"I didn't say it was unimportant so kindly stop this game where you deliberately misrepresent my words."

I didn't say you did, however when you say my idea of objective morality is silly because it's difficult to determine it, I feel the need to remind you that that has no bearing on it's importance.

"I said you can't judge the morality of actions based on events which haven't happened yet."

You actually can if you can determine the relative probabilities of future events in different timelines.

"If the participants themselves are unaware of future consequences then it cannot be said they made their decisions based on those future consequences, and therefore they cannot have any bearing on the morality of their decisions. "

You're talking about moral intent, I'm talking about moral result.

"The overwhelming majority of decisions people are faced with in life have NO bearing on general society one way or the other. They only matter to the individual parties involved."

I wish I had your ability to understand how complex systems interact without even being able to observe the entirety of the system.

"how can my actions be deemed immoral if Abraham Lincoln threatened to kill me?"

If they had a net negative effect on conscious entities then you would have caused an immoral result.

"I would have considerably more respect for you if you simply held your hands up when you get busted for talking gibberish. "

Do you mean like that time when you didn't know what the phrase "equality of opportunity" meant?

Consensus does not constitute objectivity. If everyone believes that the Earth is flat that does not make "the Earth is flat" an objective evaluation.

You are correct, but morals are conceptual in nature. The earth is not. I don't believe there is an absolute moral basis, I said that if a subjective basis can be established you can make objective evaluations.

Furthermore your observations that consensus exists about life, death, and their relative value are incorrect. Disagreement over what constitutes life and death are integral to disagreements over abortion, life support, etc. Nor is the value that is placed upon life and death uniform - our opinions are highly variable when things such as criminal history, age, race, sex, etc. are taken into consideration.

This is why I said generally rather than always. Of course there are exceptions, but the morality of life and death should not be considered in a vacuum. You weigh it against other morals and rights. In the case of abortion you have to weigh the right to life against body rights. Morality is much more than just life and death.

The basis is subjective, I said that in my initial reply. I don't believe in absolute morality, but I do believe that objective moral evaluations can be made once an agreement is reached.

Neither is it clear that everyone would agree with you that life is preferable to death (I don't). Am I objectively wrong because you and a majority of others happen to believe otherwise? Of course not; that's just argumentum ad populum. I'm only subjectively wrong according to the values you and others hold. And even if people generally believe that life is generally preferable to death, that does not mean that life is generally preferable to death but that life is generally believed to be as such. That is the subjective/objective gap, and you've failed to bridge it.

Like I said, I don't believe in absolute morality. I would like to hear your reasoning on not agreeing that life is generally preferable to death though, most intriguing.

Besides which, it isn't at all clear that people share sufficiently similar beliefs about when life is generally preferable to death to believe there is consensus there. Claiming that people generally believe that life is generally preferable to death is misleading because what is meant by the phrase "life is generally preferable to death" is not the same between persons. The ratio of value people place on life relative to death is particular both to the individual and to the circumstances. So there isn't even really an objective fact of that matter that people generally believe life is generally preferable to death.

The term generally clears most of this up. There will be circumstances in which life is not preferable to death, I do agree. But like I said earlier, issues involving the morality of life and death shouldn't be considered in a vacuum.

"If Ted buys a washing machine instead of a tumble dryer then that has no effect on any scale known to Dave, Sam and Betty. There is no quantifiable "net positive benefit" to society if Ted buys a washing machine instead of a tumble dryer."

I don't even know what you are arguing, you just gave an example with no information on how conscious entities are effected by either choice.

"The problem with your argument is that there is no such scale."

There was no scale to measure distance until one was created. We are talking about something that we cannot yet accurately measure (though we could get a rough measure) yet there is an underlying phenomenon that could theoretically be measured.

"Even if experience were bivalent (it isn't),"

Please elaborate further.

"there are no two people who would share identical conceptions of this scale such that it cannot be said that there exists a singular scale at all."

Regardless of how people conceptualize the scale of experience, there exists a point of maximum possible negative experience and a point of maximum possible positive experience. There also exists points between these that could theoretically be quantified. I don't see how people's conceptualization effects where, for example, the maximum possible negative experience lies on the scale. To me it is obvious that the maximum possible negative experience would be -10 on the scale, why would it be anywhere else on the scale?

