We notice that acting in one way makes us happy, and acting in another way makes us unhappy. This has something to do with the way the Universe works. We can understand morality practically.
Sadists are at their happiest when inflicting pain on victims. It seems to me that subjective feelings about an action are only part of the consideration.
I expected a reply like this, and it points to a core factor of your line of reasoning: namely, that we are alien to the Universe (so that the laws of the Universe do not hold for the workings of our bodies and minds); or that the Universe doesn't really have any laws, and so anything can make anyone happy, or sad.
I posit that the sadist's happiness is not true happiness; a Universe in which one person's true happiness would come at the cost of another's true happiness, would be a lawless Universe or one in which we are alien.
I argue that neither is the case, and that instead one being's true happiness does not take anything away from another's true happiness, and that there is regularity in the Universe.
That's not true. For God to be a conscious responsible being he must have a subjective experience of himself. To define the problem out of existence is to misunderstand it. The power to make your ideas about morality divine law is still a subjective exercise of discretion. If God himself is not subject to our ordinary ideas about the subjective-objective dichotomy, than he is also not subject to anything we can conceive of when we talk about good and evil, as we ourselves believe we must conform to some objective standard outside ourselves. If such a standard does not apply to god, than to call god good, or to say that he is the source of morality, leaves us with a narrative about morality that is explicitly unknowable.
You are describing a demigod or an alien god.
God, with the capital G, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, is in charge of the workings of the Universe, so per definition. For God, the problem you describe does not apply; it applies for a demigod who would mistakenly be assumed to be God.
Why do we want to explain morality?
It is something that is very important to understand. Even Hitler believed that he was a moral man. In fact, humans habitually use moral justifications for almost everything they do. If one can understand and explain morality, even if you just conclude that it is nothing more than a tool that people use to assuage their consciences or to manipulate others, we have made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of human behavior, and can then better defend ourselves against tyrants.
Okay, for now.
The law of identity. A is A. If it were not the case than you would have no more cause to address this line of argument to me than to a potted plant, or to your neighbors cat. We simply cannot escape ourselves. For arguments sake, if consciousness did survive after death in any sense, it by definition would have to be wholly alien from what we currently understand it to be. There is no doubt that if I reincarnated as a frog, my experience of myself would be infinitely unrelated in any meaningful sense to what I currently understand as "me".
It is not clear whether this would be the case.
Thomas Nagel elaborated on this problem in the famous
What is it like to be a bat?
This sounds deterministic to me. If reality has some in built mechanism of distributive justice than the whole concept of there being an objective morality is a moot point.
It is precisely because there is an inbuilt mechanism of cause and effect, that we can talk about objective morality.
No matter what we do, karma will take care of the loose ends. Nonetheless, it wouldn't explain why one action is good while another is evil.
Good is that which is in line with our true nature, and evil is that which is not; good is that which leads to true happiness, and evil is that which doesn't.
This is so because God made it so.
Of course, I might go one step further by pointing out that if reincarnation were real than death in effect would be an illusion and it wouldn't be possible to "kill" anything.
Of course. What gets disabled or killed is the body, not the person (who resides in the body and who reincarnates, ie. takes on new bodies).
It is the simple fact that by depriving the liberty of another being in the moment, you are depriving them of the ability to deprive you of liberty simultaneously.
Which seems to be the reason why people kill.
Whereas curiosity, respect, empathy, and mutual exchange can happen between two parties at once. It is immoral to initiate force. It is moral to abstain from violence as a means of getting what you want.
So your criterion for moral action seems to be, if I understood you correctly:
"Moral action is the kind of action that can be performed by all, without anyone being obstructed in their efforts by others' efforts."
This seems to be allright.
But your examples of such moral action - curiosity and mutual exchange - seem to work only for a small number of people at a time, as little as two at a time.
What if two people both want a mutual exchange with a third person, and the third person wants a mutual exchange with both, but each person can have only one exchange at a time? Then there will be competition, and competition is not moral!
