MORAL DYNAMICISM
A Theory of The Internal Logic of Morality: Part 1- Proving The Origin
INTRODUCTION
The morality debate has raged between the critics of philosophy for centuries. The typical stance is that morality is objective, and this somehow means that what is moral is moral for everybody regardless of preference. The other common stance is that morality is subjective, being dependent upon the feelings and biases of an individual.
But this argument, when examined a bit closer, is actually a quarrel between the intrinsic existence of morality. Moral subjectivists claim that morality is a social and cultural convention, and that it has no existence outside of this. Objective moralists claim that certain truths found in morality are true regardless of one's perspective concerning it. On one hand, it is argued that morality is determined by subjective values, on the other hand, it is argued that morality is bound by some set of universal standards nobody can change. Are these things mutually exclusive by nature or reconcilable?
Another dichotomy in the realm of morality is the perpetual debate between utilitarians and deontologists. In genere, utilitarians hold the belief that morality has some sort of quantifiable basis, such as happiness, utility, or some measure of a perceived virtue, e.g. freedom, love, character, et cetera... Deontologists in genere hold the belief that morality is based on some fundamental base of rules whether natural or dependent on something.
Which of these moral belief classifications, if any, are correct? And can these things be brought together into harmony? The truth is that these classifications are far too narrow, and regurgitating some claim that "morality is objective" or "morality is subjective" doesn't say much in terms of expressing ideas. What does "morality is objective" even mean? Does it mean morality is based on facts? What isn't based on facts though? Even feelings stem from things we know, albeit fallacy enters in. The human race has a history of obscuring truth that we usually found later to be self-evident, such as the Earth's roundness. The fact is that nothing based upon anything outside of facts has any place in rational discourse. The place for feelings is elsewhere. Thus the entirety of this theory shall be aimed at studying the facts of the matter, and tying it all together into a sensible theory of moral principles. For this reason, I shall not refer to my theory as moral objectivism or moral subjectivism, but instead, I shall give it its own name, moral dynamicism.
WHAT IS MORALITY?
Morality is the state of having morals. A moral is a standard of behavior. Any definition of a moral will necessarily imply this basic definition, otherwise we are not in the realm of determining the rightness or wrongness of an action in general. In order to define words so that I do not fallaciously prove my point via appeals to definition, I shall use their most basic and consistent definitions. Anyone can define a list of terms and use that as a way to tautologically prove an argument, but such an argument is useless if all its implications are built on false equivalences and/or changing how words should be used. Changing what words mean in order to prove an argument will inevitably result in the conclusion losing literal meaning as well, and can do nothing but serve the emotions and connotative preferences of one. This is not how rational people engage in discourse.
A "standard" in and of itself might spark definitional controversy. Clearly, a standard does not describe what people actually do, but standards describe what people should do. For example a standard might be that people should drive on the right side of the street, because if everybody does, nobody will get in a car accident from head-on collisions. It's assumed that the purpose of some standard is desirable, but obviously many things are open to interpretation. For this reason, I shall define a standard as a normative proposition intended to satsify a commonly desired end.
A thing that is "good" is compliant with some specified standard, and a thing that is "bad" or "evil" is contrary to a standard. If one is dehydrated and wishes to cease to be so, then one must necessarily drink some water. It would be bad for one to not drink water, in relation to one's desire or need for it. The standard in this case is the fact that people should drink water if they don't want to be dehydrated. Drinking water, to an extent that it satisfies the standard of avoiding dehydration, must therefore be "good."
At this point, i'm hoping the reader does not feel that I have inconspicously set myself up to win an argument by the logic of deducing my definitions down to something that agrees with itself. As mentioned previously, this is not how rational persons engage in discourse. Instead I shall use actual reasoning that doesn't necessitate the use of these particular words in order to retain accuracy. Because of this reason, you can easily replace my word "morality" with any set of characters that holds a given, single, unambiguous, and relevantly compatible definition, and you can do the same unto the words "good", "evil", or any word I have set forth to define, and this will not affect the accuracy of my argument.
