What could make morality objective?

[FlashDangerpants]

Thanks for explaining.

Okay: fairness. I come at fairness via pleasure/pain, because fairness is to do with how we should distribute pleasure/pain among beings who have moral standing. Since, on my theory, pleasure and pain are good and bad, all beings capable of experiencing pleasure/pain have moral standing. The question then is, given this fact, how should pleasure/pain be distributed?

The classic utilitarian answer is that it doesn't matter. I think this is a mistake. The reason it's a mistake is that it overlooks the fact that, since it's entirely by virtue of having the capability to experience pleasure/pain that beings have moral standing at all, it must be the case that every being capable of experiencing pleasure/pain has the same moral standing. If I have 100 units of pleasure to distribute between a man and a mouse, then on the assumption that both the man and the mouse can experience pleasure, I should aim to give 50 units to each of them, or get as close to this as I can. To give the man more than 50 and the mouse less than 50, or vice-versa, would be unfair, because it would be treating them as having different moral standing when their moral standing is in fact the same. (I'm not suggesting that we can actually measure units of pleasure: all of this is simply to establish the basic principles.)

If there are two fundamental goods, pleasure/pain and fairness, it's possible to face a choice between two actions where one maximises pleasure but distributes it unfairly, while the other fails to maximise pleasure but distributes it fairly. I'm not aware of any rational way to decide which of these is better, and so at this point in time I'm inclined to say that which action to choose is indeterminate. However, I'm not entirely happy with this, so I'm still thinking about it.

I don't know if any of this is helpful to Henry, but he's welcome to talk to me himself if he wants to.

As for why I think other things, such as freedom and justice, are not fundamental moral goods, it's simply that I've never seen any argument or evidence to convince me that they are. To me they look like rules of thumb. I think they're very good rules of thumb, and I think a society that adopts them as a basis for its legal system will usually produce more pleasure or happiness than one that doesn't; but that doesn't make them fundamental principles.

Well, first up, let's begin with my traditional bout of underhandedness. I would say that you have a unique position still among our moral realists at present if a 12 week fetus and a totally vegetablised coma patient are both unable to experience pleasure or pain then they have no standing in their own rights? So technically if my great aunt is on life support, and even if she might pull through and make a recovery, her breathing aparatus is mine to switch off if nobody else really cares just at this moment?

Let's ignore fairness for the moment. Then the goodness or badness of an action is calculated by working out, in the usual utilitarian way, how much net pleasure it creates (across the entire universe of sentient beings until the end of time; we're going to need a large spy network and a very big computer).

All and only those beings with moral standing are to be taken into account when working this out. All and only those beings that can experience pleasure and/or pain have moral standing. If a foetus is aborted before it becomes able to experience pleasure and/or pain, then it never acquires moral standing, so it doesn't figure in the calculation. If someone becomes a vegetable with no hope of recovery, they have lost their moral standing and cannot regain it, so they don't figure in the calculation.

Whether your great aunt is on life support is irrelevant. (I'm on life support myself: my life support consists of food, water and air.) Is she sentient at the moment? If so, she has moral standing. Is she in a coma, but has a 30% chance of regaining sentience? Then at the moment, she has 30% moral standing, and if she recovers, she will have 100%.

Surely it's not the same for the aunt to have a 30% chance of suddenly regaining moral standing as it is to have 30% of her standing right now even though she as zero claim to that?

We need to think quick, I just caused a car accident and the other driver is rendered comatose as a result. Morally I am going to be in trouble if he ever comes out of that coma, so I am obliged to take advantage of his current lack of standing by making that status permanent and disposing of his body.

I also note the oblique reference to utilitarian calculus, but I assume you wouldn't go so far as to endorse actually creating a measurement system to assign units of pleasurability and pain-ness to the mouse and the man's situations, assuming them to be scientific data now, because that would be giberring insanity?

Why would it?

It certainly strikes me as absurd to make empirical measurement of quantities of pain and pleasure. If it does not strike you as such, then at some point perhaps we can have entertainment working out what a unit of such measurement would be.

