What -functional- goal? A functional goal of whom? How has the goal been defined or described? The reason for which it has been defined or described? Its benchmarks or measurement mechanisms?
I mean something which is not its own end, and which yields mechanical function with respect to action.
This rules out circular goals, tautologies, things like: "Morality is to have a moral intent; as long as you intend to be moral, you are moral."
That a world view is less probable does not make them illegitimate
Oh, but it does; that's the tricky part.
Morality is of a quality that it changes relative probability into a binary of moral/amoral based on principles of opportunity cost (see economics).
It is immoral to follow a system that is less probably moral when one has the opportunity to follow a system that is more probably moral.
Imagine you have two boxes in a building which will shortly be exploding.
You can carry only one out to safety.
You know that box A has a 99% chance of being filled with kittens/puppies/babies/(choose your moral prerogative- whatever), and box B has a 0.00001% chance of being filled with said filling.
It becomes clear that, with the impossibility of certainty, even if you might turn out to be wrong, the moral choice (given the knowledge that the box is statistically filled with your moral prerogative to the respective degrees mentioned), is the more probable moral action of the two.
Following a less probable system for morality is less moral than following a more probable one. That makes the only moral system to follow (following the system being a moral choice in itself) the most probable one (unless or until you get more information, changing that probability).
Follow?
This is why
rejection of science is evil. Even if 'science' turned out to be wrong, we have a moral obligation to accept it as the most objective and probably true source of information we have until better information is available.
Nor does their original 'source' influence whether or not the content of the ethical framework proposed by a certain belief system is logically coherent
No, it affects the probability.
A source being a true omniscient and omnibenevolent deity would be the most probably moral.
If that deity is false, however, it can only be assumed to be a random or unreliable source- with a probability comparable to chance/guessing.
You then rule out 'things like' Satanism, Objectivism, social and instinctive moral drives, social contract and game theory without providing a reason.
I'm ruling out systems based on innate selfishness; which being the basis of morality would make the term meaningless. Objectivism and Satanism can also be ruled out on logical grounds, however, due to internal inconsistencies (this just takes longer to demonstrate).
The only problem I see with this is that goals are not necessarily nor should they be consistent. They are not consistent with individuals nor circumstances.
A goal must be internally consistent, or it lacks coherent output.
A goal can be compounded with multiple conflicting factors, if their interests are weighted coherently. Other factors rule these kinds of deontologies out, however.
Making people happy is an arbitrary goal. So this seems inconsistent with your first statement.
Umm... I said pretty clearly that such a goal was inaccurate. I was just making an example.
Absolute in the sense that there is one correct path to achieve the desired goal?
There seems to me many ways to try and achieve a desired goal.
No, the goal is absolute.
Sometimes there are multiple, equally valid means of attaining the same goal (e.g. veer left, vs. veer right to avoid a child in the center of the street).
Usually there are minute variables that will distinguish them, though, and provide a favorable course of action. Being unable to measure all of these variables, though, when there is no clear preference it is morally acceptable to merely act on one of them randomly.
Often we don't even know all of the consequences of trying one path/method over another. As we learn more we have to adjust our methods on the fly sometimes.
Yes. This is not inconsistent with objective morality. This is the same with Science- we have adjusted and improved our methods over time. It doesn't mean that things like gravity are subjective, however, just because our testing is imperfect or imprecise to some degree.
This may work where the outcome has been consistently know to produce the desired result. However someone may come up with an untried idea that produces better results.[...] There is what works well enough to produce the desired results which can always be improved upon.
You're mixing up goal and process. I don't refute that- those are matters of process.
The goal is that which is absolute; the process of reaching that goal is a gradual one, involving some mistakes, and much learning.
A different intelligence may perceive a different universe. Our observation is based on how we perceive the universe. You can't assume an alien species would perceive the universe the say way. π may have no value, no meaning to them because they sense the universe in a different way then we do.
Uh, no. That is completely, logically, false. If one is using valid scientific methodology, that controls for perception and bias.
π is inherently meaningful to all beings who have discovered mathematics (using a different word or way to represent it, but the same number); you really need to study mathematics more to understand why that is.
There are different types of logic.
No. Logic is founded on some very basic and inherently true axioms; there are some special applications which are still compatible with logic but have certain operations which are useful for certain things, that's not a "different type" of logic, though.
If you don't understand this, you need to study logic.
Wiki is a good place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_thought
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
You would or would not be obligated to use these rules in determining the right and wrong course of action?
One is obligated to use valid deduction to determine anything that is necessarily true following from something else.
We would also use economics extensively, and probability and statistics to determine the most likely moral course of action (because our information is limited).
But where did you get your starting set from?
Go back a few posts; I went over this (one of my long ones responding to a request to deduce logical absolute morality a couple pages back).
My starting set is all possible systems.
Speaking of "incorrect definitions", there is a difference between the absolutes of mathematics and the philosophy of morality and ethics.
That is false. I explained this a few posts back.