Presumably then, a true philosophy is one that is in concordance with the facts. — A Seagull

Well, of course anything that is true must be in concordance with facts, but it’s not necessarily correct the other way around. A philosophy can be in concordance with mere facts without being true. Facts are basic true observations about the world whereas a philosophy is a logical derivation of facts. All philosophical systems worthy of the name would start by stating facts that everyone can agree on. From there they will go in different directions and reach conclusions that contradict each other. The facts remain the same, though, and so in a sense they will all depend on those facts.

A philosophical truth is not observable in the same way a fact can be observed. Conclusions in moral philosophy, although they may be true, can’t really be called facts. For example, I am convinced that capital punishment is immoral, and I could refer to factual evidence to make the argument, but it would sound odd if I asserted that “it’s a fact that capital punishment is immoral”. Someone else might argue for the opposite and be quite correct about the mere facts referred to, but his conclusion would be false in my opinion. I could admit that what he said was in concordance with facts but still call his conclusion untrue.

Some approaches to philosophy contradict each other – realism and idealism can’t both be true-
while others merely present different perspectives or independent problems that can exist side by side with a number of different approaches. Existentialism, being about one’s personal relation to the world, can be paired with several different approaches.

A good philosophy may be restricted to a true philosophy, and whenever you argue in support of one school, you implicitly argue that it presents the right representation of the truth and consequently that it is a good philosophy.

“Good” may also refer to the logical consistency of an approach. In that case, all the major philosophical theories would be good, as they have certainly proven their worth by surviving. If in a system, there were significant internal breaches for anyone to see, it would quickly fall apart.

It’s been said that all of philosophy is just footnotes to Plato. It elaborates on the same general topics that Plato identified, and in that sense, it is all the same.
All philosophy that is truly philosophy, that which deals with the relevant topics, would then be good philosophy, and bad philosophy would be that which only pretends to be philosophy.

Whatever searches for the truth would be good philosophy, whereas whatever reduces it to an aimless game, would be sophism and bad.

So what makes for a good philosophy? Good in what respect?

Well, very often good news just isn’t interesting, not even for positive minded people like you guys. Good news is just normality hence no news is good news. Every day, thousands of airplanes take off and land all over the world, but you don’t want to see it reported in a newspaper, do you? “Good news! Flight DL527 landed safely at Heathrow today!”

What kind of good news is there that you don’t see enough of? Sport news is always good news since someone has always won, so if you are into sports, you should get your share. In other news, celebrity gossip is often good news, reporting on romance and happy weddings, so if that’s your cup of tea, you are well covered.

But how could you expect an abundance of good news in the more serious sections? Politics is about problems and about the continuous efforts to solve them. Occasionally there will be solutions, but they will never be final, and more problems are always waiting at the doorstep. How could it be otherwise?

There have actually been attempts to publish newspapers exclusively for good news, but they must have been full of terribly boring sunshine stories without much substance. I don’t think I would subscribe.

How exactly is one supposed to vote responsibly? — Pinprick

It’s a curious question. In general, doing something responsibly means realizing the foreseeable consequences of your actions and being willing to face those consequences. Now, what are the consequences of your voting behavior? Absolutely nothing. However you vote, it will not change the outcome of the election. You might as well vote for any crazy candidate or not vote at all, your action will have no consequences because the winner would have won no matter how you had voted.

The normal objection to this is: Sure, but if everybody thought like that, there would be no serious elections and democracy would cease to exist.

Let’s suppose that’s a valid objection. Its implied premise is: “you should act the way you want everyone else to act”. If you take this Kantian maxim seriously you should vote for your favorite candidate regardless of his chance of winning, because if everyone did like you, this candidate would actually win.

Tactical voting breaks with this principle and offers nothing instead. Either you vote according to the self-imposed fantasy that your vote decides how everyone else votes, or you take the hyper-realistic approach saying that your vote doesn’t matter at all. If you opt for the fantasy, you might as well do it completely. A combination of the two doesn’t make sense.

I don't believe a fetus can indeed desire to be alive — Aleph Numbers

It desires to be alive in the same way as an insect desires to be alive. An insect struggles for its life. I don’t mean desire as in being conscious of the desire.

The need to define fetal personhood — Aleph Numbers

I don’t care about defining personhood, so the paradox of the heap is irrelevant. The fetus is a being (however you define it) that has the definite potential of becoming a rational self-conscious being (it will for sure if only it is allowed to live). If there is a decisive moment in its development, it is when it becomes self-conscious which happens long after the baby is born, so if “personhood” was decisive, it might be morally acceptable to kill three-month old infants.

fulfilling preferences is not the same as being happy — Aleph Numbers

Fulfilled preference, not fulfilling, is happiness. When you get what you really want, you are happy. Note that it’s not about what you just think you want, because you may be wrong about that. You may think you want money more than anything, but you don’t really want it since even if you get it, you won’t be happy.

it must me wrong to use contraception because one is preventing a being with a valuable future from being born. — Aleph Numbers

You can’t do anything to something that doesn’t exist, including preventing its future, because there is no it. The it that is a fetus already exists and it’s the same being that later will become for example a three-year old kid.

Preference utilitarianism can also be used to argue against abortion. Any living organism has at least one clear preference: to stay alive. Not much consciousness is needed to have a preference. An insect clearly prefers to eat, that’s why it does it, and a fetus would have at least as much will as an insect.

Utilitarianism argues for the maximation of happiness, and happiness is the same as fulfillment of preferences, so not much has been changed by adding the word “preference”.