THE LOGIC OF CONSISTENCY
Any man capable of speech can assort words in a random order and call it "truth" or "real-life facts". Any man can also change the things he says and continue on to say that it is true. But the moment that a truth ceases to be a truth, then truth has no obligation to remain true, which would consequentially falsify and discredit one's own truth-statement as well. If X is Y, then X is not not Y, and we must assume the identity of X and Y being the same, otherwise we aren't being "logically consistent," or using words in a way that reflects some common concept each time the word is used.
With this logic of language, we can understand that it makes absolutely no sense to say that X is wrong if it is not wrong for some specified individual. By the mandate of the moral proposition that "X is wrong" there is no variable allowing for the exclusion of select individuals. If X is wrong, and Person A performs X, it would be absurd to say anything other than Person A therefore did wrong. Such a statement would be spitting in the face of Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, and common sense itself. If X is wrong, then it is wrong for everything capable of doing wrong, and it is therefore wrong for everybody. Morality is by this logic, universal in the way it prescribes itself. If X is wrong, we cannot necessarily derive that Y is wrong, unless if Y cannot exist without X. From this we can derive that correct moral propositions must be true in universum.
IS AND OUGHT: DESCRIPTION VERSUS PRESCRIPTION
Any theory of morality should remember to keep Hume's Is-Ought dichotomy in mind, so that it might not perform the fallacy accidentally. It is important to understand that saying "X is good therefore X should be done" is not in violation of this dichotomy however, since the very meaning of good is prescriptive as opposed to descriptive.
Description is when something is described, or rather, explains how something "is". The sky is blue, grass is green, we breathe oxygen, et cetera. Prescription is when something is prescribed, i.e. explains what "ought" to be done for some purpose. We ought to breathe oxygen if we want to live, we ought to go to the store if we want to buy the groceries that are found there, we ought to be nice people if we seek their cooperation, et cetera. It's important to note that description has two variables, a thing and that which is describing it, while prescription has three variables, a current state of being, a desired state of being, and the necessary action that bridges the two.
In logical function, the terms "ought," "should," "necessary for," and "good," all mean exactly the same thing. In language, we would just place each of these things in a sentence differently to sensibly convey the message. The things that all of these words have in common is the prescription of some action for some purpose. Prescription makes no sense and cannot logically exist without a purpose. Purpose is synonymous with "ends" or one's "desires," and is decided by individuals capable of choosing between different things.
Hume's dichotomy recognizes that it is impossible to derive an ought from an is, i.e. to falsely justify a prescription with a mere fact instead of a purpose. The very meaning of "ought" entails that there is a purpose, and purpose implies desire or personal preference. At this point, some readers might assume that this dichotomy removes the reason to even attempt to come up with a moral theory. But at no point will I derive an ought from an is, instead, I shall employ a different strategy. What if the point of contention in morality is not about deriving an ought from an is, but from combining an axiom dealing with "ought" with an axiom dealing with "is" in some kind of a mutually inclusive fashion? This is the idea that I will toy with in this theory.
WHAT IS A CONCEPT?
Most every word in the english language is capable of being broken down into some kind of a definition. The purpose of a definition is to clarify the meaning of something so that the word has a practical usage case. Words in and of themselves have no intrinsic meaning, but are sets of code that people determine intersubjectively in order to communicate concepts. Concepts in and of themselves are incommunicable and require an accepted medium of communication in order to be transferred from one person to another. These mediums of communication can vary from spoken language and written language, to computer simulated images. Hand signals and various other stimuli can serve similar purposes as well.
Certain words cannot be broken down into definitions however, and this is the case for many "word functions." When I say "word function," I mean the parts of speech that don't represent something that physically exists, but exists as a way to make the way we communicate sensible. These functions include various words such as "is," "as," "it," "that," et cetera. Another word that serves as a word function is "thing," surprisingly. This seems absurd since "thing" is a noun, but the idea of a thing in and of itself is simply a way to represent the set of all possibilities narrowed down in any way a definition further chooses to narrow it. The word "thing" in and of itself for this reason is definitionless, since it is firstly not a specific existence and secondly any definition would imply that the words defining "thing" are also things, and this would pose a problem of infinite regress. Instead, we learn the meaning of the word "thing" through usage or reading up on how it is used.