I am not sure up front how you can use fairness that way. The thing that makes utilitarianism tempting is that it massively simplifies the situation and provides a principle allows assignation of internally uncontroversial statuses of right and wrong. By which I mean that all who agree to the pleasure/pain thing can agree on which is the rigth or wrong course of action in any hypothetical or factual scenario where the outcome is known. but fairness breaks that unless you deal with the rthings that might make any outcome fair or unfair. That would at the very least include dessert, unless we are simplifying "fairness" into equality of outcome or something?

Don't care about simplifying. Only care about truth. If it is true that there are situations where the best action is indeterminate, then we should accept that. Indeterminacy is not a flaw in the theory, it's just a corollary of it. Is indeterminacy a flaw in quantum theory? No, it's just how things are.

If we end up with a moral fact that all moral questions are factually indeterminable that would be a skeptical position that moral knowledge is incoherent.

But I was asking what is that makes fairness unique? And I haven't seen an answer. Why isn't it a matter of the balance of pain and pleasure, plus fairness, plus niceness, and plus satisfaction?

For an example (and back to me splendid bastardry): I think it's massively unfair that Americans don't all have quality healthcare free at point of use as it is in Britain.

There's nothing much to envy about healthcare in Britain at the moment, take it from me. It's broken, and we're all scared shitless in case we break a leg or have a heart attack and the ambulance doesn't turn up and there's no free bed in the hospital.

It's annual NHS panic season in Britain. The whole thing has been days away from destruction for my entire life so far. But my question still stands and if you need to think warm thoughts about the Swiss or Dutch health services to get through it then please feel free to substitute them in.

Henry definitely doesn't think it's fair for him to pay taxes so that people who aren't himself can consume cancer medication at his notional expense. We're both really just applying the nebulous concept of fairness very differently.

So I think your list of simple foundational goods must expand beyond pleasure/pain and fairness to a principle of justice that can justify the application of the fairness principle.

I think my fairness principle is quite clear. It is, as I said, simply the principle that every sentient being has the same moral standing — though as explained above, that has to be modified if someone is in a non-sentient state from which they may recover. (Which is why it's usually a bad thing to kill people in their sleep.)

That's circular. Include the fairness principle to have fairness because it's fair to do so.
I respond with my own circular justification: Include a principle of niceness because then your theory is nicer which is a nice thing for it to be.

[Peter Holmes]

A recipe for moral objectivism.

1 Choose the goal: wellbeing, welfare, happiness, pleasure, fairness, equality, fulfilment, self-ownership, conformity to neural programming, obedience to the supposed will of my team's invented god, and so on.

2 Choose what constitutes wellbeing, welfare, happiness, and so on.

3 Choose which actions are more or less consistent with the chosen goal.

4 Choose the scope of moral concern: my group, humans, humans plus: a few other animals, other sentient beings, all life forms, and so on.

5 Claim that all these choices are nothing of the sort - but simply the recognition of unarguable facts.

[CIN]

Well, first up, let's begin with my traditional bout of underhandedness. I would say that you have a unique position still among our moral realists at present if a 12 week fetus and a totally vegetablised coma patient are both unable to experience pleasure or pain then they have no standing in their own rights? So technically if my great aunt is on life support, and even if she might pull through and make a recovery, her breathing aparatus is mine to switch off if nobody else really cares just at this moment?

Let's ignore fairness for the moment. Then the goodness or badness of an action is calculated by working out, in the usual utilitarian way, how much net pleasure it creates (across the entire universe of sentient beings until the end of time; we're going to need a large spy network and a very big computer).

All and only those beings with moral standing are to be taken into account when working this out. All and only those beings that can experience pleasure and/or pain have moral standing. If a foetus is aborted before it becomes able to experience pleasure and/or pain, then it never acquires moral standing, so it doesn't figure in the calculation. If someone becomes a vegetable with no hope of recovery, they have lost their moral standing and cannot regain it, so they don't figure in the calculation.

