GAAAAHHH!!! And we were getting so close.
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.
"Things are wrong because we feel they are wrong." Nnno, that's not quite right, either. Things are wrong because they are, and we can perceive that. That's more like it. I thought we were making progess, because you said in #783, "In one sense, the experiences we have are subjective and arbitrary - you experience pain, but how you feel about pain is largely arbitrary. So in that sense, the foundation is subjective. But from there, if we accept that as the foundation, then objective reason allows us to develop a full and complete system of morality." It sounds like you're agreeing that morality has a subjective (albeit "arbitrary") basis - or axiom, might I say - which we then use reason to proceed from.
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.
But that's not really the issue. We need not concern ourselves with what the origin of pain is, or what purpose it serves, or anything other scientific understanding associated with it. All we need to know, for our present purposes, is that it exists, and that it 'urts! Thus, it becomes a foundational point of moral understanding. Can't break it down no further than that. And that, I think, is why we're at an impasse, because I think you're asking me to break it down further, and it just won't go no further.
Ah, I see now - I hope ;)
Trouble is, I just don't buy it. The problem with this thesis that there's some morality out there, some objective sense in which the things we think are wrong really are wrong, is that we all can't seem to agree on what those preceptions are. If it's a matter of us somehow perceiving something beyond us, why is it that so many of us have faulty perceptions about whatever it is? It seems to me that there are very, very few precepts of morality that are universal across societies, and the ones that come close tend to be awfully broad. Don't eat other humans. Don't have sex with your children or your siblings. Stuff like that. And while those are good and necessary precepts, they're hardly a complete system of morality. And they're not universal and omnipresent in any case - even those two precepts break down readily given the right set of circumstances.
Take something that seems obvious to us - polygamy. It is wrong for a man to have more than one wife. Sounds good, right? But there's nearly a third of the world that just plain doesn't believe that to be true. Why are we seeing something they aren't? Or are they seeing something we're not?
And it's not just that - the number of people in this world who feel that abortion is morally wrong are far outnumbered by the people who do not. There's a billion Hindus who have no particular problem with it, and 1.2 billion Chinese, not just the Orthodox Jews I mentioned earlier. Toss in the folks in the West who don't see it as a moral issue, and you're getting perilously close to a majority of humanity with no particular moral objection to abortion.
How do you reconcile that? The problem is, the only way to call it morally wrong, while being at odds with so many, and still reconciling with the belief that it exists beyond us and we simply perceive the wrongness of it, is if you basically arrogate to yourself the position of "privileged observer" - you see things others do not, and you perceive things that others do not. And why should anyone accept those sorts of claims? Why should anyone believe that you have some special insight into things that they lack?
Because that's about the only way I can think of that you can reconcile this notion that morality exists apart from us with the fact that so few people seem to see it. And even the people who think they see it tend to disagree vociferously about what exactly it is - is that beer a sin or not?
It sounds like you're agreeing that morality has a subjective (albeit "arbitrary") basis - or axiom, might I say - which we then use reason to proceed from.
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You kept suggesting that pain is something we "decide" to not like, but I don't understand how that's true. Indeed, it seems to conflict with your statement about how it's necessary that pain be unpleasant.
I'll wrap these two into one if you don't object too much, because they're pretty closely related to each other. What I've done is to treat pain as something we make a conscious decision about, even though it really isn't. I treat it as a matter of personal preference, and act as though it were a matter of preference, because it gives me some cover to act consistently later on, when we start talking in moral terms about things that really are a matter of preference. I treat it as arbitrary, because for my purposes, it doesn't really matter that it's not, and in fact it's to my advantage to treat it as though it were.
So, when I say we "decide" pain is unpleasant, it's me glossing over the truth a bit in search of some consistency. Really, you didn't have much of a choice about the unpleasantness of pain in your life - you didn't wake up one day and decide that you just didn't like pain any more, dammit ;)
What this allows me to do is to take your subjective perceptions and treat them in an objective manner - it's a way of creating a little internal consistency in this system. I don't care particularly what your preferences are or where they came from - I simply assign them the status of presumptively valid. I accept your preferences as valid, and when I combine that with one other precept - that your preferences for yourself and your life carry more weight than someone else's preferences for you and your life - I have the beginnings of a system of morality. Treating pain as a conscious decision on your part is simply to give it all a little consistency. You don't like pain, and you don't like tomatoes. Great, I say - I don't really care why you've decided that, but they're your preferences, and you should be allowed to indulge them by not eating tomatoes and by not having pain inflicted upon you.
Sure, pain "has" to be unpleasant, in a sense, while eating tomatoes doesn't. But by treating both of those cases as a matter of preference, and then saying your preferences are valid and paramount to the preferences of others for you, it allows me to treat them both the same way. No pain and no tomatoes for you - check ;)
We need not concern ourselves with what the origin of pain is, or what purpose it serves, or anything other scientific understanding associated with it. All we need to know, for our present purposes, is that it exists, and that it 'urts! Thus, it becomes a foundational point of moral understanding. Can't break it down no further than that. And that, I think, is why we're at an impasse, because I think you're asking me to break it down further, and it just won't go no further.
What I'm saying is that if you want, you can go further - you can explore why it hurts and why it's unpleasant. But by treating it as a decision, I don't have to go further and explore those issues. I merely suggest that there is an objective foundation underneath even that. The fact that pain hurts is enough to build morality on for my purposes, but just because that's where we choose to build our foundation, that doesn't mean that there's not something underneath that also. We discover that pain hurts, and we stop there, because that's all we need to know to build a moral precept with. But we could explore why pain hurts if we wanted. And there is, IMO, an objective reason why pain hurts, why it has to be unpleasant. But we don't need that information to put together a moral precept about pain - it's enough to know that it's unpleasant, and the "why" of it doesn't matter to us for those purposes.
So, yeah, I say that pain is something we "decide" about. But that's a matter of convenience for me - it's not even really true, but by treating it as though it were true, I can lump it in with all the things you do make conscious decisions about, and call it a "preference" that should be given all the respect that your other preferences are given.