[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Even in deontological ethics, an action is morally judged by its consequences. We can't say if an action, like pushing a red button, is morally good or bad without knowing its expected consequences.

Here's a fictional scenario depicting this situation.
An foreign politician is invited to inspect a Russian nuclear submarine in a process of purchasing one. He was breiefed by an officer that in the control room there are three red buttons with different critical functions.
The first is to send SOS signal to headquarters and help will come immediately.
The second button will activate self destruction to keep the secret missions and technology brought by the submarine from falling into enemy's hands.
The third will launch nuclear attack to a predetermined location in EU.
During the inspection, a terrorist group attacks and try to hijack the submarine. The crews fight back, and the gun fight ends up killing everyone except the politician, and the submarine is slowly sinking and burning. He's left alone in the control room where there are three red buttons with labels in Russian which he doesn't understand.
Should he push a button?
He observes that the fire can accidentally activate one or more buttons.
It seems that whatever the outcome of this situation, we can't assign it to the morality of the politician.

[alancalverd]

we can't assign it to the morality of the politician.

You can't use "morality" and "politician" in the same sentence. The idea of a politician alone in a blazing, sinking ship is always appealing, but it's pretty obvious that he will push a button in the hope of being rescued, without worrying too much about polluting the ocean or destroying a city, which is his day job anyway. The fact that he has no idea what he is doing and couldn't be bothered to learn elementary Russian before spending the taxpayers' money on a Russian war machine, is par for the course.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

You can't use "morality" and "politician" in the same sentence.

You just did.

Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics

Whenever collective actions are done, some forms of politics must be involved. Some actions can only be done collectively, such as building roads, dams, and other infrastructures. So, politicians are always needed. Although there's no explicit requirement that they must be human. It's possible to replace them with some advanced AIs.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here's another story involving red buttons. A twin siblings live in an apartment. Twin A has an instinct to push red buttons anywhere he finds them. Twin B has an instinct to never touch any red buttons.
The apartment has fire alarm buttons on every floor in the building. And the fire events only happen extremely rarely. So, in most of the time, B's instinct is more useful. But when the fire event does happen, it could be fatal.
That's where understanding cause and effect, and awareness of current situation give advantage over instinct.
Essentially, moral rules are intended to identify common behaviors which bring positive outcomes for most situations. For example, being honest, diligent, brave, fair, polite, loving, and caring for others. But we also acknowledge that there are rare cases where following those rules causes bad consequences, like being honest to terrorists.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Essentially, moral rules are intended to identify common behaviors which bring positive outcomes for most situations. For example, being honest, diligent, brave, fair, polite, loving, and caring for others. But we also acknowledge that there are rare cases where following those rules causes bad consequences, like being honest to terrorists.

Accepting exceptions to moral rules must be done consistently. Otherwise, the rules are as good as if they don't exist. We can call the things that bring the required consistency as moral standards.
Someone who has a moral standard may see someone else who has different moral standards as immoral, because they break moral rules without an acceptable justification.

[alancalverd]

Some actions can only be done collectively, such as building roads, dams, and other infrastructures. So, politicians are always needed.

I have done many things for groups of people, using engineers, architects, accountants and craftspersonsofwhatevergendertheyidentifiedas. Whenever the project was commissioned by a politician, the effect was disastrous.   
The most spectacular was to improve a  mountain road. The problem was that the agricultural village at the top was being depopulated as the youngsters left for the towns in the valley. Local politicians of both parties said that improving the road would bring tourists and provide employment. The day the road opened, most of the farmers abandoned the village, loading their possessions on trucks to move to the towns. No tourists want to visit a ghost village.   

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I have done many things for groups of people, using engineers, architects, accountants and craftspersonsofwhatevergendertheyidentifiedas. Whenever the project was commissioned by a politician, the effect was disastrous.   

Great projects need the directions of resources in large amounts which are only feasible to be done collectively. Most of them are initiated by politicians, such as moon landing, the building of great wall and pyramid.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Someone who has a moral standard may see someone else who has different moral standards as immoral, because they break moral rules without an acceptable justification.

