of interest to the person I am talking to (or at least to me if I am persuading them to do [X])

Terms in moral language are frequently vague and undefined and in practice carry numerous distinct meanings, so while moral claims can have objective truth values with respect to any chosen meaning for terms, they can have different truth values with respect to different meanings, and moreover the only reason moral claims are relevant or compelling to people is when they reflect our feelings about possible states of affairs, which are not universal among all people both actual and hypothetical.