A "concept" is a synonym for "thing." In essence, all things are a concept. Nothing is not a concept, not because "nothing" is disqualified as a concept, since "nothing" is a concept, but as the formation of "no thing," no thing is not a concept, therefore every thing is a concept. Not all concepts "exist", however.
EXISTENCE
Existence is a hotly debated word with many different definitions. In fact it almost seems that some things exist "more than" others. We assume that things we see exist, to a degree, but not as much as the things that are "actually there." We also assume that ideas exist "less than" things that appear in physical reality, and that ideas in and of themselves vary in "degree of existence," in which some ideas can almost make sense but others create obvious self-contradictions. Take the round square as an example.
I do not, however, wish to use a fluid and relative definition of "existence". Such sloppy planning is not conducive to establishing a philosophical work. I do recognize however that existence is a debated topic and my definition of existence might not fit yours. But for the purpose of this theory I shall use my own definition to make my writing easier, and I promise it doesn't affect the results of my argument.
I define existence as as the state of conceptual uniformity. To exist means to be perfectly conceptual, that every aspect of a given concept is consistent and meaningful, as anything other than this would constitute an anti-concept, something that is possibly thought to mean something but lacks in definitive meaning. An example of a concept could be a tree, we can use this as an example since we know for a fact that they exist. An example of an anti-concept could be a "flying tree," since nothing about a tree gifts it with the ability of flight and to find such a thing would defy everything we understand about physics, biology, and nature. Assuming we did find one however, we would adjust our status concerning it accordingly.
All anti-concepts are concepts, but not all concepts are anti-concepts. To be a concept but not an anti-concept is to be an "entity". It's important to understand that anti-concepts are not "the opposite of a concept," but are rather, the "absence of an entity" represented by the means of communication. Everything one thinks of or percieves qualifies as being a concept. Only concepts that make sense in function or demonstrate themselves in reality are entities.
All entities have essences. An essence is the intrinsic property or group of properties serving as the criteria to determine whether or not a concept exists, and if so, then how. Essences are not very easily discussed in reality, and for this reason we use "definitions" to describe things instead. An essence can only be known to the individual that considers it, and they change the moment the exact concept changes. Definitions are able to be described, and they are an individual's best attempt at recognizing the essences of something. The essence of any specific thing is nearly infinitely complex, but essences are also found in the relationship between things, and these things are recognizably finite. If you behold a single apple, the essence of that apple includes its specific curvature and chemistry, but if you behold two apples as two units of the same entity, then the only essences are the things relevant to defining it as an "apple."
Entities are also divided up into three classes: specific entities, abstract entities, and principles. Specific entities are singular things that you can observe or manipulate in reality, while abstract entities are taking all of one set of specific entities into a theoretical wholeness. For example, you may see a penguin and this would be a specific entity, but if you were to talk about penguins (in general) you would be referencing an abstract entity. An important distinction to make here is that abstract entities are only known through language and general consideration, but specific entities are actually observed or considered singularly. Principles, on the other hand, deals with many levels of abstractions built on each other to the point that nothing one says even reflects something that can be sensually imagined as a physical thing. Instead, our brains have developed a very decentralized way to treat ideas this abstract, and the level of mental sloppiness associated with it is the cause for people to be able to believe in things that is fundamentally wrong or senseless. The danger of the mental faculty dealing with principles is that it can get so hopelessly confused over wording that the definitions of words themselves perplex the very reasoning of one. It's important to remember that concepts exist independent of word structure and language.
One last point to make on the topic of existence is that it is ultimately determined by an important law in nature. This law is responsible for the stable and perpetual existence of every physical and nonphysical thing. Without this law, our universe would be chaotic and nothing would exist longer than a fraction of a second. This is the Law of Identity.
THE LAW OF IDENTITY
The Law of Identity is the most important and fundamental principle of logic, and is treated as the Aristotelian starting point in argumentation. Although it's iconically signed off as A=A, it's literal meaning is more linguistic. It simply is the assertion that "anything is itself".
