Atheistic Objective Morality

Thanks for the debate Con, it should be fun.Both Con and I were discussing this topic in the forums, when we came across some contention.Like most members of this site, we simply had to debate it.I appreciate that god has been effectively removed from this debate, so we can actually discuss this.*Burden*I have the burden in this debate, because I'm advancing a positive claim that morality can be based on facts. "Can be" implies that there may be exceptions, but that it is at least possible for morality to be objective, and that's what I'm going to attempt to prove.*Morality*The principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong behavior can be reduced to principles concerning the distinction between beneficial and detrimental actions with respects to humans' and conscious creatures' homeostasis, experience, and well being.*Objectivity*As long as something is based on facts, it can be considered objective, and I will argue that moral values are facts; these objective facts are the standard by which we determine right and wrong behavior.*Morality Can Be Objective*I argue that right and wrong behavior is necessarily contingent on the well being, therefore homeostasis, of humans and conscious animals, especially those close to us.I define conscious animals as those that contain the proper neural substrates for consciousness and intention.http://fcmconference.org...More specifically, morality values those conscious animals who can experience the heights of consciousness experienced by humans.I also argue that if the idea of right and wrong, morally speaking, isn't contingent on the well being of humans and/or conscious creatures, then "right" and "wrong" are useless, empty terms, not worth indicating or striving for. Let's take, for example, health.There may be upwards of a thousand different ways for people to be healthy or commit healthy actions, but the distinction between ingesting poison and ingesting nutrition is about the clearest distinction between healthy and unhealthy we can make; the distinction is objective because of the objective effects on health.Is there something objectively unhealthy about ingesting poison?Who are we to say that someone who enjoys vomiting all of the time from ingesting poison has something nutritionally wrong with them?It might be that someone enjoys chronically vomiting corrosive hydrochloric stomach acid from ingesting known poisons.Is there something objectively unhealthy about that?Is there something nutritionally wrong with that person?I'm saying, yes, of course, and thanks to our understood body of facts about health, we can make this assessment of healthy and unhealthy objectively, nutritionally right and wrong, despite rare exceptions of those who may enjoy vomiting ingested poison chronically.For example, if your child had been running around for hours, and, as a result, had become dehydrated, it would be a perfectly healthy behavior to administer water (H20) to them, because this action would lead to their homeostasis, therefore their well being; this would be objectively regarded as a healthy, or a nutritionally beneficial/good action.Now imagine that instead of H20, you decided to administer H2O2, the only difference between the two being one more little oxygen atom.Well, since hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a known poison, this would objectively NOT be the healthiest/nutritionally good behavior to hydrate your child.https://www.nlm.nih.gov...Not only would your child not become hydrated, they could experience intense gastro-intestinal suffering, uncontrollable vomiting, and if it's pure hydrogen peroxide, your kid will likely suffer a violent death from such an action.I argue that the distinction between "dead" and "healthy" is yet another very clear distinction that we can objectively make given facts of health and nutrition, and that we can determine behaviors that objectively lead to/away from "healthy" and "dead."You may say, well that's not good enough, because there are exceptions like chemotherapy, where it would be healthy to administer poison to someone to rid them of cancer.I fail to see why exceptions negate objectivity.Let's take an objective domain like the principles of right and wrong in ice hockey.There's a clear, objective goal to win, and this leaves behaviors that objectively lead to success and objectively lead away from success within the objective domain of hockey.If you want to play a good game of hockey, keeping the goal keeper (net minder in Canadian) in goal is nearly always a good behavior.But of course, there are exceptions where removing the goal keeper may be the best move to make, which would allow for more skaters on the ice to increase the chances of scoring in a time-sensitive circumstance within the objective-goal-oriented-game.This negates NOT the objectivity of keeping a goal keeper in goal being an objectively good behavior within ice hockey.There are just a range of objectively good behaviors within the objective domain.*Conclusion of My Case*Why would we think that morality is somehow immune to this objectivity?Any action that one could consider to be moral can be weighed by whether or not that action leads to human/conscious animal well being/homeostasis, much like a move in hockey either leads to the objective goal of victory or it doesn't. We further determine "right" and "wrong" actions with facts, like administering H2O is perfectly conducive to hydrating your child, while administering a seemingly similar compound, hydrogen peroxide (H202), is not only detrimental, it flies in the face of objective, positive health/well being BECAUSE of the facts of chemistry, nutrition, and health.Therefore, objectively, the distinction between "right" and "wrong" behavior is determined by facts of human homeostasis/well being, and these facts inform our values sans personal interpretation.The actions that objectively lead AWAY from threats to well being/homeostasis are MORE MORAL than those that lead toward detriments to well being/homeostasis. I await a robust discussion from Con.Con?