Whether your great aunt is on life support is irrelevant. (I'm on life support myself: my life support consists of food, water and air.) Is she sentient at the moment? If so, she has moral standing. Is she in a coma, but has a 30% chance of regaining sentience? Then at the moment, she has 30% moral standing, and if she recovers, she will have 100%.

Surely it's not the same for the aunt to have a 30% chance of suddenly regaining moral standing as it is to have 30% of her standing right now even though she as zero claim to that?

You are correct. I misspoke. She doesn't have 30% moral standing, but she should be treated as if she did. She shouldn't be treated as having 100% moral standing, because she may not recover, and she shouldn't be treated as if she had 0%, because she may. So she should be treated as if she had something in-between, i.e. 30%.

We need to think quick, I just caused a car accident and the other driver is rendered comatose as a result. Morally I am going to be in trouble if he ever comes out of that coma, so I am obliged to take advantage of his current lack of standing by making that status permanent and disposing of his body.

Okay, I can see that I'm not being clear enough.

If you kill a sentient being, it then no longer exists, and has no moral standing. If you decide not to bring a sentient being into existence, no sentient being exists, and so there is no being to have moral standing.

Once you have decided that there are to be existent sentient beings, they have moral standing, and are to be included in the calculations of net pleasure and fairness of distribution of said net pleasure.

So, if you keep a pig alive, it has moral standing, and you put it into the calculation. If you butcher it for sausages, it no longer figures in the calculation. The same goes for human beings, who are, after all, just another species of sentient being. If there can be sentient robots, the same applies to them.

Then the question arises, when is it okay to kill a sentient being? The answer is, when doing so will lead to more net pleasure, fairly distributed, over the remaining life of the universe, than not killing them.

In practice this calculation cannot be made by humans, and possibly not by anyone. If the universe is non-deterministic, the long-term future is unpredictable. If it is deterministic, it is predictable in principle, but it is unlikely that humans will ever be able to predict it beyond a very short timespan.

So we need a way of deciding what actions to perform based on something other than long-term consequences. There are two main options. We can try to make a calculation for the short or medium term, and leave the long-term consequences to sort themselves out; or, instead of making a calculation, we can devise moral rules of thumb which we have reason to think will tend to increase net pleasure, and follow those. (In practice, we tend to do both of these.)

Of course we may get it wrong whichever of these we do. I think it's a good rule of thumb to only punish the guilty, but sometimes this may lead to bad consequences, for example if you set free a man innocent of murder who then develops a virus that wipes out every living thing on the planet. But such cases are rare. The rules of thumb generally work pretty well.

So, getting back to your comatose car crash victim. If you decide to off him, as you point out, he no longer exists to have moral standing, and so does not figure in any subsequent moral calculations. But that doesn't tell you whether offing him is a good or bad thing to do. In theory you should work this out by calculating the consequemces of offing him and not offing him over the entire future of the universe. In practice, you will have to rely on one of the two methods I have suggested. Personally, I wouldn't do it, for the following reasons:
1. Since he hasn't already topped himself, he probably has reasons to stay alive, and these reasons probably involve giving somebody (e.g. himself and/or his family) net pleasure; if you top him, that probable future net pleasure is lost.
2. You might be caught. How probable this is depends on a number of factors, including whether there are witnesses that you haven't noticed, whether someone arrives before you have finished, whether you can manage to fool a police pathologist into thinking the death is accidental, and so on. It's probably not easy to reliably work all this out when you are under stress, as you will be, unless you are a socio- or psychopath. If you are caught, you will be punished much more severely than if you had simply owned up to causing the car crash, so that your own probable future net pleasure, and that of those who depend on you, is likely to be severely reduced.
3. If the police decide that the guy was murdered, but they never pin it on you, this will reduce public respect for the law and fear of punishment, which may make a small but significant contribution to a rise in violent crime, which is likely to reduce people's future net pleasure across society.