Although it may be dismissed as meaningless tautological rhetoric by the skeptics, the truth statement of "anything is itself" actually holds unique epistemological properties. The Law of Identity is the only truth statement that is both analytic and synthetic, as well as being simultaneously a priori and a posteriori. The Law of Identity is analytic because it is the definition of a tautology, and it's synthetic because once the law is realized it is new information to us, since before recognizing the Law of Identity we don't know that a thing is itself. This law is a priori since it can be known through thought processes alone, and it is a posteriori because we can verify it in nature. Nothing ceases to be itself, instead, everything holds constancy, whether we are talking about objects or the processes between objects themselves.
One can begin a logical discourse by defining correct as adhering to the Law of Identity, but skeptics scoff at this as "cheating," so to speak. They want to know why the Law of Identity is correct, as if it isn't merely the way we speak. Although it makes no sense to prove the very idea of correctness correct without assuming that my objective is to be correct to begin with, I can prove that any attempt at denying the relevance of the Law of Identity ultimately results in agreeing to it. I can do this in three ways.
The first method is to simply use logic while assuming that the Law of Identity does not exist. Doing this will bring us in a complete circle, as shown: If a thing is not itself, then neither is this statement as a supposed truth itself, therefore this supposed truth must not be true, therefore this statement is not true, therefore a thing is itself.
The second way is by the process of elimination, and is brought up as a counter-rebuttal to skeptics who deny the legitimacy of the first method. A skeptic may tell you that using logic assumes the Law of Identity, and although this is not true because at no point prior to our conclusion do we assert that a thing ever equals itself, we could pretend that the skeptic is right for the sake of their argument. Accepting that "proving something" implies coming to a conclusion, we can prove that any belief held outside of the Law of Identity can't be conclusive. We know that believing in the Law of Identity is a conclusion, but what is our alternatives? If the Law of Identity is presupposed by logic, then we must adopt something other than logic. Without logic we must either use inconsistent reasoning, wholly illogical reasoning, or a lack of reasoning at all. The first two mandate that a thing is either not itself or not always itself, in which we could never come to a conclusion about anything. The third fails to come to a conclusion by failing to use reason in the first place. Hence we can conclude that the Law of Identity is true since it is impossible to come to any other kind of a conclusion.
The last resort of a skeptic may be to point out that not only does logic assume the Law of Identity, but every word one uses also presupposes the Law of Identity, in an attempt to claim that the law is unprovable since one cannot speak it into recognition of existence without their words first having identities. Although this is equally wrong for the same reason that it is wrong to think that logic itself assumes the Law of Identity, we can actually use this claim against the skeptic. The third method of proving the Law of Identity is to explain that If using coherent language, or arguing at all, presupposes the Law of Identity, then arguing that the Law of Identity is not true, also presupposes it is true, for without the utility of consistent language you could not think or even express this thought to begin with.
This last argument destroys the rational skeptic, because at this point the skeptic would have to entirely ignore the fact that his own refutation is self-detonating in favor of the Law of Identity in order to not recognize it. Thus, by claiming that the Law of Identity is false, one is forced to admit that the Law of Identity is true, if one is willing to follow logical the implications of that statement.
One last remark concerning the Law of Identity, and this is concerning the false paradox of truth. Using the proof for the Law of Identity as a gateway, we can prove that all false statements imply the Law of Identity and furthermore prove that falsity does not exist. For example, assuming that "a circle is not a circle" we can derive the concept that "a thing is not itself" and finish this process to the conlcusion that a thing is itself. We cannot, however, use the statement "a circle is not itself" and logically end up with the idea that "a circle is itself." Thus, the false paradox of truth proves to be indeed false, as it does not destroy the dichotomy between truth and falsehood, instead, it points out an aspect that strengthens this dichotomy. By recognizing that every false statement testifies to the Law of Identity, it testifies to it's own falsity, wrongness, and nonexistence, by violating the Law of Identity.
