What could make morality objective?

[CIN]

According to Kant,
the individual[s] and the-collective need to strive to be morally competent, relative to his current moral competency abilities. If indexed at 100 then progress to 101, 102 .. and so on, or try to achieve a quantum jump say, 101, 102, 110, 111, 115 .. and so on.

At present, while progressing to an ideal, in any casuistry dilemma, one should act spontaneously to the best of one's ability with a mindfulness of the objective ideal standard.
In the above case, the surgeon can either kill a healthy patient to save 5 premature-dying unhealthy patients [or otherwise] for whatever the reason which to him is the most rational on assumption he is committed to a path of moral progress toward the ideal.

In an emergency situations like a Trolley Cases, one should just act with as little thinking as possible but with an afterthought of how to prevent similar dilemmas happening in the first place in the future.

For Kant, one has to do one's best at the present; for the collective, it has to work towards the future [for elimination or prevention of moral dilemmas] where there are no unhealthy patients to generate any moral dilemma for any surgeon to decide.

For example, I stated, AT PRESENT, given one's psychological and moral competency, one can have as many abortions as one need to; what is needed at present is to inculcate into the individual[s] and society the need to expedite moral progress in the future in preventing the need for abortion due to unplanned births.
The moral solution is to develop high moral competence in all humans to the extent that unplanned births are eliminated or prevented to the extreme minimal so that there is no need to be bothered with the question of abortion.
Abortion is still permitted in warranted unavoidable situations, but the collective will strive to eliminate or prevent "warranted" situations to the extreme minimum in the future.

For FDP as a moral skeptic, he has no moral say in anything moral and will not be bothered with any moral progress. The same for moral relativists who has to tolerate and respect the moral views of others.

If you are a moral objectivists, what plans do you have for moral progress in the future? Engaging with moral dilemmas forever and eternally?
You don't seem to have any?

It's 50 years since I read Kant's Groundwork, so I can't claim to be very familiar these days with his moral views. I do think that he was right to condemn treating beings as mere means when they should be treated as ends, though I think his criteria for a being counting as an end were wrong: any being capable of experiencing pleasure and/or pain should be treated as an end, and not just humans.

I think aborting any being whose life is expected to have a positive balance of pleasure over pain is wrong, and its wrongness is in proportion to the size of that balance. It doesn't follow that abortion is bad: for example, it would probably have been wrong to abort Hitler, because his moral standing was probably high, but it would have been a good thing to abort him because millions of people would have lived longer and happier lives. The same goes for other evil dictators such as Putin. Personally in such cases I would choose goodness over rightness, but I can't justify that choice on any objective grounds.

Abortion may be wrong and yet no-one be morally to blame: this will be the case if the people responsible for the abortion either don't realise they are doing wrong, or have no effective free will and couldn't have done otherwise.

As for moral progress, better planning of pregnancies should reduce the wrong of abortions, but at the end of the day I'm an amateur philosopher not a social planner, so I don't regard it as my responsibility to produce plans for future progress in the behaviour of the population.

[Veritas Aequitas]

According to Kant,
the individual[s] and the-collective need to strive to be morally competent, relative to his current moral competency abilities. If indexed at 100 then progress to 101, 102 .. and so on, or try to achieve a quantum jump say, 101, 102, 110, 111, 115 .. and so on.

At present, while progressing to an ideal, in any casuistry dilemma, one should act spontaneously to the best of one's ability with a mindfulness of the objective ideal standard.
In the above case, the surgeon can either kill a healthy patient to save 5 premature-dying unhealthy patients [or otherwise] for whatever the reason which to him is the most rational on assumption he is committed to a path of moral progress toward the ideal.

In an emergency situations like a Trolley Cases, one should just act with as little thinking as possible but with an afterthought of how to prevent similar dilemmas happening in the first place in the future.

For Kant, one has to do one's best at the present; for the collective, it has to work towards the future [for elimination or prevention of moral dilemmas] where there are no unhealthy patients to generate any moral dilemma for any surgeon to decide.

For example, I stated, AT PRESENT, given one's psychological and moral competency, one can have as many abortions as one need to; what is needed at present is to inculcate into the individual[s] and society the need to expedite moral progress in the future in preventing the need for abortion due to unplanned births.
The moral solution is to develop high moral competence in all humans to the extent that unplanned births are eliminated or prevented to the extreme minimal so that there is no need to be bothered with the question of abortion.
Abortion is still permitted in warranted unavoidable situations, but the collective will strive to eliminate or prevent "warranted" situations to the extreme minimum in the future.

