Comment by lo_zamoyski

To go down this rabbit hole, presumably someone is hating somebody in this immoral hierarchy though? If everyone is happy with everyone, where's the immoral part? I do think the OP is right that in many circumstances of everyday life, being good usually correlates with being appreciated by people you actually have relationships with. Of course, this being real life, there are exceptions. However, while a child may complain and claim they hate you for not letting them have too much candy, they do love and appreciate you in a deeper way for taking care of them.

> Instead of naming something concrete, it makes more sense to define what the only legitimate basis for morality and the human good is, which is human nature. If you deny that, then there is indeed no possible objective basis for the good.

Quite the opposite - I agree with that, and that's why I think goodness is not an objectively evaluable property. At the risk of making you feel I'm twisting your words, you pretty much said it yourself: what the human good is, is at the very least subject to human nature. Therefore, your evaluation of goodness cannot be objective. You're at best speaking from the subjective perspective of a human being.

But if you now say this doesn't get to the heart of your overall reasoning, I agree.

Consider then if goodness is even more subjective than just being a human value - for example, imagine that individuals might have (if even just slightly but) differing natures and so differing values. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what the human nature is like is not going to be durable across people. Worse still, you may even consider scenarios where the nature of a person changes over time, or they may value different things given a specific context. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what's bad is no longer durable not just across people, but across contexts, situations, and even time itself.

Notably of course, this is logically indistinguishable from other people simply making a measurement error of the same supposedly objective property. So this all hinges on whether you (can) believe that instead of there being an ontic, fundamental property of goodness, one that you're properly accessing and others disagreeing aren't, your access is the same as anyone else's. And that regardless of whether such a property objectively exists, it may either not hold an observer invariant value, or you may never be able to tell to have learned that value.

What does "care for" mean, precisely? Is circumcising or baptizing them objectively good, so that they don't burn in hell for all eternity? What about shaping their skull in a more pleasing form? If they have ambiguous but otherwise working genitals, should you do surgery to assign them a clear sex? Or unto more mundane affairs, is it objectively good to give them baby formula instead of mother's milk, or maybe the other way around? Is it objectively good to take them from their parents and care for them yourself if the parents are not caring for them? How do you objectively determine if the parents are caring for them?

That's a bit contradictory, isn't it? If caring for helpless infants is an objective good only for those who inherently understand why that is, then that's a dependence on the observer's understanding and so it is subjective.

There's a world of difference between something being objectively a certain way, and between feeling really strongly some way about something and thinking that everyone else reasonable would feel the same way too. There are things that are encoded into (most of) our very instincts, things we (for the most part) find absolutely common sense, but this doesn't make them objective. I wish language was able to succinctly express these different levels of "being on the same page", but alas I don't believe it does at the moment, and abusing the word "objective" I can't say I love as an alternative.

I agree with you that it is good to care for helpless infants. The fact that this cannot be clearly explained to someone who doesn’t inherently agree indicates that this is not an objective good, though.

The devil’s advocate would probably also ask how it would be objectively good to protect baby Hilter, knowing that protecting his innocent infant life would lead directly to the deaths of millions.

Is caring for a helpless infant objectively good if it is infected with an extremely virulent plague that will undoubtedly kill any human who comes in contact with it, or a human who comes into contact with them, or them, many layers deep? What if that infant has 2 days to live no matter what, but millions of people will die if it's cared for?

Objective good does not exist, context is king.