Here are some examples. The Aztecs justified human sacrifice because they believe that doing so would appease their gods, which then would spare them from natural disasters such as volcanic eruption or famine.
The Inuits justify infanticide to preserve resources, which is deemed necessary for them to survive in harsh environment.
On similar ground,  Nazis justified killing of the disableds, also genocide of what they called sub-human races.
Many pre-modern societies justified slavery.
Deception and lies to the enemy are norms in wars.
A common feature found in those examples is the goal to preserve the existence of a group, often at the expense of another group.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

A common feature found in those examples is the goal to preserve the existence of a group, often at the expense of another group.

There is a more general concept which makes us see someone else's moral standard as immoral instead. We see that their moral standards are merely instrumental to comply with a more fundamental moral standard. In other words, we think that they are confusing between terminal goal and instrumental goals.
Hence, in case when we realize that someone else's moral standard is more fundamental and universal than our own moral standard, we will find ourselves in the wrong side of moral landscape. And we will have to admit that we are the immoral ones, when our actions, which were guided by our previous moral standard, turn out to violate their more fundamental moral standard.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

A concrete example may help us understand the concept better. I think most of us agree that Ted Bundy had done immoral actions in his life. Considering the preparations for his crimes, it's unlikely that he did those things accidentally or spontaneously.
But as a conscious agent, his actions must had been driven by his personal goal and preference, supported by his knowledge. He expected that those actions were the best options known to him in his particular situations, according to his criteria for goodness. Otherwise, he must have chosen the better option.
It seems like he held an extreme hedonistic moral standard. His criterion for goodness is his own pleasure, unlike common utilitarianism, which consider the aggregate of pleasure minus pain in a group of people.
We can see that he was wrong on many levels. Getting pleasure and avoiding pain are merely instrumental goals to survive. His personal goal was not fundamental nor universal. His pleasure wasn't even good as instrumental goal, as it turned out bad for his own survival.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Immorality is more often related to pain or other undesired consequences inflicted on others, rather than pleasure of one self. Self pleasure is not generally seen as immoral if it doesn't cause pain on others, either directly or indirectly.
Self inflicted pain is not generally seen as immoral either if it doesn't cause pain on others. But more often, self harm  or attempted suicide can cause hassle and loss of valuable  resources, which made them seen as immoral in many societies.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Bad consequences due to honest mistake are not usually seen as immoral. But if the mistake is thought to be obvious, it can still be called immoral. For example, human sacrifices meant to stop famine, or anti-vaccination campaigns in the middle of a pandemic.

[alancalverd]

Great projects need the directions of resources in large amounts which are only feasible to be done collectively. Most of them are initiated by politicians, such as moon landing, the building of great wall and pyramid.

"look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" - well worth reading "Ozymandias" in this context.

A dozen men have walked on the moon - so what?

The Great Wall is a series of fortifications, some of which are less than 150 years old, and it wasn't much of a military success, despite costing the lives of about a million workers.

The occupants of the pyramids are all dead.

Compared with the work of Einstein, Roentgen, Curie, Milstein, Salk, Newton, and a thousand others whom I quote or praise daily, the accomplishments of most politicians are nothing. I will make an exception for Churchill and Bevan, but even Churchill was just responding to another politician.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Let's address the first objection found here.
 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#1

Let's continue from where we've left.

Some moral realists argue that the disagreements, widespread as they are, do not go very deep—that to a significant degree moral disagreements play out against the background of shared fundamental principles with the differences of opinion regularly being traceable to disagreements about the nonmoral facts that matter in light of the moral principles. On their view, the explanation of moral disagreements will be of a piece with whatever turns out to be a good explanation of the various nonmoral disagreements people find themselves in.