For FDP as a moral skeptic, he has no moral say in anything moral and will not be bothered with any moral progress. The same for moral relativists who has to tolerate and respect the moral views of others.

If you are a moral objectivists, what plans do you have for moral progress in the future? Engaging with moral dilemmas forever and eternally?
You don't seem to have any?

It's 50 years since I read Kant's Groundwork, so I can't claim to be very familiar these days with his moral views. I do think that he was right to condemn treating beings as mere means when they should be treated as ends, though I think his criteria for a being counting as an end were wrong: any being capable of experiencing pleasure and/or pain should be treated as an end, and not just humans.

Kant's morality is confined to humans only whilst he did provide for compassion to non-humans animals in another topic like virtue which is independent but complementary to morality and ethics.
It is applying Occam's, else mixing too many things in one pot with too many cooks is a mess that will reduce efficiency.

"Treating humans as 'ends' means we should always treat people with respect and value them for who they are, not just for what they can do for us. We should see them as ends in themselves, as beings with inherent worth and dignity."

I think aborting any being whose life is expected to have a positive balance of pleasure over pain is wrong, and its wrongness is in proportion to the size of that balance. It doesn't follow that abortion is bad: for example, it would probably have been wrong to abort Hitler, because his moral standing was probably high, but it would have been a good thing to abort him because millions of people would have lived longer and happier lives. The same goes for other evil dictators such as Putin. Personally in such cases I would choose goodness over rightness, but I can't justify that choice on any objective grounds.

Abortion may be wrong and yet no-one be morally to blame: this will be the case if the people responsible for the abortion either don't realise they are doing wrong, or have no effective free will and couldn't have done otherwise.

As a moral principle i.e. theoretically, abortion is absolutely not permissible and is to be avoided at all costs.
However, in practice, abortion is not to be condemned and is allowable taking into account the unavoidable present circumstances of humanity but with the strong awareness and not abandoning the above theoretical principle.
It is this theory <-> practice complementariness that will facilitate moral progress, i.e. a fixed objective to be grounded and improved upon progressively.

The theoretical moral principle, 'abortion is absolutely not permissible' is objective as grounded on the main moral principle, 'the oughtnot-ness to kill humans by humans'.
I have argued [in many threads here] this can be verified and justified empirically via the scientific framework and system [FS], thereupon transmuted into the moral FS as an objective moral fact to be used as an ideal standard to guide moral progress.
This moral objective fact is merely a guide only, so there should be no enforcement at all.

As for moral progress, better planning of pregnancies should reduce the wrong of abortions, but at the end of the day I'm an amateur philosopher not a social planner, so I don't regard it as my responsibility to produce plans for future progress in the behaviour of the population.

My point is, we need to plan [to the best of our abilities] for at least a theoretical moral model that will reduce and prevent "unplanned abortions" and also "abortion that are warranted at present" [extended to all evils] progressively in a future time. Given, there is no perfection, this will leave abortion to be done only in the extreme worst scenario that necessitate it.
With the moral principle in mind and driven by it, we will strive to find the root causes of whatever is inevitable at present and take corrective steps to prevent its happening [where possible] in future.

This sort of acknowledging the reality of evil at present and planning for the future to eliminate and prevent all evil, is within the ambit of philosophy.

[Peter Holmes]

That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact. It's not a feature of reality that is the case, regardless of opinion. It's a moral opinion. Or call it a moral principle or belief. And that's fine.

[Belinda]

That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact. It's not a feature of reality that is the case, regardless of opinion. It's a moral opinion. Or call it a moral principle or belief. And that's fine.

So is "do not kill people" not morally objective?

[CIN]

That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact. It's not a feature of reality that is the case, regardless of opinion. It's a moral opinion. Or call it a moral principle or belief. And that's fine.

So is "do not kill people" not morally objective?

I would say that killing a human, other things being equal, is objectively bad. The argument runs like this:
1. To say that X is good is to show a pro-attitude to X and also to imply that that pro-attitude is appropriate to X.
2. A pro-attitude is appropriate to pleasure.
3. Therefore pleasure is (intrinsically) good.
4. Therefore it is (instrumentally) good to cause a being to have pleasure, and bad to prevent the having of pleasure by a being.
5. If a being would have more net pleasure (i.e. more pleasure than pain) if it was not killed, killing that being prevents the having of net pleasure by that being.
6. Therefore, if a being would have net pleasure if it was not killed, then other things being equal, killing that being is bad.