I also note the oblique reference to utilitarian calculus, but I assume you wouldn't go so far as to endorse actually creating a measurement system to assign units of pleasurability and pain-ness to the mouse and the man's situations, assuming them to be scientific data now, because that would be giberring insanity?

Why would it?

It certainly strikes me as absurd to make empirical measurement of quantities of pain and pleasure. If it does not strike you as such, then at some point perhaps we can have entertainment working out what a unit of such measurement would be.

I don't suggest that we can currently assign actual units of measurement. What I have noticed is that both pleasure and pain vary in intensity and duration, and these are quantitative variations. Where you have quantitative variations, you have the theoretical possibility of measurement. I see no reason to rule out the possibility, remote though it may be, that humans are able to do this some day.

I am not sure up front how you can use fairness that way. The thing that makes utilitarianism tempting is that it massively simplifies the situation and provides a principle allows assignation of internally uncontroversial statuses of right and wrong. By which I mean that all who agree to the pleasure/pain thing can agree on which is the rigth or wrong course of action in any hypothetical or factual scenario where the outcome is known. but fairness breaks that unless you deal with the rthings that might make any outcome fair or unfair. That would at the very least include dessert, unless we are simplifying "fairness" into equality of outcome or something?

Don't care about simplifying. Only care about truth. If it is true that there are situations where the best action is indeterminate, then we should accept that. Indeterminacy is not a flaw in the theory, it's just a corollary of it. Is indeterminacy a flaw in quantum theory? No, it's just how things are.

If we end up with a moral fact that all moral questions are factually indeterminable that would be a skeptical position that moral knowledge is incoherent.

I don't say that all moral questions are indeterminable. My view is that some are, and that hardly any are determinable with great accuracy owing to our inabilty to see very far into the future, but that we have developed rules of thumb, and general ideas of fairness, which in practice tend to increase net pleasure even if they don't fully maximise it.

But I was asking what is that makes fairness unique? And I haven't seen an answer. Why isn't it a matter of the balance of pain and pleasure, plus fairness, plus niceness, and plus satisfaction?

That sounds like an alternative to my theory, rather than a criticism of it. All I claim is that it is unfair to allocate different amounts of net pleasure to beings if they have the same moral standing. I don't see where niceness and satisfaction come in. They don't figure in my theory. But I may be misunderstanding your point.

For an example (and back to me splendid bastardry): I think it's massively unfair that Americans don't all have quality healthcare free at point of use as it is in Britain.

There's nothing much to envy about healthcare in Britain at the moment, take it from me. It's broken, and we're all scared shitless in case we break a leg or have a heart attack and the ambulance doesn't turn up and there's no free bed in the hospital.

It's annual NHS panic season in Britain. The whole thing has been days away from destruction for my entire life so far. But my question still stands and if you need to think warm thoughts about the Swiss or Dutch health services to get through it then please feel free to substitute them in.

I think it's a good moral rule of thumb that people should be given healthcare in proportion to their clinical need, rather than in proportion to their ability to pay. But it is only a rule of thumb; it is possible that a healthcare system which doesn't follow this rule of thumb could cause more net pleasure than one that does, for example if the government decides to significantly underfund the system for 12 or 13 years.

Henry definitely doesn't think it's fair for him to pay taxes so that people who aren't himself can consume cancer medication at his notional expense. We're both really just applying the nebulous concept of fairness very differently.

So I think your list of simple foundational goods must expand beyond pleasure/pain and fairness to a principle of justice that can justify the application of the fairness principle.

I think my fairness principle is quite clear. It is, as I said, simply the principle that every sentient being has the same moral standing — though as explained above, that has to be modified if someone is in a non-sentient state from which they may recover. (Which is why it's usually a bad thing to kill people in their sleep.)

That's circular. Include the fairness principle to have fairness because it's fair to do so.
I respond with my own circular justification: Include a principle of niceness because then your theory is nicer which is a nice thing for it to be.