Other moral realists, though, see the disagreements as sometimes fundamental. On their view, while moral disagreements might in some cases be traceable to disagreements about nonmoral matters of fact, this will not always be true. Still, they deny the anti-realist's contention that the disagreements that remain are well explained by noncognitivism or by an error theory. Instead, they regularly offer some other explanation of the disagreements. They point out, for example, that many of the disagreements can be traced to the distorting effects of the emotions, attitudes, and interests that are inevitably bound up with moral issues. Or they argue that what appear to be disagreements are really cases in which the people are talking past each other, each making claims that might well be true once the claims are properly understood (Harman 1975, Wong 1984). And they often combine these explanatory strategies holding that the full range of moral disagreements are well explained by some balanced appeal to all of the considerations just mentioned, treating some disagreements as not fundamentally moral, others as a reflection of the distorting effects of emotion and interest, and still others as being due to insufficiently subtle understandings of what people are actually claiming. If some combination of these explanations works, then the moral realist is on firm ground in holding that the existence of moral disagreements, such as they are, is not an argument against moral realism. Of course, if no such explanation works, then an appeal either to noncognitivism or an error theory (i.e. to some form of anti-realism) may be the best alternative.

If we're already informed of the universal terminal goal, we can assign the disagreements to uncertainty due to limited information. Long chain of causality can lead to unexpected results. It prevents us from being 100% sure about the best options for the long run.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Great projects need the directions of resources in large amounts which are only feasible to be done collectively. Most of them are initiated by politicians, such as moon landing, the building of great wall and pyramid.

"look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" - well worth reading "Ozymandias" in this context.

A dozen men have walked on the moon - so what?

The Great Wall is a series of fortifications, some of which are less than 150 years old, and it wasn't much of a military success, despite costing the lives of about a million workers.

The occupants of the pyramids are all dead.

Compared with the work of Einstein, Roentgen, Curie, Milstein, Salk, Newton, and a thousand others whom I quote or praise daily, the accomplishments of most politicians are nothing. I will make an exception for Churchill and Bevan, but even Churchill was just responding to another politician.

Theoretical works mean nothing if they are not applied.
Moon landings validated that human's fate is not tied to earth. Humans or their successors don't have to go extinct when the earth stops existing.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The second argument against moral realism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#2
2. Metaphysics
Putting aside the arguments that appeal to moral disagreement, a significant motivation for anti-realism about morality is found in worries about the metaphysics of moral realism and especially worries about whether moral realism might be reconciled with (what has come to be called) naturalism. It is hard, to say the least, to define naturalism in a clear way. Yet the underlying idea is fairly easy to convey. According to naturalism, the only facts we should believe in are those countenanced by, or at least compatible with, the results of science. To find, of some putative fact, that its existence is neither established by, nor even compatible with science, is to discover, as naturalism would have it, that there is no such fact. If moral realism requires facts that are incompatible with science (as many think it does) that alone would constitute a formidable argument against it.

Noncognitivists and error theorists alike have no trouble respecting naturalism while offering their respective accounts of moral claims. In both cases, their accounts appeal to nothing not already embraced by naturalism. Of course noncognitivists and error theories disagree in crucial ways about the nature of moral thought, and noncognitivists and error theorists disagree among themselves too about which versions of their preferred accounts are better. But they all are, from the point of view of naturalism, on safe ground.

Moral realists, in contrast, are standardly seen as unable to sustain their accounts without appealing, in the end, to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism. This standard view can be traced to a powerful and influential argument offered by G.E. Moore (1903). As Moore saw things, being a naturalist about morality required thinking that moral terms could be defined correctly using terms that refer to natural properties. Thus one might define ‘good’ as ‘pleasant’, thus securing naturalistic credentials for value (so long as pleasure was a natural property) or one might define ‘good’ as ‘satisfies a desire we desire to have’ or as ‘conforms to the rules in force in our society’ or ‘promotes the species.’ Any one of these proposed definitions, if true, would establish that the facts required to make claims about what is good true or false were compatible with naturalism. Yet, Moore argued, no such definition is true. Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive. For in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was on offer, it always made sense to ask, of things that had the naturalistic property in question, whether those things were (really) good.

Consider someone who held not merely that pleasure was something good but (as a definition would have it) that pleasure was goodness—that they were one and the same property. According to that person, in claiming that something is pleasant one is claiming that it is good, and vice versa. In that case, though, it would not make sense for people to acknowledge that something is pleasant and then wonder, nonetheless, whether it was good. That would be like acknowledging that something is a triangle and then wondering, nonetheless, whether it has three sides. Yet, Moore maintained, the two cases are not alike. A person who wonders whether a triangle has three sides shows he does not understand what it is to be a triangle. His competence with the terms in question is revealed to be inadequate. In contrast, Moore observed, for any natural property whatsoever it was always an open question whether things that had that natural property were good. A person who raised that question did not thereby reveal himself not to be competent with the terms in question. What this shows, Moore argued, was that moral terms did not refer to natural properties and so a proper account of moral claims would have to recognize that they purport to report non-natural facts.

