Aged Like Milk

This is again likely the key to our disagreement; you value the thought of empathy, but not the results of actions based on that thought. . . You have not chosen to help them, you have just chosen to doom them too and a lot more of the world to suffer even more, to seemingly satisfy your need to feel morally pure.

You don't understand anything.

Look, different people experience things differently, feel things differently, and have different moral intuitions, and different things that they think are "obvious" or "self-evident." This needs to be said, because I'm not sure if you're aware of it. If everyone acted purely based on that, then there would be no end to conflict, and no ability to cooperate on almost any level. In order to resolve these differences, or at the very least to communicate them to others, we take these experiences, feelings, intuitions, etc. and we rationalize them into moral principles.

The reason that I quipped about "putting principles on a dartboard" is because that seems to be how you think people arrive at them. That they are completely arbitrary and unrelated to empathy or moral intuitions, and that they must therefore be in constant conflict with them. That's a completely ridiculous and backwards way of seeing things.

There is no conflict whatsoever what my empathy and conscience tells me and the moral principles I believe, because they are one and the same. The latter is nothing more or less than an attempt to rationalize and verbalize what the former pushes me towards.

When I say that I will not support genocide under any circumstances, this is not some external concept that I read in a book somewhere or that my reason is trying to enforce against the will of my emotions or my conscience. It is my conscience, it is my empathy. The only distinction is that I have packaged my inner experiences of those things into words that are comprehensible to others.

Is is really so hard to accept that my sense of empathy leads me to a different conclusion from yours?

If you want to just critique different moral theories, then fine; mine’s clearly somewhere closer to Mill’s utilitarianism, though not exactly. What are you supporting here? Some form of deontology I assume, since not Hobbesian or Lockean take on social philosophy, and it doesn’t really sound like some modern take on virtue ethics either.

The point is less that I want to critique your specific moral theory (though I will), but more that I want you to acknowledge that it exists, in order to help you understand why people don't see things the way you think they should. I am not a deontologist, though I believe that view is more popular in the States than in Europe.

I'm more or less a Rule Utilitarian. I would argue that moral rules are essentially theories on how to produce desirable results. Such rules are necessary for several reasons: first, because there are many factors that can compromise a person's judgement in the moment, and second, because having such rules or theories allows us to test what works and what doesn't in a broader and more systematic way. I would add that my rules are more like suggestions or guidelines, that can be deviated from, but only if I'm very confident in that judgement, and prepared to accept the fallout.

Imo, your positions are only really defensible from the specific standpoint of Act Utilitarianism, which I see a lot of problems with. Perhaps the biggest is that in practice, you will still end up resorting to moral rules (or mental shorthands if you prefer) because to do otherwise would simply take too much time. When you go to the grocery, you probably don't evaluate the moral implications of every item every time you go there, and if you did, it probably wouldn't be based on something so abstract as "maximizing utility" or "the greatest good for the greatest number," but perhaps, "Which companies treat their workers well," or "Which products are made in countries I want to support," or "Which products contain no meat or animal products?" If you are making evaluations based on standards like that, then those are the moral rules you are operating under, "I should only buy goods from companies that treat their workers well," and so on.

But when you don't recognize those rules as such, then you lose the ability to critically examine them, evaluate them, or even express them. If you aren't making a conscious effort to refine those rules, then those rules are just going to be passively absorbed by what other people around you are doing, or what you're taught, or how things have always be done traditionally, or the ideology of the dominant socioeconomic class: none of which are good reasons for doing something.

Let me bring it back home. When I evaluate a moral claim like, "You should always vote for the lesser evil," then I look at historical examples and see whether the results that strategy has produced are things I consider good or desirable. "If you believe your survival is threatened, it's ok to resort to genocide," has an absolutely terrible track record historically. It's no more rational to believe that than to believe you can fly if you jump off a building. The theory simply has not every held up in practice at all, it is unsupported by evidence and I would even say that it is straight up unscientific. Because the process of evaluating moral theories has at least some similarities to the process of science, perhaps the biggest limitation being the element of subjectivity in evaluating outcomes. But I believe we are on the same page that the results from that belief have always been overwhelmingly negative. But since you aren't evaluating your rules, you won't notice when historical precedent is warning you against something.