Well, yes, I agree with that as far as it goes. But my point in tossing that stuff out was to say that it's not just you and I who disagree on what that foundation is - there are deep divisions among people in general about what the foundations of morality are, and what the precepts of morality are.
Set me straight if I'm off here, but did you just admit to me that you're altering reality to fit your argument? Not that your paragraph isn't entirely without justification, but... I don't know. In any case, pain is pretty much by definition unpleasant. I'm not sure what else to say in that regard.
Not altering reality per se, in the same way that calling an elephant a frog doesn't make it a frog in any sense other than the trivial linguistic sense. What I'm doing there is glossing over the differences in favor of some consistency - I'm not really arguing that an elephant is a frog, just that there are some advantages to treating elephants as though they were frogs ;)
By the same token, me saying that the unpleasantness of pain is a "decision" doesn't really make it a decision, but there are practical advantages to treating it as though it were. The unpleasantness of pain may be inevitable, but the unpleasantness of tomatoes probably isn't ;)
COOL!!!... I hope. That is, I think you're acknowledging that morality has more than just a social-pragmatic basis. Is that what you're saying? (Please say yes)
I can...sort of ;)
In one sense, using the precept that your preferences for yourself should outweigh the preferences of others for you is a subjective judgement. It's a judgement call based on what I see as the consequences of deciding otherwise. I could have just as easily said that one major precept of morality is that my desires for people are paramount to everything, including their own desires. And there have been societies predicated on exactly that premise - think of the god-kings of the ancient Egyptians, for example. What the Pharoah said was absolute law, no matter what you happened to prefer - if he said "eat tomatoes", you were going to be eating tomatoes, no matter how you happened to feel about tomatoes.
But, because of the potential consequences of a society like that - not least among them, the notion that power corrupts - I make the subjective judgment that we'd like a society where people's preferences for themselves are given more weight than other people's preferences about them. It's a subjective judgement, but not a completely arbitrary one, since there is pragmatic, practical reasoning underneath the making of that judgement, and supporting that decision.
So, yes, it's subjective, but not arbitrary. How's that? ;)
This is a relatively minor but not insignificant point: It's true that there's an objective reason why pain hurts (and not just IYO, but AAMOF), but there is no objective description of what it is. And that's what makes it axiomatic in terms of morality. It truly doesn't matter why it hurts, what biological function it serves, what neurotransmitters it involves, whatever. Finding the answers to these questions even in their most fundamental details is not only unnecessary - as you've acknowledged - but not even useful. It would provide no further insight into morality at all. Only the experience of it provides the insight.
Yes. Here I think you and I are basically in agreement. For the purposes of building a system of morality wherein inflicting pain on others is wrong, it does not really matter why people think of pain as being unpleasant - the fact that they find it unpleasant is enough. We might be interested in investigating further, and discovering why exactly it is so, but that investigation is not necessary to construct a system of morality.
So, you're saying that something can only be determined "wrong" based on its social implications? There's nothing intrinsically wrong about torturing someone, even if it would have no effect on you or on society?
Let's try looking at it from this angle: You asked me earlier, what makes it "wrong" for someone to inflict pain on me. I'm beginning to think that what you meant by that question was, What consequences would result from that action? But that, alas, is not the question; that's not what "wrong" means. Wrongness, like pain, can not be defined in terms of further consequences (though doing bad things can certainly often have adverse consequences for the doer). Now you can object by saying, "Yeah, so pain is irreducible, and wrongness is irreducible, that doesn't mean one has anything to do with the other." That's true, but since we have nothing further to go on in either case, we can define one as having to do with the other, since they're just names at that point, just as you seem to have defined it in terms of its social consequences. But societies are merely constructs, whereas human experience (I can assure you) is real.
So, yes, it's subjective, but not arbitrary. How's that? ;)
It's fine, although for a different reason than you said. It's non-arbitrariness is not due to its practical effects, but to the fact that pain, by definition, hurts, meaning that it creates an effect that can only be described as "wrong", which one has to experience to understand. Put another way, the fact that I don't like tomatoes may be arbitrary, but the fact that I can experience suffering is not.
Anyway, I want to revisit what we were talking about way way back, speculating about your reactions to those coked-up thugs breaking into your house, etc. More generally, I want to bring up the subject of any feeling of righteous anger, or of remorse for actions, or of any other type of emotion that's based directly on a perception of morality. Now it's true what you've said, that simply looking at how you feel about a subject does not, in itself, determine morality. However, if you feel one of these emotions I described, in response to a certain situation, while it may not necessarily prove that how you feel about that situation correctly reflects true morality, what it should prove is that there is in fact such a thing as right and wrong, intrinsically - the same way that if you see the color red, it does not conclusively prove that photons of a red wavelength have struck your retina, but it should prove that there is indeed such a thing as red for you to be fooled into seeing.