Fair enough. You are after all very far left on concepts such as morality, perhaps you're wrong though? Sometimes, and I don't mean this as an insult, but sometimes it does seem like you think these concepts are so beneath you and you've reached conclusions that you're so invested in that you are beyond ever agreeing with me on these concepts.
Often times talking with you about these things feels like being wrong and speaking to someone who is right and has all the evidence to support that. It feels like being a high school kid again and talking to a teacher.
I
am a teacher.
I mean, I'm not sure what evidence you have, as you aren't providing any. You're making appeals to pathos and occupying a rhetorical stance; i.e. "It's obvious that raping infants is immoral." I'm not going to argue for moral relativism when it comes to raping infants; I'm simply saying that we cannot prove moral objectivity--but the good thing is, we don't need moral objectivity in order to live in a civilized and humane way. We have ethics, which are very different.
As far as evidence goes, I'm not a moral philosopher by any means; but I've read Kant's
Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals and Nietzsche's
On the Genealogy of Morality, as well as a lot of postmodern theory on morality (much of which is critical of Kantian morality). I realize that this might seem like me claiming authority, but all I mean to say is that I've spent time reading about morality; and I would encourage my students too also (if I haven't assigned the reading already). Extreme singular examples don't convince me of any sweeping, objective morality because singular examples always reduce down to how someone feels. Morality reduces to a subjective experience of something, which moral philosophers then try and extend to an objective account of right and wrong. I've never seen a compelling argument for objective morality. Dak might not approve of this appropriation of his lingo, but your argument basically boils down to "because muh feelings."
Now, ethics are an entirely different matter. I believe that ethics exist, because ethics are socially/institutionally constructed and can be elaborated and improved upon by complex societies. I absolutely believe it is ethically unacceptable to rape a baby (to use your example). I also believe it's ethically wrong to murder, steal, etc.; but ethics is an ever-shifting set of parameters, which is why we have legal processes. The ethics of a situation never reduce to a single act, but to a network of conditions. To put this another way, morality always begins from personal experience or feeling, and extends outward from there in an attempt to impose personal beliefs as universal laws. Ethics, on the other hand, derives from social discourse. It may correspond to what people feel, perhaps even to what every single living person feels--but that isn't its source.
There is no and has never been any society I know of where the victim of theft or rape doesn't feel or know they've been immorally treated. Murder is different of course as the victim is dead.
This is an enormous generalization, and can be disproven purely by one single person who says: "I was robbed, but I don't feel morally mistreated. I feel ethically mistreated."
