Morality is Necessarily Subjective, but Non-Arbitrary

I share your curiosity, wiploc. I hope to provoke it further. I claim that morality is necessarily subjective for the very simple reason that, were it any other way, moral expectations could be applied to objects and non-conscious things. This is because properties arising from objective modalities of interaction and detection do not essentially and necessarily discriminate between participating parties; the same properties are functionally available to all. Contrastingly, it is characteristic of subjective modalities that such discrimination does and must occur, ensuring that certain essential properties are only available to certain parties a priori (such as feelings, etc.). Thus, to say that morality is objective would be to say that moral culpability belongs to the objective modality of accessibility, open and applicable to the world indiscriminately, such that inanimate objects would be under the jurisdiction of moral prescriptions. On these grounds we could, for example, hold a hurricane morally accountable for its destruction. Intuitively, this is clearly nonsense. But to tighten this argument, we need only note that morality is both conceptually and grammatically teleological in nature (whatever its content may be). It functions in terms of intention, prescription, and end-directed behavior; these capacities do not concern properties that are functionally available to all parties indiscriminately. More specifically, inanimate objects have no such capacities. On the basis of these thoughts, any contention that morality is objective appears absurd. I move that such contentions are absurd. A thing like intention belongs exclusively and essentially to a subjective modality of observation (a mind), and therefore so does morality. The second part of my claim, that the content of morality is non-arbitrary, I will defend more syllogistically: -An agent is a discrete identity. This identity contains the ability to act as that agent. -When an agent intentionally performs an action to harm itself, it denies its identity by affirming its destruction. -But when an agent intentionally acts, it affirms its capacities to act as an agent, and therefore its identity. -Therefore, self-harm is a performative contradiction. -To assert a contradiction is irrational, and to assert a perfomative contradiction is to perform the action it concerns. -The action concerned is self-harm. Therefore self-harm is irrational. Now consider a collection of discrete agents: -Each such agent is a self, and to each of them, every other agent is an other. -Therefore, each agent occupies a category of "self" and "other" when all relations between them are considered. -For one agent to intentionally harm an "other" is for it to harm another "self". It is therefore harming an element of the category to which it also belongs. -But if it so grants that elements of this category may be harmed, then it is volunteering itself for the same treatment, because it belongs to the same category. -This constitutes the endorsement of self-harm, which is irrational. -Therefore, for one agent to intentionally harm another is irrational. Clearly this is applicable to humans in particular. Therefore, descriptively speaking, if an agent is rational, then prima facie it will not harm another agent. In such a case, the use of prescriptive moral grammar would be moot. But in the case of agents that do not satisfy the description of being fully rational, moral grammars are the basis for compelling rational behaviors of interaction between agents. Thus, I argue that morality, consisting of prescriptive claims about behavioral interaction, is a non-arbitrary grammatical recognition of the primitive logical structures intrinsic to agential identity, the symmetry between such agents, and so-called "sensory axioms" which preside over sensory experience necessarily. One example of such a "sensory axiom" is that of suffering; suffering may be declaratively formulated to state, "Harm is a problem". This is a primitive feature of experience which non-arbitrarily informs prescriptive grammars, of which moral grammar is a special case. In short, because we are not fully rational agents, we need moral grammars (prescriptions, imperatives, etc.) to compel ourselves to satisfy non-arbitrary logical structures concerning ourselves as entities. Thus stands my defense; please do have at it!