I don't think it's circular. Unless you can make your point a different way, we may have to just disagree on that. And I still don't know why you are talking about niceness.

[Veritas Aequitas]

A recipe for moral objectivism.

1 Choose the goal: wellbeing, welfare, happiness, pleasure, fairness, equality, fulfilment, self-ownership, conformity to neural programming, obedience to the supposed will of my team's invented god, and so on.

2 Choose what constitutes wellbeing, welfare, happiness, and so on.

3 Choose which actions are more or less consistent with the chosen goal.

4 Choose the scope of moral concern: my group, humans, humans plus: a few other animals, other sentient beings, all life forms, and so on.

5 Claim that all these choices are nothing of the sort - but simply the recognition of unarguable facts.

Your above is leading to no where.

First you need to defined 'what is morality' and 'what is objectivity'.

Since you have not defined the above, how could your point 1-5 follow to the conclusion;
A recipe [or no recipe] for moral objectivism.

That is the sickness that pervaded your OP and all your posts that follow in this thread.

[FlashDangerpants]

But I was asking what is that makes fairness unique? And I haven't seen an answer. Why isn't it a matter of the balance of pain and pleasure, plus fairness, plus niceness, and plus satisfaction?

That sounds like an alternative to my theory, rather than a criticism of it. All I claim is that it is unfair to allocate different amounts of net pleasure to beings if they have the same moral standing. I don't see where niceness and satisfaction come in. They don't figure in my theory. But I may be misunderstanding your point.

I am trying to get you to explain WHY we are adding fairness into the mix at all?
Why does anything need to be fair? You insist it must, but only because the alternative is unfairness.
So I ask also, why shouldn't we insist on politeness if the alternatives are impolite?

What are the actual grounds you have for requiring fairness?

[Peter Holmes]

A recipe for moral objectivism.

1 Choose the goal: wellbeing, welfare, happiness, pleasure, fairness, equality, fulfilment, self-ownership, conformity to neural programming, obedience to the supposed will of my team's invented god, and so on.

2 Choose what constitutes wellbeing, welfare, happiness, and so on.

3 Choose which actions are more or less consistent with the chosen goal.

4 Choose the scope of moral concern: my group, humans, humans plus: a few other animals, other sentient beings, all life forms, and so on.

5 Claim that all these choices are nothing of the sort - but simply the recognition of unarguable facts.

Your above is leading to no where.

First you need to defined 'what is morality' and 'what is objectivity'.

Since you have not defined the above, how could your point 1-5 follow to the conclusion;
A recipe [or no recipe] for moral objectivism.

That is the sickness that pervaded your OP and all your posts that follow in this thread.

Well. All this way, and I've never defined the words morality and objectivity. What an eejit. Okay.

1 What we call objectivity is independence from opinion when considering the facts. Which assumes that there are such things as facts. Objectivity and facts go together like a coach and four.

2 What we call a fact is a feature of reality (sometimes called a state-of-affairs) that is or was the case, independent from opinion.

3 A factual assertion is one that asserts the existence of a feature of reality. So it has a (classical) truth-value which is independent from opinion: true, if the feature of reality is or was the case; and false, if it isn't or wasn't.

4 A moral assertion is one that says something is morally right (good) or wrong (bad/evil), or that we should or shouldn't (ought or oughtn't to) do something because it's morally right (good) or wrong (bad/evil).

5 Moral objectivism is the claim that there are moral facts, so that moral assertions - such as 'abortion is morally wrong', 'capital punishment is not morally wrong', 'we oughtn't to eat animals' and 'humans ought not to kill humans' - have a truth-value (true or false) independent from opinion.

This amounts to the belief that moral rightness and wrongness are things or properties that are or were the case - that exist or existed. And, pending evidence for the existence of abstract or non-physical things, 'exist or existed' means 'exist or existed physically', along with other physical things and properties.

So the burden of proof (demonstration) for the physical existence of moral things or properties is with moral objectivists - and, by implication, moral realists. A burden unmet so far, to my knowledge.