Notes:
1. Humans obviously qualify as beings in this context.
2. Re step 1: see A.C.Ewing, The Definition of Good, p. 152: 'We may therefore define "good" as "fitting object of a pro attitude".'
3. Re step 2: there's a vast amount of empirical evidence for this from both human and animal behaviour. See also Irwin Goldstein's excellent paper, Why people prefer pleasure to pain (on JSTOR).

To show that killing is objectively wrong, as opposed to objectively bad, is trickier, because it gets us into the issue of moral standing, but I'll have a go if you wish (though it may not be today).

[Peter Holmes]

That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact. It's not a feature of reality that is the case, regardless of opinion. It's a moral opinion. Or call it a moral principle or belief. And that's fine.

So is "do not kill people" not morally objective?

No. A command (an imperative) isn't a statement (a declarative). So it can't be a factual assertion: X is or was/isn't or wasn't the case.

[Belinda]

That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact. It's not a feature of reality that is the case, regardless of opinion. It's a moral opinion. Or call it a moral principle or belief. And that's fine.

So is "do not kill people" not morally objective?

No. A command (an imperative) isn't a statement (a declarative). So it can't be a factual assertion: X is or was/isn't or wasn't the case.

Okay. Is "It is wrong to kill people" morally objective?

[Peter Holmes]

So is "do not kill people" not morally objective?

No. A command (an imperative) isn't a statement (a declarative). So it can't be a factual assertion: X is or was/isn't or wasn't the case.

Okay. Is "It is wrong to kill people" morally objective?

That's the issue here. And I think not, because 'objective' means 'factual' or 'based on facts' - and there are no moral facts, but only moral opinions. So the expressions 'moral fact' and 'moral objectivity' are incoherent. For example, it can't be a fact that X - say, abortion - is morally wrong or not morally wrong.

[promethean75]

If ethical statements can't express propositions, they can't be true or false. So they certainly can't be objective in any sense. But they're still meaningful prescriptively in the way your homeboy R.M. Hare meant.

[Veritas Aequitas]

That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact. It's not a feature of reality that is the case, regardless of opinion. It's a moral opinion. Or call it a moral principle or belief. And that's fine.

As stated a "million" times.

The problem is your 'what is fact' is grounded on an illusion.
PH's 'What is Fact' is Illusory
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39577
Thus your statement above has no credibility nor objectivity.

"That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact." is a strawman.
I have never asserted the above.
What I stated was:
'the oughtnotness [a noun] of humans killing humans" is a FS-fact. i.e. it is contingent to a collective-of-subjects human-based FS like that of the scientific FS. In this case, since we can have objective scientific facts from the scientific FS, we can have moral facts from a credible moral FS.
It is mind or subject[s] independent thus objective because it is grounded on a collective of subjects and not based on one subject's opinions, beliefs or judgments.

[Veritas Aequitas]

So is "do not kill people" not morally objective?

No. A command (an imperative) isn't a statement (a declarative). So it can't be a factual assertion: X is or was/isn't or wasn't the case.

Okay. Is "It is wrong to kill people" morally objective?

Commands like 'ought not' 'should not' is not a fact per se.
The same with 'right' or 'wrong' which are very ambiguous terms thus subjective.

We need to establish a proper definition for what is fact.
PH's 'what is fact' based on absolute mind/human-independence is grounded on an illusion.

What is fact is always contingent upon a human-based framework and system, it cannot exists otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact

What is objective means it is independent of a [one]* subject's opinion, beliefs and judgment.
* or a disorganized number of people.
Any resultant conclusion [realization and proposition] from an organized group of people [framework and system] is a fact of varying degrees of credibility and objectivity of which the scientific FS is the gold standard.

Thus the realization and proposition from an organized moral framework and system produces moral facts which are objective [as defined].

The "oughtnotness of humans killing humans" is a derivation from a moral framework and system, so it is an objective moral fact.
This need to be supported with empirical verifications and justification. [done elsewhere].

So, morality is objective as conditioned upon whatever the justified objective moral facts, e.g. "oughtnotness of humans killing humans"

Analogy:
The expression of emotions are obviously subjective i.e. different with each individual.
But 'emotions' as objective when we refer to the universal physical neural mechanisms in all humans at source that trigger the emotions.
There is no denial emotions are objective within the science-biology-psychology FS in terms of its universal physical neural mechanisms.

The analogy is applicable to morality.
While there are loads of different moral sentiments between humans, there is a universal moral neural mechanism within all humans which qualifies morality to be objective.

