Universality doesn't necessarily have anything to do with morality.

If I want to kill all other people and I successfully kill everyone but myself, my preference has become universal but fulfilling that preference has not become any more moral.

Personally, I don't think morality is all that subjective, but more an emergent property of community identity. (Thus is inherently shared rather than inherently personal). I would way that Morality is, fortunately, relative.

As a foundation for morality it does, violation of a universal principle being an immoral act. Your hypothetical situation depends on the dimension of time, I'd say that universality has no such constraint: the concept of a perfect circle exists regardless of a physical example ever having existed.

> Your hypothetical situation depends on the dimension of time

So do you include the future and the past? If you include the future it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine the universality of a principle. If you don't include the future, that means that it is possible for the universality of a principle to change. Then As soon as one person is born who doesn't share a principle, the moral character of that principle vanishes?

I'm not what point you are trying to make by bringing in the concept of the perfect circle. I don't see at all how this relates to morality. The concept of a perfect circle is not universally shared currently, and certainly isn't historically shared universally. Even if that concept were universal, it would not make imperfect circles immoral.

> So do you include the future and the past?

Yes. I think the point of confusion is around "universality". I'm not talking about a unanimous agreement on preference between people born and unborn, I'm talking about attributes that define kindness (the set theory kind, not the Disney princess kind). I was hoping to make that clear with the perfect circle bit, but I wasn't aware of contention on the issue... pretend I said square, I'm pretty sure that is a safe universal definition. I have no opinion on the morality of geometry, but all squares share universal attributes. All humans share universal attributes as well, by way of biological imperatives - life is preferable to death, all things being equal and outside of coercion.

If "life is preferable to death" were a universal attribute of all humans resulting from a biological imperative, no one would ever choose to end their life. I suspect any other proposed "universal attribute" -- at least one that take the form of a universal preference -- will fail to correspond with reality in the same way.

> all things being equal and outside of coercion.

I think that covers mental illness, war, dying in a fire while rescuing kittens, emo cutting, etc.

I don't think it covers any cases of voluntary suicide not motivated by percieved impacts on others, irrespective of mental illness. Unless you define coercion so broadly that the whole statement becomes meaningless.

>> all things being equal

If you could stop the pain without dying, would you still kill yourself?

If you could escape depression without dying, would you still kill yourself?

If you could find meaning in your existence without dying, would you still kill yourself?

If you could go to heaven (or whatever magic place you believe is better than your present situation) without dying, would you still kill yourself?

If you could kill yourself without dying, would you still kill yourself? (Weird I know, but for the sake of completeness)

Did I miss any good reasons to kill yourself?

Please provide a single example of when "all things being equal and outside of coercion" (using your extremely broad definition of 'coercion') a human made a choice to live rather than die.

Or is your 'universal attribute' some sort of 'ideal' that doesn't actually ever happen and thus is completely useless for defining the set of 'human' and 'not human', let alone 'moral' and 'immoral'.

Sure, you woke up and didn't kill yourself. As did most every human being that has ever existed, because humans don't do that outside of very strange circumstances that are out of their control.

Sure, but whether or not there are universal preferences is also subjective.

> are

I don't think that existence is subjective, so universal preference either exists or it doesn't. It has been a long time since I've sat in a philosophy class though, so I'd welcome a correction.

Whether a preference is universal is sufficiently impractical to ascertain with certainty (especially since you have said you want to include the preferences of people in the past), such that any belief about the existence of any universal preferences is inherently subjective.

I'm not talking about whimsical preference, I'm talking about group membership defining attributes - preferences that make one a human being and that every other human has or will share. And yes, this would define a human being even in a world were no human ever existed or will exist.

So... you are talking about preferences that 'define a human being', but then those preferences are only tautologically universal (since you are excluding any possible exception). This seems absurd.

So if I were to tell you that I really did prefer to be a slave you would say I am not human? You are excluding as 'human' any individual who are not capable of understanding the concept of 'ownership'. Do you seriously believe that babies and the severely mentally handicapped are not human?

If you are operating with such a divergent notion of 'human' (and thus 'morality', 'universal' and 'preference') then there is no point in having any further discussion with you or considering anything you have to say.

Nope, exceptions get their own subclass. Babies would be baby-humans, the mentally ill would be - well you get the idea. These classes are actually a predictable reality given an accurate definition of "human being", a component of the whole. Imagine a dependency graph, with the edge cases as leaf nodes. So the definition of human isn't related to a single entity, or the averaging of the qualities of the entire population - it is related to the attributes that give rise to the entire structure - seed values. Again, this has nothing to do with time, so "give rise to" is more like a logical conclusion than a sequence of events.

You should be aware that there's a significant risk you'll have to turn every single human who ever lived into its own class, and even then you'll run into the Halting problem while trying to identify each case of each classification.

You won't end up with any single seed values you can match any given instance against, but with multidimensional matrices that represents multidimensional scales.