Moore's arguments seem to refer to direct consequences or short term goals. He doesn't seem to successively ask why questions deep enough to reveal the terminal goal of morality.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Third argument against moral realism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#3
3. Psychology
Nonetheless, realists and anti-realists alike are usually inclined to hold that Moore’s Open Question Argument is getting at something important—some feature of moral claims that makes them not well captured by nonmoral claims.

According to some, that ‘something important’ is that moral claims are essentially bound up with motivation in a way that nonmoral claims are not (Ayer 1936, Stevenson 1937, Gibbard 1990, Blackburn 1993). Exactly what the connection to motivation is supposed to be is itself controversial, but one common proposal (motivation internalism) is that a person counts as sincerely making a moral claim only if she is motivated appropriately. To think of something that it is good, for instance, goes with being, other things equal, in favor of it in ways that would provide some motivation (not necessarily decisive) to promote, produce, preserve or in other ways support it. If someone utterly lacks such motivations and yet claims nonetheless that she thinks the thing in question is good, there is reason, people note, to suspect either that she is being disingenuous or that she does not understand what she is saying. This marks a real contrast with nonmoral claims since the fact that a person makes some such claim sincerely seems never to entail anything in particular about her motivations. Whether she is attracted by, repelled by, or simply indifferent to some color is irrelevant to whether her claim that things have that color are sincere and well understood by her.

Noncognitivists often appeal to this apparent contrast to argue that moral claims have this necessary connection to motivation precisely because they do not express beliefs (that might be true or false) but instead express motivational states of desire, approval, or commitment (that might be satisfied or frustrated but are neither true nor false). Nonmoral claims, they maintain, commonly express beliefs and for that reason are rightly seen as purporting to report facts and as being evaluable as true or false. Yet, because beliefs alone are motivationally inert, the fact that someone is sincerely making such a claim (that is, is expressing something she actually believes) is compatible with her having any sort of motivation, or none at all. In contrast, claims that commonly express desires, preferences, and commitments do not purport to report facts and are not evaluable as true or false. Yet, because these are all motivationally loaded, the fact that someone sincerely makes such a claim (that is, is expressing something she actually feels) is incompatible with her failing to have the corresponding motivations. As soon as the contrast is in place, noncognitivists argue, we can well explain the motivational force of sincere moral claims and explain too the insight behind Moore’s Open Question Argument, by seeing moral claims as not beliefs but (perhaps a distinctive kind of) desire, preference, or commitment.

"Some feature of moral claims that makes them not well captured by nonmoral claims".
Moral claims take side on conscious beings. Any bias toward some specific types of conscious beings must be based on (presumed) merits.
Non-moral claims don't take any side. They are truly objective, where conscious beings are not considered more important than non-conscious counterparts.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Aztec Human Sacrifices
0:00 Introduction
2:52 Intro to "Aztec" Religion
6:04 Intro to "Aztec" Sacrifices
8:15 Heart-Extraction Sacrifice
16:52 God Impersonator Sacrifice
19:15 Intro to the Historical Theories
20:01 Ecological Argument
21:23 Political Argument
23:58 Conclusion to the Sacrifices and Theories
26:20 Problems With the Source Material
33:53 Conclusion

Why most modern humans think that human sacrifice is immoral, while some ancient humans thought otherwise?
How was human sacrifice tolerable in those societies?

[alancalverd]

The objection is not universal.Suicide bombers, and the scum that own them, believe that self-sacrifice and the murder of others is not merely moral but a sacred duty. Christians have burned one another from time to time for the greater glory of their disgusting deity. It's all part of the same human vanity.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The human sacrifice is only tolerable in a society if the remaining conscious beings can replace those being sacrificed.
Imagine a human society that violate the rule above, e.g. sacrificing every female member of theirs. Unless the male members found an alternative to reproduce, that society will go extinct.