That’s exactly right. And if you think that’s clearly not true, then feel free to explain the difference. Morality is about how you ought to act, period. I’m just using the predominant view in the history of philosophy. At the start, you wanted me to explain to you what morality was. Now, having had it explained quite clearly to you, you want to say that that’s not what it is, (as if you didn’t really want it explained to you at the beginning), and you’re also saying that whatever morality is, it doesn’t exist. This is clearly inconsistent on your part.
I don’t think it can get any simpler or more straightforward than defining ‘morality’ as the topic concerning how you ought to act, and ‘objectivity’ as the position that there are right and wrong answers to those questions, independently of your opinion. What could be more clear, unambiguous, and straightforward? Now what you’re asking me to do is argue on behalf of a moral theory—i.e., a specific set of criteria for answering moral questions, and argue that it is better than other moral theories. I’m happy to do that, but it’s a tangent from the point of this debate, because the only way to object to any given moral theory is by implicitly assuming that morality is objective, in order to argue that it’s objectively false. My arguments work regardless of your theory. If you want a specific criteria, take the pain argument—and my response to the poor objection of masochism.
I’m pretty sure they don’t. And you can verify this by answering whether you think the sentence, “You should not stab my eyes out with a fork” is true. If the answer is that you don’t think that’s true, then please offer some sort of explanation----because explanations are required when you say outlandish things, go against ordinary languge, go against ordinary phenomenology, ordinary experience, etc. By your rationale, these strange bizarre things called “numbers” don’t exist—they’re like goblins and gremlins. And that doesn’t strike you as odd.
You keep thinking I’ve committed to a specific moral theory, but there’s no point theorizing in the first place, unless you take morality to be objective—and the arguments I’ve made work regardless of what you theory you use. If I tell you that you always have a reason to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, are you going to say, “aha, no sometimes you should maximize pain and minimize pleasure”—because that’s incoherent. You need to do the experiments that I offered in my first post. You know, bend the knuckles on your fingers backwards, and tell me if a physiological creature of the type you are likes pain. Pain gives you a reason to act one way rather than another. It can be outweighed. But whatever else you want to claim morality is, it at least involves that. And every one of my arguments works even if avoiding pain has nothing to do with how you ought to act.