Morality is objective.

IntroductionThank you, larztheloser, for accepting. I ought to be fun going head-to-head with such a seasoned debater.Concerning your clarification, I will agree: moral principles cannot be both objective and subjective. It is a true dichotomy to say they are either one or the other.I also agree to your condition that a forfeited round will equate to an automatic loss (I'm sick of my opponents accepting and then never returning anyway).Now to begin, I would first like to say that while my arguments henceforth may appear at times to be appeals to emotion, I urge you to look at them for what they truly are: appeals to logic.Objective Morality ExplainedLet us look again at the definition of morality: "the principles concerning the distinction between good and bad (right and wrong) behavior".The two most conversional words in this definition are, of course, "good" and "bad". How can we justifiably say which actions constitute "good" behavior and which actions constitute "bad" behavior, without appearing to be merely projecting our own bias onto the problem?Before we can even answer that, we must first ask ourselves something even more fundamental. It is understood that morality is that which governs what we consider to be good and bad actions, but good and bad for what or for whom? The answer is, of course, for us. For our own well-beings, for the well-beings of our fellow people, and for the well-beings of other conscious creatures (living things which, like us, can feel happiness and pain and other sensations of the sort).Therefore, "good" actions are those which promote an overall "good" well-being of conscious creatures, and "bad" actions are those which promote an overall "bad" well-being of conscious creatures.It is not, for example, morally apprehensible to pound your fists repeatedly into the softest part of a pillow. The same cannot be said, however, for performing the same action against the softest part of a child's face. Why is this? Because the child has nerve-endings to detect the sharp pains of a bombardment of fists and sentience to induce displeasurable feelings of fear, so it is clear that by beating his/her face in, you've made the existence of at least one conscious human being less satisfactory than it otherwise would have been, at least temporarily. A pillow, on the other hand, does not have the capacity to feel discomfort over its state of enduring pummeling, so it can be inferred that beating it with your fists is amoral (neither morally good nor bad, as it is irrelevant to the principles of morality).The Value of Well-BeingThe question has now changed from "How can we determine, objectively, which actions are good and bad" to "How can we determine, objectively, which states of well-being are good and bad".It's clear to discern that well-being is somehow connected to both physical and mental health. Of course, perfect physical and mental health can be difficult to define, and we may not know everything there is to know as of yet; but that doesn't change the fact that some states of physical and mental health are objectively better or worse than others.For instance, larztheloser, can you agree that bleeding unstoppably from every orifice of your body is objectively worse to your overall well-being than, say, not bleeding unstoppably from every orifice of your body? Perhaps you can't, or else you wouldn't be proclaiming morality is subjective. Perhaps the problem here is that the value one places on well-being is subjective and, therefore, the actions which effect well-being are judged subjectively.However, this is quite parallel to saying "the value one places on logic is subjective and, therefore, logical arguments are judged subjectively". While there is no celestial rule book of logical truths and the application of the principles of logic depends on thinking minds to understand them, logic is still an objective doctrine. And logic would remain objective no matter how many people misunderstood it (or, indeed, even if every living creature in the universe misunderstood it). The same can be said for morality. No matter how many people misunderstand the value of well-being or the course of actions we must take in order to achieve maximally good well-beings, the principles of morality remain objective.I must concede that, of course, some people do not value their own well-beings. This is exemplified most commonly in suicidal acts, where one takes his/her own life at the benefit of no one. But most, if not all, of suicide attempts are a result of some form of depression, an imbalance of chemicals in the victim's brain. This is akin to the victim being, in a way, "broken" as an automobile is with a blown engine. We cannot tailor the definition of "good performance" to suit the behavior of a car with three flat tires any more than we can tailor the definition of "good well-being" to suit the behaviors or values of a person with self-harming tendencies.Logically Deducing Objective MoralityOnce you agree that some states of well-being are objectively better or worse than others, despite any "broken" or misguided discrepancies, you can agree that some actions are objectively better or worse for well-being, and therefore the principles which concern themselves with these actions (morality) are objective. Here is my four-point logical argument to summarize everything I've said thus far:1. Some states of well-being are objectively better or worse than others.2. Our behaviors and actions can effect the well-beings of ourselves and of other conscious creatures, for better or for worse.3. Morals are the principles concerned with these behaviors and actions which effect well-being.4. Therefore, some actions can be named objectively morally good or bad, depending on how they effect well-being.