Again, who belongs in the ingroup involves reasoning and facts about rights and capacities.

You can’t cause “harm” to a rock, because a rock has no preferences. (Comment #46) “The environment” is also an abstraction without sentience and preferences.

See Comment #68 for animals.

This is not the definition of ‘morality’ in any society, it’s the definition of ’selfishness’, or ‘immorality’ if it means hurting others. The concept of morality inherently means something different: behaving in a fair way to reduce or not cause harm to others.

Again, this just begs the question: which entities count as “others” worthy of consideration? Can we cause harm to non-human animals for our own benefit and still be moral? Insects? Plants? Rocks? The environment in general?

I don’t know of any time and place where a motivation of causing more harm was considered ‘good’ by local standards. In many instances harm is and has always been (often tragically) caused in perceived service of a greater prevention of harm.

I think we’re through, here.

Wikipedia, which does dissect the concept says: Generally speaking, morals are basic guidelines for behavior intended to reduce suffering in living populations.

The concept of morality inherently means something different: behaving in a fair way to reduce or not cause harm to others.

That is not what the word means. Please see this, this, and this.

if psychopaths take over the world and kill all other humans, does it change objective morality?

Read comment #52. Yes, it wouldn’t “change” it, it gets rid of it.

More specifically, psychopaths, as intelligent, selfish actors would still use reciprocity, which provides a basis for cooperative behavior even between entirely self-interested agents (’you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’, ‘mutually assured destruction’, etc). But they wouldn’t have the capacities which characterize the moral concept: fairness, empathy, altruism.

Micha,

The racist can make the following argument: All else being equal, satisfaction of one’s preferences, even aesthetic preferences, is a moral good.

See comment #52 and #72. This is not the definition of ‘morality’ in any society, it’s the definition of ’selfishness’, or ‘immorality’ if it means hurting others. The concept of morality inherently means something different: behaving in a fair way to reduce or not cause harm to others.

Because all of these arguments (Kant’s Universalizability, Mill’s Harm Principle, Spencer’s Law of Equal Liberty), while plausible and to various degrees persuasive, are not objectively provable through facts or logic.

What do you think we’re trying to prove with facts and logic? I’m trying to prove facts about humans. And, in fact, the success of those civil rights movements and the proven persuasiveness of the ethical arguments you list, among other things, do indeed demonstrate factual truths about human morality: it is altruistic. Human beings selflessly desire the well being of others when those others are perceived as the “ingroup”.

Your racist argues that black appearance justifies unfairness, but there is ample reason to believe that is not the genuine source of his mistreatment. The same history would have created the same outcomes if the skin colors were reversed. Historical circumstances created an unfair arrangement which was then necessarily justified and maintained with false facts to appease the moral instincts.

The civil rights movement provided the images and arguments that contradicted the false facts. If outgroup status was justified by false claims about the humanity and capacities of blacks, the images of dogs attacking the defenseless, and reasoned black pleas for empathy and equal treatment were indeed factual rejoinders to those justifications.

Comment #68 deals with this further, as does Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle. Who belongs in the ingroup involves reasoning and facts (mediated by emotions) about rights and capacities.