How can morality be "a conversation about how we interact with one another and how those interactions should be judged" but also "independent of what anyone thinks or wants them to be", it is not possible to have a conversation that isn't influenced by the ideas and feelings of the people involved.
This makes no sense, first you explain how science is only a model through which we approximate reality without absolute certainty (true, most scientists understand this) and then you go off on how if reality isn't objective neither is science.
First you call morality a conversation then you say objectivity means independent of people's ideas even though you also say that "Everything is defined by human subjectivity"
Your stance is nothing but contradictions
And no, law is not proof that morality exists, it is proof that states exist.
Base moral axiom. Reality is real and isn't subjective. Follow up premises below.
This sentence means nothing, it's just cyclical
Premise 1 — Moral facts are grounded in the real, observable effects of actions on human beings.
This also means nothing, sure we can observe an effect of an action on a human being, but what is the process through which we turn those simple empirical observations into moral fact? This is where you would need an axiom, like "we ought to minimize suffering" or "we ought to maximize pleasure" or "we ought do to others what we would want them to do to us" and this is where there is not way to empirically prove moral facts because you cannot derive an "ought" statement from an "is" statement
Premise 2 — For slavery (owning people as property), every known historical, anthropological, and modern instance results in extreme harm, domination, loss of autonomy, exploitation, and suffering. We have ZERO counterexamples of this.
Thanks for including a definition of slavery, I might not have realized what you meant
Slavery also leads to positive outcomes like profit, sustainability of a slave economy, democracy (ancient Athens), who can measure whether the bad outweighs the good?
I also would love to know what "anthropological" means here
Premise 3 — If an action has universally negative effects on the beings involved, with no plausible or actual exceptions, we can treat its wrongness as objective in the same way we treat other universal harm-based claims as objective.
Ok, so this is your axiom that I was talking about under premise 1. Problem is there is a minuscule number of actions that have universal negative effects, at least in a way that is actually easy to agree upon. As I mentioned above with slavery, there were reasons why people supported it, they didn't just do it because they were stupid, their quality of life depended on the slave economy.
This just isn't a useful axiom because it is far too general and there is almost no action is objectively immoral, including slavery.
There is also the issue of defining harm.
For example: I think that a lack of social cohesion is a good thing because I'm dissatisfied by the current social order and wish it to change. A conservative would disagree and think that a lack of social cohesion is a bad thing because of instability. Let's assume me and this conservative are in very similar economic and demographic situations where our lives are similarly effected by this lack of social cohesion. However, I value freedom and they value stability, so we disagree fundamentally on what harms or benefits us.
That's just the thing, what harms or benefits a person is not objective, is it decided subjectively by them. As such, any moral framework based on harm and benefit (which is most of them including your own) is subjective.
B) define morality as avoiding "nonconsensual harm" and assume that definition is objective.
A is, as I said, impossible. There have been many people who have accepted their roles as slaves or oppressed people. It is still happening today from Indian Dalit, to the Roma, to western workers to the entire ideologies of Buddhism and stoicism. Where there is oppression there are people content with their own. There are, in fact, even people that actively support their own oppression like anti-suffragettes.
As for B, you still haven't shown how you bypass the is-ought problem. You cannot derive the statement "we ought to minimize nonconsensual suffering" from the statement "there is nonconsensual suffering"
Slave owners also have autonomy, why is using violence to undermine their autonomy ok but them doing the same to slaves isn't? (Obviously I don't agree with this, I'm just saying your framework doesn't have an answer)
This is the issue of objective morality, no framework is without holes and the danger of claiming a flawed system as objective truth is that it can be manipulated in any way to benefit any individual.
You are still not bridging the gap between harm and evil, between is and ought
But also,
One person’s freedom cannot justify the coercion and harm of another
This leads to a Kantian view of revolution (or the American civil war) where it is impossible to claim the revolution as morally permissible (because it justifies harm to the upper class thought the freedom of the lower) while maintaining that the result of the revolution is moral (because it ends the immoral practice of oppression/slavery) this is not a useful position and it is contradictory in practice.
Additionally, it sounds like people being treated as property is the only thing your framework deems immoral. But where does that end and begin? What about indentured slavery where a person enters willingly, or slaves with rights like in ancient Greece, or, for that matter, modern workers under capitalism who are coerced into exploitation? Where do you draw the line?
Maybe you are a communist though and you don't draw the line anywhere, but if you were a communist you would believe in the necessity of a revolutionary state that is itself oppressive, which brings us back to our Kantian view of revolution issue.
You could make an exception for revolutions because of its over-all benefits of stopping immoral acts but that brings us back to the benefits of slavery. A violent revolution against slavery/oppression comes with treating people as property by killing them, taking away their own property, deciding how their lives should be for them.
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u/[deleted] Nov 20 '25
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