THE LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT: A SUBTLE EXTENSION OF THE LAW OF IDENTITY UPON ACTION
An action is a change in something's state of being. All actions presuppose three parts, the means (or starting point), the transformation, and the ends. The means are the starting point of an action, being the state of being prior to transformation. The transformation is the process of changing means to ends, being the state of being of a change itself. The ends are the ending point of an action, being the state of being posterior to action. Action presupposes the means because without means there is no beginning, and without a beginning something never happens. Action presupposes a transformation because without a transformation there is no change in time, and without a change in time, means never become ends and action would fail to presuppose either means or ends or both. An action presupposes ends because without an endstate (of a specific action), a state of being never changes "into" anything, therefore there would be no action.
At first, it may seem as though the Law of Cause and Effect is an a posteriori truth, due to of our perceiving of it in nature, and the lack of the apparent ability to deduce it without using it in circular reasoning. But the Law of Cause and Effect is actually an a priori truth as well as an a posteriori truth.
If something is itself, then it won't spontaneously cease to be itself. If something did cease to be itself, then it will come to pass by some form of a cause. What is a cause? A cause is any kind of action that changes the particular existence of something (and an effect is something that is caused). In order for something to act in such a way that it does change another thing, that thing must be conceptually characterized by its essence in the way that it makes a thing particularly different, and the thing being changed must also have the essence that allows it to be changed. Essentially, the Law of Cause and Effect is a logical extension of the Law of Identity, and any argumentative violation of the Law of Cause and Effect would necessarily also be a violation of the Law of Identity.
Like objects, actions are also things, and they both are terms for things that in specific instances are conceptually unique and meaningful, governed by the essence of the things. Actions exist because of their conceptual uniformity, and recognizing this fact is what helps us understand that the Law of Cause and Effect is in fact a way of applying the Law of Identity to physical reality.
Unlike the commonly held belief, inaction is not a form of action. The notion doesn't make any sense. Action is a change in a state of being, while inaction is when no change occurs in some state of being. The two are mutually exclusive opposites, and cannot exist in a particular way simultaneously. Decisions, however, could denote either action or inaction. Both types of decisions would require an initial action of thought, however.
THE EXISTENCE OF MORAL AGENCY
Agency and moral agency are two terms that are often used interchangeably, but I am going to draw an important distinction between the two for this theory. Agency, in its simplest definition, is the ability to act. An ability is having the means to some end. Agency is therefore having the means of action.
Everything in the physical universe has agency. Everything, from people, to animals, and even nonliving matter and nonmatter. If anything performs an action at any point in time or keeps the ability to, it has agency. Not everything in the physical universe has moral agency however. In fact, humans are the only known thing to have moral agency. With enough knowledge in zoology, one could make the case that certain nonhuman animals might also have moral agency, but such animals are not known to me. Moral agency is the ability to make decisions.
A decision is a little bit more complicated than an action. A decision is a conscious action between two mutually exclusive things, governed by conceptual awareness. By this definition, no known nonhuman animal has the capability of making true decisions. Nonhuman animals can't make decisions because they can't voluntarily process concepts, but everything in their mind is a cache of evolutionary data interacting with external stimuli. Humans have the same faculty, but we also have a separate faculty, of manipulating concepts with absolutely no necessitated instinctual directives. All actions of any nonhuman animal are predetermined conditionally by insincts, and will therefore not do anything that contradicts their instincts. Instincts are thought patterns that owe natural selection its existence. A purpose can be thought of as arbitrary to instincts, and is something unique to moral agents. Purposes are entirely subjective, and do not owe their existence to natural selection. Humans are unique because with our purposes, we can choose to contradict our natural instincts. This quality leads to a greater range of activities humans end up commiting, and sometimes lead to amazing evolutionary advantages. It can also just as easily suppress one's own chance of survival.
