Make sense?
I think so, since you seem to be restating what I said in #764: "It's like I said before, I can't know for sure if others can feel pain the way I do, but I can know that if they do, it would be wrong for me to inflict it on them. And, also like I said before, that is the foundation, which we then use logic to proceed from."
The thing itself doesn't change, only people's subjective perception of it.
And that seems to be a restatement of the point I was making in #772 (note the parenthetical contrasting): "I evaluate an experience (by which I mean, the end subjective result of the experience, as distinct from the stimuli which cause it, as the same stimuli might cause different experiences for different people) as being awful, and then say it would be wrong to subject others to that same experience (regardless of whatever stimuli are used to elicit it)."
But we simply accept those subjective perceptions and proceed as objectively as we can from there.
Hence, I would gather that you agree with what I was saying in #778: "And my dispute would be that if these alternate explanations rely exclusively on objective and pragmatic criteria (survival of the species, functionality of society, etc.), then they're seriously lacking."
Ah, I think I understand you now. No, I wouldn't necessarily sign on to that statement. The problem, as I see it, is that you're sort of mashing two issues into a single statement.
Here's the thing. To build a system of morality, I don't need to get more fundamental than the fact that people experience pain, and that they don't wish to. I can stop right there, because that decision about pain is enough for me to move forward and do what I'm interested in doing.
But does that mean that the whole thing rests on subjective criteria? No, of course not - just because we don't care why people don't like pain doesn't mean there isn't an objective, pragmatic reason for people not liking pain. I stop asking questions at the "people don't like pain" step, because that's all I need to know in order to build something resembling morality. I didn't ask why that was so because I don't need to know why it is so for my purposes - just knowing that it is so is enough.
The decision that people make in saying that they don't like pain is entirely subjective and arbitrary, if you limit your inquiry by going no further, as I did. But if you want to shift scope, you can ask yourself "why do people dislike pain?" When you do, though, you have to realize that you're shifting scope, and looking at a bigger picture. You're traveling farther than you need to in order to construct morality.
Not that that's a bad thing, but in a lot of ways, it's sort of like that airy-fairy "root-cause" analysis that the terrorist sympathizers tend to engage in. If you're exploring such things, no matter where you stop and declare "this is it - the root cause", that point is essentially arbitrary. You can always ask "why?" about that thing that you've declared to be the root-cause of whatever it is you're interested in.
So, that's all rather long-winded. But the ultimate answer, in a nutshell, is, no this thing is not necessarily predicated on subjectivity - it only appears so because of where we stopped asking questions. If we ask ourselves "why do people dislike pain?", the possibility remains that there will be an objective, pragmatic reason for that, which would have the effect of putting us right back on an objective, pragmatic foundation for morality.
Is there an objective answer to why people dislike pain? There is, but whether or not you find it compelling is up to you. It starts by realizing that casting it as "deciding" to not like pain is fundamentally a mis-statement - it worked for us before, but now we want to dig deeper. Why do people dislike pain? Mostly, they don't have a choice about it in the first place - it's completely involuntary. And why should it be that way? Hmmmmm.....