" Persons A and B might both note their experience at 0, but that does not mean their experience is the same because what 0 signifies to each may be different and cannot be confirmed as identical. "

This is an issue with measurement through self-reporting which exists for all phenomena when measured though self-reports. Surely fMRI scans would yield more accurate results, for one example. As I say though this is simply a criticism of our ability to accurately measure the phenomenon, not of the phenomenon as existing in a manner that is quantifiable.

"You are assuming moral and experiential neutrality in order to prove the homogeneity you need to get a theory of averages off the ground."

The reason I do this in the example is the same reason that, for example, air resistance is assumed to be negligible in basic physics experiments. Things are complicated enough as they are and as such we simplify so that we can actually utilize the idea. We simply do not have the information required to holistically account for all effects an action will have. As I say, I'm not stating these assumptions are entirely true, however they are necessary to utilize this idea of moral result in daily life.

"Not only is that blatantly circular"

What, specifically, is circular? If you talk of my assumptions, once again, as implied by the word assumption, I am not stating that they are truths.

"if it were true then there would be no moral disagreements and everyone would have the same experiences (which plainly isn't the case)."

If I personally think that the sky is green, does this affect the truth or are people's opinions irrelevant to what is actually true? Is it subjective whether God exists because some believe while others don't? I personally think people's opinions have no bearing on what is actually true.

"There also is no such thing as an actual average effect because most of the effects from which the average derives will derive from that mathematical average; the effects are not "on average" anything because they remain distinct with their respective attributes, and the idea of an average effect is strictly that: an idea."

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're saying. If giving somebody $10 has an average effect (in and of itself) of +1 to the recipient's experience, can it not be said that giving somebody $10 will on average have a positive effect on the recipient's experience? I'm aware that I have simplified what we are talking about here, but I don't understand how a given action in a given situation etc. cannot have an average effect. If we perform the action 1000 times in situation X then we should expect an effect of approximately +1000 overall on conscious experience. If the action is more likely to have a positive effect relative to a negative effect then surely the action has a positive expectancy. Why is this not effective, given that it is effective in investment and gambling?

"and the idea of an average effect is strictly that: an idea."

Tell that to casinos and investors. Repeat an action with positive expectancy often enough and overall a positive result will be achieved.

" Even if it could be said that action X produces the average effect Y then: (a) that does not mean that engaging in act X will necessarily produce Y so we still cannot predict whether our action is moral until after the fact which is useless"

Yet on average we will achieve a moral result, which is what matters. It is by no means useless to use relative probability to achieve a desired result. People do this all the time, for example asking somebody the time has a chance to yield the desired information, yet the person may also decline to answer or respond with hostility. We weigh up the relative probabilities of these events and thus ask, but if there were a 10% chance of getting shot for asking the time, we wouldn't ever ask the time. The only way to measure moral result for a given act is after the fact, for obvious reasons. As previously explained we can have positive expectancy for an action though, which relates to both moral result and moral intent.

"that does not mean that people will associate the same experiential value to the effect Y so you can't accurately predict a net value even for the allegedly average effect Y. "

Effect Y is supposed to be the effect on the entity's conscious experience and thus should have a concrete experiential value. I am aware that different people respond to the same stimuli differently and thus have different experiential effects from the same stimulus. Imagine an RPG character that has damage resistance 1 takes an attack of 4 damage, his HP will decrease by 3, while a character with damage resistance 4 will lose 0 HP from the same attack. In this case the experiential effect is analogous to HP lost, not the damage of the attack.

" Poker games advance under a predetermined set of agreed upon rules and probability is predicated upon those parameters and insulated against subjective ascriptions of value or experiences of gameplay. Ethics advances under divergent subjective beliefs about value ascription and is not insulated against subjective experiences; the greater complexity of ethics lies precisely in the heterogeneity of experience and valuation which does not obtain in poker. "

I appreciate that you personally believe morality to be entirely subjective, however as far as I can see there is nothing subjective about my conceptualization of morality. With complete information an act can be shown to be categorically moral or immoral in result (if my conceptualizations are accepted as true).

