I believe that there is an objective system of verifiable, moral facts which can be true or false. ...- Since human minds are part of objective reality, they can be analyzed and objective, verifiable propositions can be stated about them.
But those "objective" facts would only be about the intuitions of individual minds,
and then formulate equations to calculate how moral something is for a particular agent.
Same problem. A thinks it is moral to kill B, B thinks it is not moral to be killed by A. Where is the objective moral fact there? Objective moral facts (or at least intersubjective ones) need to resolve conflicts between individuals. You have offered nothing that can do that.. Morality cannot just be a case of what an individual should do, because indiviuals interact.
However, if one is to ask a moral question without including a specific group-referent (though usually, "all humans" or "most humans" is implicit) from which one can extract that objective algorithm that makes things moral or not, then there is no "final word" or "ultimate truth" about which answer is right, and in fact the question seems hopelessly self-contradictory to me
Then morlaity is not so objective that it is graven into the very fabric of the universe. The problem remains that what you have presented is too subjective to do anything useful. By all means present a theory of human morality that is indexed to humans, but let it regulate interactions between humans.
However, what opinions people generate and what turns out to be objectively moral are correlated, but from a third cause - one that is still a black box which we cannot describe very accurately (
That is hard to inpterpret. Why should opinions be what is "objectively moral"? You might mean there is nothing more to morality than people's jugements about what is good or bad, but that is not an objective feature of the universe, it is mind projection. That the neural mechanisms involved are objective does not make what is projected by them objective. If objective neural activity makes me dream of unicorns, unicorns are not thereby objective.
And in any case, what is important is co-ordinating the judgements of individuals in the case of conflict.
Since humans humans can influence the state of reality, and there's an algorithm somewhere that determines what we find moral,
"We" individually, or "we" collectively? That is a very important point to skate over.
and humans "prefer" things that are moral (are programmed to act in a way that brings about higher quantities of this "moral" stuff), then if they do things which probably lead to more of it, they prefer that result, and if otherwise, they would have preferred that first result. It follows from this that humans should do things which (probably) lead to higher values of this moral stuff."
THat seems to be saying that it is instrumentally in people's interests to be moral. But if that were always straightforwardly the case, then there would be no issues of sacrifices and self-restraint involve in morality, which is scarcely credible. If I lay down my life for my country, that might lead to the greater good, but how good is it for me? The issue is much more complex than you have stated.
(part 2 of two-part response, see below or above for the first)
THat seems to be saying that it is instrumentally in people's interests to be moral. But if that were always straightforwardly the case, then there would be no issues of sacrifices and self-restraint involve in morality, which is scarcely credible.
See this later comment but this one especially (the first is mostly for context) to see that I do indeed take that into account.
The key point is that "morality" isn't straightforwardly "what people want" at all. What people co...
I think there’s a confusion in our discussions of deontology and consequentialism. I’m writing this post to try to clear up that confusion. First let me say that this post is not about any territorial facts. The issue here is how we use the philosophical terms of art ‘consequentialism’ and ‘deontology’.
The confusion is often stated thusly: “deontological theories are full of injunctions like ‘do not kill’, but they generally provide no (or no interesting) explanations for these injunctions.” There is of course an equivalently confused, though much less common, complaint about consequentialism.
This is confused because the term ‘deontology’ in philosophical jargon picks out a normative ethical theory, while the question ‘how do we know that it is wrong to kill?’ is not a normative but a meta-ethical question. Similarly, consequentialism contains in itself no explanation for why pleasure or utility are morally good, or why consequences should matter to morality at all. Nor does consequentialism/deontology make any claims about how we know moral facts (if there are any). That is also a meta-ethical question.
Some consequentialists and deontologists are also moral realists. Some are not. Some believe in divine commands, some are hedonists. Consequentialists and deontologists in practice always also subscribe to some meta-ethical theory which purports to explain the value of consequences or the source of injunctions. But consequentialism and deontology as such do not. In order to avoid strawmaning either the consequentialist or the deontologist, it’s important to either discuss the comprehensive views of particular ethicists, or to carefully leave aside meta-ethical issues.
This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article provides a helpful overview of the issues in the consequentialist-deontologist debate, and is careful to distinguish between ethical and meta-ethical concerns.
SEP article on Deontology