The above approach to moral is objectivity in terms of its universal elements is to facilitate and expedite moral progress within humanity.
The universal objective moral facts are only to be used as a standard and guide for moral progress, never to be enforced upon individuals.

On the other hand, if morality is not established as objective, then, anything goes with a pandora box of evils with no objective standards to guide moral progress.

[Veritas Aequitas]

If ethical statements can't express propositions, they can't be true or false. So they certainly can't be objective in any sense. But they're still meaningful prescriptively in the way your homeboy R.M. Hare meant.

Anyone can make statements.

It is evident, humans are striving to be one-up of the current status in whatever is positive to humanity, e.g. knowledge, technology, and thus morality.

To facilitate and expedite moral progress, there is a need for morality to be factual and objective.

At present those who opposed that morality is objective got their definition of 'what is fact' wrong [illusory] which impacts moral elements as facts.

PH's 'What is Fact' is Illusory
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39577

See my post above in establishing the effective definition of "what is fact" and "what is objective" which enable the resultant that morality is factual and objective.
In this sense, moral facts are true, not false as verified and justified within a moral framework and system.

It is on this basis that morality can be facilitated and expedited in its progress within humanity progressively from now to the FUTURE [no immediate progress now].

[Veritas Aequitas]

That humans ought not to kill humans is not a fact. It's not a feature of reality that is the case, regardless of opinion. It's a moral opinion. Or call it a moral principle or belief. And that's fine.

So is "do not kill people" not morally objective?

I would say that killing a human, other things being equal, is objectively bad. The argument runs like this:
1. To say that X is good is to show a pro-attitude to X and also to imply that that pro-attitude is appropriate to X.
2. A pro-attitude is appropriate to pleasure.
3. Therefore pleasure is (intrinsically) good.
4. Therefore it is (instrumentally) good to cause a being to have pleasure, and bad to prevent the having of pleasure by a being.
5. If a being would have more net pleasure (i.e. more pleasure than pain) if it was not killed, killing that being prevents the having of net pleasure by that being.
6. Therefore, if a being would have net pleasure if it was not killed, then other things being equal, killing that being is bad.

Notes:
1. Humans obviously qualify as beings in this context.
2. Re step 1: see A.C.Ewing, The Definition of Good, p. 152: 'We may therefore define "good" as "fitting object of a pro attitude".'
3. Re step 2: there's a vast amount of empirical evidence for this from both human and animal behaviour. See also Irwin Goldstein's excellent paper, Why people prefer pleasure to pain (on JSTOR).

To show that killing is objectively wrong, as opposed to objectively bad, is trickier, because it gets us into the issue of moral standing, but I'll have a go if you wish (though it may not be today).

1. To say that X is good is to show a pro-attitude to X and also to imply that that pro-attitude is appropriate to X.

It appear there is nothing in the above to stop 'genocides' [or whatever evil to us] as X being good [relative to their definition] and showing a pro-attitude to 'genocide'*.
* those who believe genocide is good for their cause will not label it as 'genocide' but some positive terms [e.g. cleansing] relative to their ideology or beliefs.

I believe it would be more effective to define "morality" as 'the management to eliminate and prevent evil to enable its related good to manifest spontaneously'.
To effect the above, we need an effective moral framework and system [a moral model].

If genocide is identified as evil, then the task of morality is to eliminate or prevent genocide.
In this case, we need to have an exhaustive list of 'what is evil'.
We need not have to focus on 'what is good' because the related good will naturally emerge when the related evil is got rid off, prevented or reduced to most possible minimum.

To enable the above approach, one has to define what is morality, fact and objectivity effectively. I have done that in the prior three posts.

What is critical is the drive to achieve expeditious moral progress that is universal for humanity.

[henry quirk]

it can't be a fact that *X... is morally wrong or not morally wrong

Heaven help us if you're right. I, for one, have no interest in livin' thru a repeat of humanity's spicer periods. As I say elsewhere: even if natural rights are just a clever construct, a fiction, I can see no downside to livin' as though every person has them.

*an abuse or violation of another's life, liberty, or property

[Belinda]

No. A command (an imperative) isn't a statement (a declarative). So it can't be a factual assertion: X is or was/isn't or wasn't the case.

Okay. Is "It is wrong to kill people" morally objective?

That's the issue here. And I think not, because 'objective' means 'factual' or 'based on facts' - and there are no moral facts, but only moral opinions. So the expressions 'moral fact' and 'moral objectivity' are incoherent. For example, it can't be a fact that X - say, abortion - is morally wrong or not morally wrong.