"what constitutes a positive experience-effect to a conscious entity can only be known by that entity for itself."

To some degree, yes. We can however acquire this information by asking the individual or through trial and error. Even in subtle ways, people will let you know if they like or dislike what you are doing.

"We may believe that we send our children to school and that this is positive for them, but only they know whether that is the case and even what that means."

Well contrasted with not giving them an education at all, I personally think it's quite clear which has the best effect on them. You may argue homeschooling is better etc. and that's fine, I mean as opposed to not educating the child at all. If the choices are between education and no education, is it not clear which will provide the better quality of life?

"Asserting that what you view as the correct conceptualization of morality establishes the parameters for what can constitute moral beliefs begs the question, and if true would only serve to make your observation utterly meaningless. Because, yes, if you define morality to preclude disagreement with your moral beliefs then the only ones left will be in agreement... but that's a pretty boring and uninformative observation, the only function of which is to preclude discussion."

I'm not making this argument at all. You disputed that moral codes generally concern "consequential utilitarianism" and I'm stating that it seems to me that they generally do.

"Further, asserting logical entailment between your experience mattering and others' experience mattering does not prove it."

So whether you spend the rest of your life in terrible suffering or not isn't of any consequence?

"Asserting that other positions are nonsensical does not prove that they are. And asserting that 'might makes right' does not concern morality is just factually incorrect given that it is literally an observation about the nature of morality."

"Might makes right" simply states that anything you are capable of is moral and thus morality itself is wholly irrelevant to that account (because we already have the concept of ability). Just as you request evidence, I also would request evidence that ability=morality.

"All of which is besides the point, anyways, since whether other moral philosophies are correct, logical, or sensible is simply irrelevant to whether they exist; that we are discussing them as moral philosophies proves that they do and this disproves your claim."

I brought up "might makes right" because as I say, it doesn't actually seem to be an account of morality at all, rather the statement that morality is ability (which doesn't fit under any dictionary definition of morality I can find). Since morality is about ideals of human conduct or what one should do, to me it makes no sense to say the ideal of human conduct is everything you can do. For one thing, this means that you should kill yourself because you can, in addition to both keeping the cake and eating it. It appears to be an attempt to invalidate morality rather than to define it.

While I don't consider "might makes right" an account of morality for these reasons I can concede that someone somewhere considers it an account of morality and thus not all moral philosophies are concerned with consequential utilitarianism. The vast majority are though, and while I could make up a philosophy that states morality is a winged snake that lives under the sea it wouldn't fit the concept.

"What I meant was an objective basis for morality"

I've given an objective account of morality, I suppose my account doesn't truly fit either side.

"for example it is always wrong to kill, regardless of context."

If that's your definition of absolute morality then I am not a moral absolutist. I do, however, think that a net positive effect on conscious entities is always moral.

"I suppose for somebody who defines morality the way you do the problem, without the additional information, is no problem at all."

My view is somewhat consistent with moral relativism, but as I say it also is somewhat in conflict, because I do believe in moral absolutes.

"I remember when I first heard a similar problem years ago I spent a long time going back and forth internally about what the most moral action would be."

I think the reason that people (myself included) have such issues with it is because it is so far from a real life situation, partly because there would be so much uncertainty in a real life situation. As I say, it is very difficult to actually manage to do make an evil deed have a moral result. What if you push the man and he doesn't stop the train? What if the five people can escape somehow? etc. In reality we wouldn't know that the fat man could stop the train, that the train couldn't somehow stop or reroute and that the five people couldn't escape. If we push the man and any of these assumptions are incorrect then we would have made a bad situation much worse. This is precisely why we have such moral qualms about performing an evil act in service of a moral end: it's so easy to be wrong.

"It's exactly the same scenario, except you know with absolute certainty that the fat man is responsible for the brakes failing."

No change, but then since I'd kill him anyway (if everything else were somehow known for certain) I suppose that is to be expected. It's interesting how we feel that those responsible for a negative incident should bear the consequences rather than those that aren't responsible.