6 PSs.

6.1 To deny the existence of what we call facts, and therefore what we call objectivity, is to deny the existence of moral facts, and therefore moral objectivity. When you eat your cake, it's gone.

6.2 We can use the words right, wrong, good, bad, should and ought to morally and non-morally. For example 'the right direction', 'the wrong decision' and 'you ought not to pour petrol on a fire if you want extinguish it' need have no moral meaning whatsoever. And if the word ought is used non-morally in an assertion, it isn't a moral assertion, and it can't assert a so-called moral fact.

6.3 Non-moral premises can't entail moral conclusions, because a deductive conclusion can't contain information not present in the premise or premises of an argument. So a moral conclusion stands alone, unless it follows from a moral premise, which also stands alone, and so on.

[CIN]

But I was asking what is that makes fairness unique? And I haven't seen an answer. Why isn't it a matter of the balance of pain and pleasure, plus fairness, plus niceness, and plus satisfaction?

That sounds like an alternative to my theory, rather than a criticism of it. All I claim is that it is unfair to allocate different amounts of net pleasure to beings if they have the same moral standing. I don't see where niceness and satisfaction come in. They don't figure in my theory. But I may be misunderstanding your point.

I am trying to get you to explain WHY we are adding fairness into the mix at all?
Why does anything need to be fair? You insist it must, but only because the alternative is unfairness.
So I ask also, why shouldn't we insist on politeness if the alternatives are impolite?

What are the actual grounds you have for requiring fairness?

Because if you allocate different amounts of pleasure or pain to beings with the same moral standing, you are treating them as if they had different moral standing. Which they don't.

The classic case here is Ursula Le Guin's story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf). If the sole ground for allocating moral standing is the ability to feel pleasure and/or pain, the child in the basement has the same moral standing as any other person in Omelas. To give all the pleasure to everyone else and all the pain to the child is to treat the child as if it had no moral standing, which is an error. I call this error 'unfairness'. What would you call it?

[FlashDangerpants]

That sounds like an alternative to my theory, rather than a criticism of it. All I claim is that it is unfair to allocate different amounts of net pleasure to beings if they have the same moral standing. I don't see where niceness and satisfaction come in. They don't figure in my theory. But I may be misunderstanding your point.

I am trying to get you to explain WHY we are adding fairness into the mix at all?
Why does anything need to be fair? You insist it must, but only because the alternative is unfairness.
So I ask also, why shouldn't we insist on politeness if the alternatives are impolite?

What are the actual grounds you have for requiring fairness?

Because if you allocate different amounts of pleasure or pain to beings with the same moral standing, you are treating them as if they had different moral standing. Which they don't.

The classic case here is Ursula Le Guin's story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf). If the sole ground for allocating moral standing is the ability to feel pleasure and/or pain, the child in the basement has the same moral standing as any other person in Omelas. To give all the pleasure to everyone else and all the pain to the child is to treat the child as if it had no moral standing, which is an error. I call this error 'unfairness'. What would you call it?

I'd call it very blatant question begging. The consequentialist pleasure and pain ethos is entirely unemcumbered with rules about fairness, and politeness, and niceness and anything esle except a quantitative assessment of nice and nasty feels.

You have picked one out of all those other things and just rammed it in there with no explanation of why. Consequentialism doesn't require individuals to have independent moral standing at all. Sure it's unfair if they don't. It's not nice either. It's bad manners too. It's downright inconsiderate. But none of those things matters to the big heap of pleasure that represents the moral good, there certainly isn't one that does matter while the others don't.

[Peter Holmes]

I am trying to get you to explain WHY we are adding fairness into the mix at all?
Why does anything need to be fair? You insist it must, but only because the alternative is unfairness.
So I ask also, why shouldn't we insist on politeness if the alternatives are impolite?

What are the actual grounds you have for requiring fairness?

Because if you allocate different amounts of pleasure or pain to beings with the same moral standing, you are treating them as if they had different moral standing. Which they don't.

