Of course morality is about how you ought to act, but it’s not merely about how you ought to act. This is what you said – “But as it is, morality is the topic about ‘how you ought to act’” Implying that any time we’re talking about how one ought to act, we’re talking about morality. That’s the implication of your statement. And that’s clearly not true. We can talk about how we ought to act in loads of scenarios without talking about morality – again, by your own admission. So, can we agree that morality is not just the topic about how you ought to act? Can we agree that it’s actually a more specific sub-topic of the broader topic about how you ought to act?
Now, when you say “morality exists,” and then you defend that statement by saying, “You can’t go a single day without wondering about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and whether you should keep doing it,” that really, really confuses me. “Morality exists” to you is the same thing as saying “people sometimes wonder whether they should do something.” That’s a pretty shallow form of existence. Yes, people sometimes wonder what they should do. I completely agree. If that’s what you want “morality exists” to mean…I guess I can agree to that, though I’ll cringe while doing it. It’s a weird use of the term, but…I guess tentatively acceptable. I’d prefer if you left “existence” out and just explicitly said “people sometimes wonder what they should do,” as that would be more direct and avoid confusions. Most people mean something different by the phrase “morality exists,” I’m pretty sure.
In fact, that last suggestion, about leaving ‘existence’ out of it – if we continue, that’s actually going to be a very important motif. Reducing your terminology into more clear, precise terms that have no ambiguity.
So, if you want to continue, I’d appreciate it if you removed some of the ambiguity about what morality itself means. We can’t properly talk about the existence/objectivity of something if what we’re talking about isn’t even clearly defined. Do you want to stick with some form of the definition, “Prudence in situations that really matter”? If so, prudence HOW? Personal expected utility? Personal expected value? Group expected utility? Group expected value? Upon what criteria is prudence judged? And how are we judging what “really matters” as well?
Now, I want to throw a caveat out there, something that wasn’t explicitly stated before: if you define morality in such a way that it’s objective, but not binding (ie it doesn’t really matter if I behave morally or not), or the definition has some other clear failure along those lines, you’ve not won. You’ve just defined morality into a useless but trivially ‘objective’ corner.
For example, if I define moral actions as “Those actions which have the highest likelihood in resulting in me getting twinkies,” then the case could certainly be made that that form of morality is ‘objective’ in the sense that some actions have objectively higher likelihoods of me getting twinkies than others. But it’s so far removed from anything anybody else means by morality, and there’s no sense of binding-ness to it, so that wouldn’t be any sort of convincing victory in the case of this debate. Proving morality is objective in such a way is like proving God exists by defining God as a Payless Shoe Store.
So, even if your definition does turn out to be demonstrably ‘objective’, whichever definition you choose, it may not hold in other areas of moral relevance – like being binding, or remotely resembling anything anybody else means by morality. If you prove that it’s objective, but have to define it into uselessness to do so, then you’ve not won.