Moral agency not only allows for one to make decisions between obvious good and evil, but also choices between logic and fallacy, utility and miscalculation, and a myriad of preferences. Moral agency allows people to economize by the means of integrating new information into a situation. When you walk into a restaurant, you use moral agency to decide what entree you wish to order. When you talk to people, you use moral agency to figure out how to manipulate conversation in order to fit your needs or desires. Moral agency is a part of every human's life. No human relies solely on instincts, because it is far too easy with our complex minds to create abstractions outside of our environment. In fact, by the very presence of us having moral agency, we are gifted with the ability to defy our own instincts. A man could choose to starve to death even with a plate of food in front of him, and at any time choose to eat. An animal could not constrain itself in such a way, and if it had some kind of problem that led to this, it could not choose to reverse it.
Finally, moral agency is integrally important to this theory for its objective properties. Desiring to not have moral agency is logically impossible. One can only claim that he desires to not have moral agency, but the desire in and of itself cannot exist, and here is the reason: If desire is a decision, and moral agency is the ability to make decisions, then to desire to not have the ability to make decisions means you can't desire it in order to desire it, and this is a self-contradiction. And thus we come to the Law of Moral Agency, in which one cannot desire to lose one's moral agency, if desire in and of itself is a type of decision, and decisions presuppose that one needs moral agency in order to make them, and if one cannot desire to lose moral agency, then one must necessarily desire to have it. If a person were to say that he desired to lose his moral agency, then he would be either confused or a liar, because one cannot think that making decisions are bad if one must make them to think this. The only valid form of protest to moral agency would be not making decisions, and thus doing nothing. This cannot be a philosophy, and it would be contradictory to any notion of obtaining knowledge or exercising wisdom. Moral agency is inherently desirable for any individual to obtain.
THE CONCEPT OF EFFICIENCY
Efficiency has a few differing definitions, but in a strict philosophical sense, efficiency refers to the state of an absence of how long it takes for something to be done. The more time it takes to be able to do something, the less efficiency it has. Walking across your living room floor has some degree of efficiency, but if someone had to choose between walking to get a television remote, and reaching across the couch to pick it up from the cushion, one would almost undoubtedly always choose the latter, because the latter is much more efficient. Walking across the living room to get the remote would be much more efficient, than let's say, sailing the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California to go find an electronics manufacturer in Japan. But if they both do the same thing, achieving the same end, then why would one care the method by which he obtains it?
An important fact about efficiency is that the desire of absolute efficiency is perfectly natural. People immediately and with absolute efficiency do what they presently value the most. A person may desire to get out of bed, but until the person begins to value getting out of bed more than staying in it, the person will not leave it. Although people are perfectly efficient towards their present values, no person is perfectly efficient with their general values or "purposes." Purpose is something that evades people, since obtaining it is oftentimes a lifelong process, and there are usually an uncountably large number of obstacles. The path by which one might most efficiently obtain a purpose does not truly exist, except in a world where individuals are bound by how fast their minds and bodies are physically able to work. In terms of obtaining one's purposes, not all people act with equal efficiency. Some are excellent, while others slack and procrastinate.
We cannot prove that efficiency is desirable, since it makes sense to desire inefficiency due to the fact that not all desires are necessarily efficient, but we can prove that a person ought to desire efficiency. One ought to desire efficiency if one is to desire anything at all, since efficiency of means is inherent in accomplishing ends (The Law of Efficiency). Efficiency is inherent in accomplishing ends since an absence of time (the essence of efficiency) is required in order to finish a process. No purpose can be accomplished unless it ceases to exist in time, which is the logical equivalent of ending.
THE EXISTENCE OF MORAL POWER
Moral power is the first entirely new and undiscovered concept in the realm of morality that will be integrated into this short work. Moral power is the central concept in this theory, and it is simply the relative extension of moral agency. Unlike moral agency, moral power is relative. You can easily have more or less of it, and everything with moral agency has some level of it. Moral power is the efficiency of moral agency.
Often linguistically stylized or conceptually unpacked as "the ease of the ability to make decisions", moral power is importantly distinguishable from moral agency because of the "ease" or "efficiency" variable. The average rate at which a person's mind can process thoughts, consider two possibilities, make a decision between them, and fulfil it, is said to be the level of moral power one has.