The classic case here is Ursula Le Guin's story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf). If the sole ground for allocating moral standing is the ability to feel pleasure and/or pain, the child in the basement has the same moral standing as any other person in Omelas. To give all the pleasure to everyone else and all the pain to the child is to treat the child as if it had no moral standing, which is an error. I call this error 'unfairness'. What would you call it?

I'd call it very blatant question begging. The consequentialist pleasure and pain ethos is entirely unemcumbered with rules about fairness, and politeness, and niceness and anything esle except a quantitative assessment of nice and nasty feels.

You have picked one out of all those other things and just rammed it in there with no explanation of why. Consequentialism doesn't require individuals to have independent moral standing at all. Sure it's unfair if they don't. It's not nice either. It's bad manners too. It's downright inconsiderate. But none of those things matters to the big heap of pleasure that represents the moral good, there certainly isn't one that does matter while the others don't.

Flash is right. And to put it another way - 'we ought to be fair' is as much a moral premise as 'we ought to cause pleasure and avoid causing pain'. And neither of those is a fact. They express opinions, which are subjective.

[CIN]

I am trying to get you to explain WHY we are adding fairness into the mix at all?
Why does anything need to be fair? You insist it must, but only because the alternative is unfairness.
So I ask also, why shouldn't we insist on politeness if the alternatives are impolite?

What are the actual grounds you have for requiring fairness?

Because if you allocate different amounts of pleasure or pain to beings with the same moral standing, you are treating them as if they had different moral standing. Which they don't.

The classic case here is Ursula Le Guin's story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf). If the sole ground for allocating moral standing is the ability to feel pleasure and/or pain, the child in the basement has the same moral standing as any other person in Omelas. To give all the pleasure to everyone else and all the pain to the child is to treat the child as if it had no moral standing, which is an error. I call this error 'unfairness'. What would you call it?

I'd call it very blatant question begging. The consequentialist pleasure and pain ethos is entirely unemcumbered with rules about fairness, and politeness, and niceness and anything esle except a quantitative assessment of nice and nasty feels.

There is no single 'consequentialist pleasure and pain ethos'. Consequentialism is a class of theories, not a single theory. Any theory that holds that the moral character of an action is determined by its consequences counts as consequentialist, and any theory that both does that and holds that pleasure and pain are morally relevant features of those consequences counts as a theory which has a 'consequentialist pleasure and pain ethos.' My theory falls within this description, and the fact that it also considers fairness to be morally relevant doesn't alter that.

You have picked one out of all those other things and just rammed it in there with no explanation of why.

I gave you an explanation of why, to do with moral standing. If you think there is something wrong with that explanation, you need to say what it is.

Consequentialism doesn't require individuals to have independent moral standing at all.

Same mistake as before. Consequentialism is not a single theory, it's a class of theories. And it is a misstatement to say that my theory requires individuals to have independent moral standing. (BTW, I don't know what you mean by 'independent'.) The moral standing of beings capable of experiencing pleasure and/or pain is a corollary of the theory, not something the theory requires. If pleasure and pain are good and bad, as I have argued, then any being capable of experiencing pleasure and/or pain has moral standing, because to have moral standing is to be an entity for whom it matters morally how they are treated; and if it is good to give an entity pleasure, then it matters how that entity is treated.

Sure it's unfair if they don't. It's not nice either. It's bad manners too. It's downright inconsiderate. But none of those things matters to the big heap of pleasure that represents the moral good, there certainly isn't one that does matter while the others don't.

A classic utilitarian would no doubt agree. But my theory is not classic utilitarianism, and you are in error if you try to foist onto me a theory I do not hold. Basically, you are strawmaning.

[FlashDangerpants]

Because if you allocate different amounts of pleasure or pain to beings with the same moral standing, you are treating them as if they had different moral standing. Which they don't.

It seems I missed how central this is to your belief. The thing is I don't see why it matters if you are treating persons as if they have differnet standings. The only reason not to is that is is unfair?

