A) pain exists. B) pain is wrong. Like that ;)
As to the first question, I can no more objectively describe what makes it wrong than I can objectively describe pain in the first place.
No, no - wait a moment. Forget the semantics of it for a moment, forget about the ambiguities present in such a thing. I'm not asking for an objective definition, where you express it in such a way as to cause me to fully understand and know it in the sense that you know it. Forget about persuading me for a moment - I promise that I will take whatever you say at face-value in this. Forget about me understanding why it's wrong for someone to inflict pain on me, just tell me why it's wrong for someone to inflict pain on you.
Don't worry about explaining it to me or persuading anyone of the truth of what you say for a moment. Instead, give me your subjective take on it, your own explanation of why it is wrong for someone to inflict pain upon you. Don't worry about what I think, just lay it out in a way that seems plausible to you - IOW, forget "obective" for a moment, and just give me your subjective opinion.
I don't care if you can "prove" the truth of what you say, I'm just interested in what you have to say. So, let me rephrase a bit - Answering in any way you see fit, why do you feel that it is wrong for someone to inflict pain upon you?
Speculation, wishful thinking. It may be true in most cases. And sure, helping the species survive is of course one way of doing right by your neighbor.
That's not quite what I meant, that we do right by our neighbors when we promote the survival of the species. What I meant was that by most conventional understandings of morality, survival of the species results from the practices contained therein.
IOW, by following those proscriptive rules of morality (setting aside where exactly those rules come from for a moment), the survival of the species is promoted. Don't steal. Don't be envious. Don't murder one another. And so forth - when you do right by your neighbor in that completely conventional sense, survival of the species is promoted as a result. That's what I want to get at - you don't even have to think about something abstract like "survival of the species". It inevitably follows from morality itself, barring external events, of course ;)
Fascists wanted society to be arranged like the human body, with defective "cells" regularly eliminated. Maybe such a plan, if people were to accept it, truly would have made for a more durable society. But they weren't willing to accept it - and nor should they have, as you seemed willing to agree earlier.
Perhaps people weren't willing to accept it because it was hazardous to the survival of the society - certainly it was hazardous to many of the individuals within it. It's kind of hard to build a viable society that is predicated on mass-murder, as we have seen (too) many times.
"Obective" is probably not too easily forgotten, but you can forget "objective" instead ;)
I fail to see how a "pragmatic" argument could lead to the conclusion that pain is "wrong". Wrongness, by definition, involves a moral judgement (at least in this context).
Don't worry about explaining it to me or persuading anyone of the truth of what you say for a moment. Instead, give me your subjective take on it, your own explanation of why it is wrong for someone to inflict pain upon you. Don't worry about what I think, just lay it out in a way that seems plausible to you - IOW, forget "objective" for a moment, and just give me your subjective opinion.
Well, I guess in order to talk about what is wrong, I should first talk about what is right. While still avoiding any talk about religious details of our origin, I should think that someone with even the mildest of religious stirrings (be they monotheistic, pantheistic, or something even less defined than that) would understand right away that regardless of how we were created, or even if we were "created" as such, our existence is a sacred thing, an end in itself. It's not just a condition, like a computer being on or off, or an atomic electron being in an excited state or a ground state. Our existence is the source of everything that we could possibly find worthy - every sense of joy, fascination, and yes, even pain (to the extent that it's not deliberately inflicted), are such immeasurable gifts that flow from it. There can really be no higher earthly purpose than to preserve such gifts, and to enable them to be used in as much freedom as possible. This is where morality begins. Certainly people's understanding of it can be liable to going off in several directions from there, some of which may be sound, some of which may be delusional. Certainly it may have to be compromised in certain situations that we call "necessary evils" (such as fending off invasion). But this is the foundation, and it is real.
Perhaps people weren't willing to accept it because it was hazardous to the survival of the society - certainly it was hazardous to many of the individuals within it. It's kind of hard to build a viable society that is predicated on mass-murder, as we have seen (too) many times.
So how do you say "circular argument" in Latin? ;*P The reason, in the case of the Nazis, why it was so hard for them to build such a society is that people fought it. They didn't accept it. It certainly wasn't that depopulation simply reduced their numbers to the point where society couldn't function; there were still plenty of people left over, so that wasn't the issue at all. If not for people's unwillingness to accept it, there's little reason that I can think of why it wouldn't have produced a very formidable society. So morality really can't be understood in terms of what promotes social survivibility. It can only be understood in terms of the inherent goodness of life, as I described above.