The important thing to understand about moral power is the fact that not only is it impossible not to desire it, but it ought to be increased. It's impossible not to desire moral power because one cannot desire to lose the ability to make decisions, and losing moral power at a point would result in this. One ought to increase moral power in oneself because doing this will make it easier to do anything, and if anything is to be a purpose, then moral power is absolutely imperative. This is how you bridge the Is, with the Ought, not by deriving one from the other, but meeting the two morally-relevant axioms together, the one that is descriptive with the one that is prescriptive.
The reason I chose the axiom of moral agency is because it gave us a starting point in terms of what is even possible to desire. This will become a vital element later when we prove moral power to be the ultimate moral goal. Unfortunately, moral power is very much an abstract concept in the minds of the morally-inclined. It is so abstract that outside of this theory, moral power is not generally considered in the decision-making process of moral agents. If I were to piece together a perfectly rational theory, but lose my entire audience in the heighty level of abstraction required to comprehend it, then I wouldn't be accomplishing much of anything. This is why I shall codify a law for morality that works around even having to use the term in my conclusion.
THE GOLDEN AXIOM
The Golden Axiom is a recodification of the ever-popular golden rule. The reason i'm calling it an axiom instead is because it is self-evident in the definition of morality. The Golden Axiom states that because morality applies to all moral agents, a moral proposition not followed is either immoral or signifies of a false proposition, therefore one ought to do what one morally proposes and accept the same from others. It's another way of saying that double-standards are illegitimate, and that if something is moral, then it remains so. The Golden Axiom is founded on the idea that it would be logically inconsistent to say an act is immoral if it was not immoral for a specific person, since this would constitute an exception to the rule, devalidating either the rule or the exception, since they contradict each other.
All actions can be passed through the "Golden Axiom Litmus Test" (or GALT for short). The GALT states that something can only be a moral proposition if it is able to be done by anyone, and a moral proposition regarding something's "goodness" can only be true if it is impossible for the action not to be desired. Desire is an important variable because thats the only way any moral propositions can be integrated, by finding something desirable and trying to act in that way, and it is also an absolutely necessary variable in the concept of ought, since without desire, it's impossible to ought anything be done. For example, we may take the action of murder into consideration. Anyone can murder, so we have a moral proposition, and we can prove it's wrong since nobody can ought to be murdered, as such a thing is undesirable by definition. If one wanted to be murdered, it wouldn't be murder, but assisted suicide. In fact, all acts of coercion are necessarily immoral for this reason. If something fits the GALT and does not pass it, the action is evil, but if it does pass it, the action is good. We do not, however, always have enough information to determine this, and oftentimes we will have to leave the GALT unfinished, since something cannot fit the GALT unless it is a moral proposition that is necessarily impossible to desire or not desire. The purpose of this theory is to be able to effectively finish the GALT in any given moral proposition.
THE NONEXISTENCE OF AMORALITY
That which is moral "ought to be done", and that which is immoral "ought not to be done." But what about that which is "amoral?" The idea that something could be neither good or bad is to say that it could be neither ought to be done nor ought not to be done. This is impossible, because if something is not ought to be done then it is necessarily ought to not be done, and if something is not ought not to be done it must be ought to be done, therefore by a thing not being moral it must be immoral and vice versa.
As a different concept, however, amorality could make sense. Instead of something not being good or bad, it not being necessarily good or bad, then we have a concept that actually make sense. These can be all your mundane everyday ativities, the ones that hold almost no moral significance, and without near-perfect information, we would not always know the moral stance of such actions. This could be, for example, picking a favorite flavor of ice cream. Such doesn't seem like it matters that much, but there is technically a "right" decision. The right decision might just be which one the consumer likes more, as yielding more personal satisfaction is preferable to less. If you bring someone to an ice cream shop and this person choses the ice cream they didn't want, it's accurate to say that this person made the wrong decision. Now, maybe there is no preference. If this is the case, then the right choice may be the easiest or quickest one, as such would be preferable to taking longer. Such mundane decisions might not be very important, but it makes no logical sense to say that they aren't important at all.
