Mmmm, perhaps not quite. And I think that may be because in #778, I may have misunderstood what you were saying in #777. Anyway, the point of my statement was not to comment on what causes pain to exist. I'll re-post it so we can have it as a reference: "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." The "alternate explanations" that I was referring to (or thought I was referring to) were not explanations for what causes pain, but explanations for why certain things are morally wrong. I was saying that if you rely exclusively on objective and pragmatic criteria, such as I described, for determining the rightness or wrongness of something, then you're missing a huge piece of the puzzle. And that's what you seemed be corroborating in #783: "The thing itself doesn't change, only people's subjective perception of it. But we simply accept those subjective perceptions and proceed as objectively as we can from there." In other words, you seemed to be agreeing that subjective experience is a valid basis for determining morality.
Because of how I've built this system of morality, it relies in large part on the "subjective" perceptions of people - that they've "decided" that pain is not something they like, that it is unpleasant. What I wanted to get across though, is that this "subjectivity" is as much a quirk of the language we are using. Yes, things appear to be subjective at that point, using that frame of reference. But when you step back, what appears to be a subjective decision dissolves and reveals itself to have a pragmatic foundation in turn. Pain has to be unpleasant, in a sense - there's a pragmatic reason that it must be so.
That may be what I was getting at, but in re-reading, what it sounds to me as though you want to say is that we can base a system of morality on subjective experiences, rather than upon pragmatic concerns - things are wrong because we feel they are wrong, rather than because we've reasoned that something ought to be wrong due to the potential consequences. And certainly, you can do that - that's more or less the system we've got now. But you don't have to do that - a self-contained system based on pragmatic principles could be made to serve just as well.
You can construct a system of morality based on the things we "feel" are wrong, and subjectively perceive to be wrong. That might lead to some rather odd moral pronouncements, but you can do it - imagine if the notion that white pants after Labor Day were considered a moral imperative, instead of a simple faux pas. Or, to pick a real example, imagine if buying underwear and beer on a Sunday were considered morally verboten....
Ultimately, I think a society based on a practical sense of morality is likely to be freer than one that's based on our simple intuition and subjective feelings about what should be "wrong" for people to do. If someone does something that does no harm to others, why should our visceral feelings about that thing override someone else's preferences? You'd probably see no real harm in having a beer while watching the ball game, or whatever it is you do, but Islam and the Women's Christian Temperence Union both proceed from the assumption that that action is inherently sinful, regardless of how you feel about it, or whether any harm is done by it. That strikes me as unacceptable - I only suggest that we make the same calculation about the harm of a beer at the ball game in everything else as well. If we cannot show how someone is harmed by a thing, what right do we have to say that it is "wrong"? God told us it was?