What are we to do about persons who have earned extra suffering through misdeeds?

[Peter Holmes]

The scope issue - which beings should have 'moral standing', and why - is purely a matter of opinion. No fact - such as that some beings don't experience pleasure and pain - entails a moral conclusion. Why should such beings not have 'moral standing'?

As always, moral objectivism requires a refusal to recognise the moral belief, judgement or opinion at the start or the bottom of any argument about morality.

[popeye1945]

All experience/knowledge/meaning belongs to a conscious subject and never does it belong to the physical world or object as the physical world, thus all meaning is bestowed upon a meaningless world by a conscious subject. This is so because biology is the measure and meaning of all things. Morality is objectified or bestowed upon the world in the forms of biological extensions namely, norms, institutions, codes of conduct, laws, and social contracts. All these things are expressions of humanity's biological nature. The physical world in the absence of a conscious subject is meaningless, experience in the form of biological reactions provides an aware subject with what is termed apparent reality. The subjective mind objectifies, and it does not occur in any other way.

[Peter Holmes]

All experience/knowledge/meaning belongs to a conscious subject and never does it belong to the physical world or object as the physical world, thus all meaning is bestowed upon a meaningless world by a conscious subject. This is so because biology is the measure and meaning of all things. Morality is objectified or bestowed upon the world in the forms of biological extensions namely, norms, institutions, codes of conduct, laws, and social contracts. All these things are expressions of humanity's biological nature. The physical world in the absence of a conscious subject is meaningless, experience in the form of biological reactions provides an aware subject with what is termed apparent reality. The subjective mind objectifies, and it does not occur in any other way.

The problem with saying that what we call facts, and therefore objectivity, are in the gift of 'the conscious subject, is that that's not how we use the words fact and objectivity, which very specifically refer to things that exist regardless of perception, naming and description - such as by conscious subjects.

And your last sentence is unabashedly substance-dualist - treating the mind as something different from an object, such as the brain. In what way does the mind objectify the brain? And what distinction is made by the expression subjective mind? Could there be an objective mind?

I suggest that you've argued yourself into a metaphysical delusion - that the subject/object distinction refers to something fundamental about reality.

[popeye1945]

All experience/knowledge/meaning belongs to a conscious subject and never does it belong to the physical world or object as the physical world, thus all meaning is bestowed upon a meaningless world by a conscious subject. This is so because biology is the measure and meaning of all things. Morality is objectified or bestowed upon the world in the forms of biological extensions namely, norms, institutions, codes of conduct, laws, and social contracts. All these things are expressions of humanity's biological nature. The physical world in the absence of a conscious subject is meaningless, experience in the form of biological reactions provides an aware subject with what is termed apparent reality. The subjective mind objectifies, and it does not occur in any other way.

The problem with saying that what we call facts, and therefore objectivity, are in the gift of 'the conscious subject, is that that's not how we use the words fact and objectivity, which very specifically refer to things that exist regardless of perception, naming and description - such as by conscious subjects. And your last sentence is unabashedly substance-dualist - treating the mind as something different from an object, such as the brain. In what way does the mind objectify the brain? And what distinction is made by the expression subjective mind? Could there be an objective mind? I suggest that you've argued yourself into a metaphysical delusion - that the subject/object distinction refers to something fundamental about reality.

The world is known to you through your body, the physical world alters your biology and this is how you come to know the world subjectively. Perception in its immediacy is truth until there is a reason to question one's initial experience/perception. The subject-object relation is the physical world as object supplying the stimulus to which biology responds to or reacts, and this is the objective world one claims as apparent reality. Apparent reality is a world of objects as conscious subjective knowledge. A fact is an object or the relation between two objects or more and there is no way to prove that physical objects exist in the absence of consciousness or that physical consciousness exists in the absence of the world as object for we can never escape our subjectivity. You've made these baseless charges before; you would do well to try to understand the statements made and forget your preconclusions. Your questions indicate you do not understand period.