BRIDGING THE IS-OUGHT GAP
Depriving people of the moral power that they could have had always violates the Golden Axiom. Nobody can desire to lose one's own moral power or desire to not obtain more of it. This desire requires considering inaction to be preferable to action, even though having desire is an action which expresses a preference for action (which is a self-contradiction), while simultaneously requiring one to consider inefficiency to be preferable to efficiency, even though desire implies some kind of purpose and inefficiency is not imperative for accomplishing the purpose (which is inherently counterproductive). By this reasoning, one cannot desire to not have moral power and should not desire to not have it. Everyone inherently simultaneously desires to have moral power and is morally obligated to obtain it.
If depriving people of moral power always violates the Golden Axiom, and if something can only be moral if it does not violate the Golden Axiom, then depriving people of moral power absolutely cannot be moral, and this is how we come to the Law of Moral Dynamicism: That which results in a loss of moral power in a moral agent is evil, and that which results in a gain of moral power in a moral agent is good. This rule can also be extended to complex problems, if we are able to quantify moral power and make a judgement upon which action will result in more of it, especially for the longer-term.
Quick Summary: Moral power is the efficiency of moral agency, aka the ease of the ability to make decisions. Causing an increase in the moral power of someone is good, because causing a decrease in the moral power of someone is evil, because if something must necessarily violate the Golden Axiom then it must be evil, because violating the Golden Axiom either means a moral proposition is false or one did evil, since all morals apply to all moral agents, because time does not alter a priori truth and the definition of "moral" is not written to be able to have exceptions to its own clause.
ESTABLISHING A LAW OF MORALITY
Although the Law of Moral Dynamicism has been discovered in order to create a infallible moral code for all those who can unpack its heighty abstractness, the very fact that it is so abstract means it isn't very useful in normal reality. In order to complete a theory of objective morality, one must render it understandable to the simplest of minds. Moral power is not a very apparent concept, in fact, moral agency is widely misunderstood and efficiency is almost never taken in it's literal philosophical sense. This very unfortunate series of facts give us all the reason to codify a law that don't require any preset definitions or non-self-evident premises. This has been the aim of secular philosophers for much of time.
The Law of Moral Dynamicism is as given: "That which results in a loss of moral power in a moral agent is evil, and that which results in a gain of moral power in a moral agent is good."
In order to turn this into a universally understandable moral law, we must unpack our concepts. Most people aren't going to understand what "moral power" means, and most people will have rationally unfounded and emotional reactions to the concepts of "good" and "evil". In order to construe a sensible string of words together that accurately represent the Law of Moral Dynamicism, we do need to use a couple of tricky words. The tricker of the two is "suspension", which means "to suspend in time" or to "cause an instance of something to take time to exist," the other word is "decision", which is just "a conceptually aware action between two or more mutually exclusive things." With these two simple words defined just briefly, with the hopeful intention that most people will intuitively already know what they mean, it is time to render the Law of Moral Dynamicism to be understandable to the average mind.
THE LAW OF MORALITY: Any decision that results in a suspension of the ability to make decisions should not be done because it suspends the ability to do anything that should be done. If it is not self-evident, suspending what should be done should not be done since it does the opposite of what should be done in every moment the thing that should be done is not done, and it violates the Law of Identity to argue that what should be done shouldn't be done.
CONCLUSION
The wrestle between the subjectivists and the objective moralists can finally be put to rest. Morality is objective in the sense that there is a uniform code that applies to all people equally, but it's subjective in the sense that this code might be applied slightly differently from person to person all depending on what creates the greatest gain for moral power in a person. For these reasons, and because morality can be a vague concept, it is not wrong to say that morality is both objective and subjective, even if these two things are defined oppositely. Subjective and objective moralism can finally be united into a singular, open-minded, and logical study of doing what is right.
As for verifying the usefulness of this theory for yourself, it is expedient that you apply it to your daily life. Think in terms of moral power. What will liberate you, and will subjugate you? Bondage is the key to unhappiness and the lack of desire to improve, while freedom is the key to ultimate joy and excellence. From here on out, it is your job to protect your own moral energy, and to protect the moral energy of others, and usually doing one makes it easier to do the other. Until next time friends, peace out.