Logically, it makes no sense. Countless simple examples show it to be false. Would it be ethical to have an endless cycle of revenge attacks if most people thought it was good? What about a genocide? Would it suddenly be okay to deny you rights if everyone else just turned around and said you no longer had them?

Ultimately, the approach of tying ethics to popular opinion disrespects the objectivity of subjectivity. It treats the world and its people like they are devoid of ethical significance. Ethics is turned into a sort of recreation which is only about making a majority happy, as if it were a trival pursuit papered over the top of insignificant lives.

It's like Unitarianism, only with a standard of "what most people think," even if it results in destruction which makes many very miserable indeed.

OK, great... whatever...if you have no cogent objections or examples, but just vague assertions and implied put downs....or else...

There are plenty of things in history that nearly everyone has been in agreement about and were demonstrably wrong about. — The Great Whatever

give me some (relevant to the actual argument) examples of these "plenty of things" for analysis, or answer the challenge I offered in the last post you responded to, or give a decent argument to support your contention that there is no substantial difference between moral intuitions and empirical observation.

In short, provide anything that would constitute an intelligent response, instead of practicing evasion by attempting to dismiss my challenge to you to offer an imaginable alternative to what I had proposed as "dismissive crap". Do something like that if you want me to take you seriously as a discussant. Otherwise...not so great...whatever...

It is simply not plausible that people generally would ever think revenge attacks or genocide are a good thing. The society we have today reflects what people predominately have thought over time.

What I have been saying has nothing to do with "popular opinion" but with the most general moral intuitions.

Demonstrateably wrong. People have thought such things over history-- societies engulfed in the instability of revenge killings, society which scapegoated a minority with glee, etc., etc. To say people have never thought such things is ignorance of how people have behaved. At various times our moral intuitions have lead to exactly the opposite of how we considered them.

But more to the point, what is possible matters too. Even if no-one had believed such acts were moral, it would still be a possibile outcome. If people were to think a cycle of revenge kill was good, then it would be-- clearly a contradiction with what is ethical.

Not demonstrably wrong at all, and nor have you demonstrated it to be wrong. Some people may have thought revenge killings, per example, to be a good idea; and groups within society may have been embroiled in clan conflicts involving ongoing revenge killings, but that fact, even if true, would by no means demonstrate that nearly everyone or even a majority of people in those societies thought that revenge killing was a good idea.

What it is (presumably logically) possible for people to think is utterly irrelevant; what is relevant is the empirical fact as to whether historically most people have thought that such acts as murder, theft, lying, betrayal and so on are morally wrong, because if it is so, that fact could be said to represent a natural human moral intuition.

Of course, I am not saying that this can be applied to things such as wearing a hijab, bowing before the queen, gay marriage, transvestitism, transexualism and so on, because all those sorts of things that might be wrongly supposed to be moral issues are really not important moral issues at all but matters of mere custom, and it is important for the freedom of those who wish to practice or refuse to practice such mere customs that that they be recognized as such, and that it be recognized that they have no genuine moral significance.