I can only give examples where well-being is not the motivation behind the existence of the moral distinction, you can always tie it back to the well-being of one of the parties. If I said cheating was wrong because people thought it was unfair - you could make an argument for how that unfairness impacts on peoples well-being. If I said premarital sex is immoral in many cultures, you could make an argument about spiritual well-being. If I talked about Sati, where wives follow their deceased husband into death through self-immolation or hanging, could you make some argument about the well-being of the family or something? Perhaps, since you don't need evidence or anything you can make an argument. Is that really the reason people care about these issues? No, it isn't. The origins are cultural/religious, many moral actions don't explicitly have anything to do with morality, many actions are not cared about due to their relevance to well-being.Can you provide an example of a moral distinction that does not involve well-being?
I could make an argument that your every action is related to well-being very easily. You eat, walk, talk, breathe, drive, think, act - all for well-being - I can argue. Will you say "No actually I do this out of a sense of duty" or "I do this because I believe in principles x and y" probably, but I can still argue it's for well-being. It's not a compelling argument.
Would things like brushing your teeth, eating healthily, getting a good job, socializing, eating healthily, dealing with depression and so on, not become moral imperatives? If what is required for something to be moral is how it relates to well-being?Such as?I'm not sure why this is your reply, what I said was that if that distinctions about the morality of behaviour are dictated solely by motivations to preserve well-being then you get behaviours which dilute the meaning of morality.
Also morality is not fundamentally, an interpretation of how best to spread well-being across peoples. We've seen morality function in religions, societies and states as being ways of controlling the masses. We've seen morality functioning to maintain groups of people to live together in harmony. We've seen morality used in revenge, capital punishment, capitalism-style each man for himself, only the strong survive and so on. To simply all of this to "maximize well-being" is a misrepresentation of history. Once again I must say, although it's being ignored that while this is an interesting conversation I don't see the relevance to the topic. You think if you can simplify morality into a functional definition, that you are demonstrating objective morality? More on this later.
Morality is itself an interpretation, I don't think you appreciate how dysfunctional what you've said about morality has been so far. You told me that all there is to morality is differing interpretations about how to preserve well-being, you've made a definition for well-being that with suitable interpretation is applicable to nearly every possible action. People need to prioritise their well-being, the well-being of others, the different types of well being against each other, to determine what constitutes their actual moral distinctions. The only thing that saves me from completely flipping this moral compass on its head by saying "my well-being or the well-being of my people takes complete priority" is your claim that some interpretations can be wrong without really elaborating.Plausible reasoning will always be necessary
What meaning does objective morality have, when my moral distinctions are completely subjective? I don't know the first thing about physics but in morality, interpreting what to do with existing things and options is the quintessential aspect of what morality is. Morality is about what you should be doing, morality is the reasoning that guides us between right and wrong. To define morality as objective, you need to say which interpretations are right and wrong, if you aren't doing that and instead letting people decide then it's relative.
There is no epistemic objectivity in making a distinction between behaviours, there is only possible validity for subjective premises (like well-being). Epistemic means relating to knowledge, what can be known - no? How can you call a distinction between behaviour knowledge? It's inherently an opinion. Well it's true maybe I am misunderstanding the term honestly I don't even know what ontologically objective means - I thought an ontological experience was inherently subjective as it related to our experience which is known only to us.I'm not really sure I understand what you're getting at here. If you think that epistemic objectivity is irrelevant to objective moral law, then you are either not understanding the difference between epistemic and ontological objectivity or are asking about an ontologically objective moral law, which seems incoherent. In what sense are you using the term "objective"?
Here's how I defined objective morality in my OP:
Hopefully this will clarify why allowing for interpretations and being able to assert our own moral positions wouldn't be what I would call objective morality. Hopefully it will also clarify why demonstrating positions on morality across humans to be like minded does not affect the actual moral claim which needs to be objectively valid and true. To be clear my position is that objective morality cannot possibly exist - I agree interpretation is always going to be relevant no matter how demonstrated an objective fact is.Objective morality claims that there is inherent value, worth and correctness in particular moral positions. There may be causal benefits but they are not responsible for the value or worth of those moral positions. Naturally there are different arguments for how objective morality came to be, what positions have inherent value and so on. The word objective in objective morality means it is not subject to opinion, the actual moral claim is objectively valid and true.