Any moral act aims at increasing happiness in the future, that is, the act comes first and the consequence, happiness, follows later. The fact that the happiness of the fetus will not be realized until later, after birth, does not make it a special case compared to a being that’s already born. The state of well-being that one hopes to create by acting morally is always just a potential, and the fetus as a potential moral object makes it no different from any other moral object. If it’s bad to steal an object that would later have made a person happy, it’s also bad to take away a life that would later have made the fetus happy. (I don’t care if you call the fetus a person or not. The point is that the fetus and the born infant is one continuous being.)

im not claiming absolute truth. Its relative to whatever standard of the society/group. — DingoJones

I don’t quite believe you think it’s that relative. If a society/group considers that donating a chewing gum makes up for murder, they would be plain wrong, wouldn’t they?

So your objection is essentially that morality isnt about taking moral measure of the past but only as the persons Moral disposition is currently? Is that right? — DingoJones

If by morality you mean moral character, that’s right. And I think that’s what you are trying to measure with your scheme. Isn’t it? The issue is the moral worth of the person and I don’t know what that would mean other than character.

How do you separate the act from the intention? If a guy saves babies and cures cancer so he can pick up chicks easier, the act is clearly morally good and the intention not so much, but since the act is an act of good Im not sure it makes sense to say the actor is bad (or not good). — DingoJones

Right. The action is still good, and the actor is neither good nor bad based on this action.
Of course it’s difficult or impossible for us, the observers, to know his intention. That’s why we make shortcut judgments based on his actions, and that’s why your scheme might seem to work on the surface. We can’t look inside a person’s head, so we assess him based on the circumstantial evidence we have.
That would be the way we actually judge character, but it’s highly inaccurate and often unjust. We look at the drunkard who neglects wife and kids for his booze, which of course is bad, but we don’t know what brought him there, what tragedies he may be fighting against. Therefore, we shouldn’t judge anyone, if we can refrain from it, and a system like yours is an invitation to superficial judgment.

So, we are back where we started then. It’s not just that people tend to feel that way, and it’s not about how people in a given collective would give weight to different kinds of action.
Your claim is that this way of thinking has an absolute truth value (which makes it an ethical theory). Very good. Let’s test that.

Whatever is ethically good or bad is either an action or a person. We here assume we know what a good/bad action is and also the degree of good/bad action. This is about testing the ethical value of a person.

I would say that a good person is one who is inclined to do good actions. He has a mental disposition that makes him do what is good when it’s time to act. This is what is called virtue. A person possesses a degree of virtue now at this moment - he is now a good or bad person.
People can change. He may have been a terrible person in his youth, a murderer even, but now he has grown virtuous and that depends on the mental disposition and habits that he has now acquired. It doesn’t depend on what he has actually done, he may not have had the chance, or the change may have come over him relatively recently, but if something came up now, he would do the right thing.

So, how can we tell that he is now a good person? We can’t. We don’t know what is going on inside him. We can only judge from what we see from outside. We acknowledge his good acts, subtract his bad ones and guess his inner state based on that, but we may be wrong. An extremely good deed, curing cancer or creating peace in the middle east, doesn’t make him a good person unless he did it for the right reason, that is a desire to do good. (Maybe he did it to make money)

If we can measure the moral balance in this way, I dont see any reason why even heinous acts of immorality couldnt be balanced out in the same way as my stick of gum example above. This is where Id like to be challenged, as Im not very comfortable with that conclusion. — DingoJones

So people may tend to think that way and I conceded that I may instinctively do so myself. (“He has done some bad things and some good things, so I guess overall he’s an ok guy.”) but that doesn’t mean there’s any deeper truth to it. There is no logical reason why good and bad acts may cancel each other out. But you were not looking for a logical reason, were you, so why expect anything from the conclusion about the “heinous act”?

The reason you are not comfortable with the conclusion is that the original premise was only true in a very inaccurate sense. The premise says: this is how we generally and unreflectingly judge a person’s moral standing. The conclusion: therefore, we must also do it like that in this extreme case. The conclusion doesn’t seem true, so there must be something wrong with the premise.
This is exactly how we detect that our general assumptions are logical fallacies: It seems right from the start because we haven’t considered all implications.
But you didn’t exactly say that the premise was true, did you? You only said that this is what people (including yourself) generally do when considering someone’s approximate moral merits. It’s like explaining why you want something for dinner- it’s generally right but can’t be put through a logical test.

Im asking about how the balance of moral/immoral works, regardless of what the individual standards that are in place may be. Its about how people are judged morally according to any given moral standard, not whether or not the standard is just or not. — DingoJones

So people are judged morally in any given society by adding and subtracting good and bad actions according to the standards of their society. So what?

Regardless of what those standards are, whether they are very strict or very lenient from our perspective, one would assume that the average member would have an average score, that is a balance between good and bad. It is pretty much a tautology: The standard of any society is determined by how the members generally behave, and how the members generally behave will be identical to the standard. Those who subscribe to the standard, the members in general and the average member, will naturally accept those who are like themselves, those who hit the balance. (They will condemn those below and praise those above.)

This is how we assess everyone in our society concerning everything, not only concerning moral issues (although we tend to confuse them). Someone who dresses in average clothes will get an average acceptance by average members. It’s just how it works, but is it how it ought to work? Should the average expectation be of any real concern to you at all? If you are not an average representative of your society, you will disagree with its verdict, so why bother?

So now you are moving from a universal standard for ethics (at least that’s where I thought you were in your OP) to a community based practical agreement. Sure, that could work, but then you’re not really talking about morality anymore but about political and legal theory (related but still different). It could be a good principle for organizing a society, but whether it is ethical or not would depend on the actual content of the agreement. Imagined a horrendously skewed law for acceptable repayment, e.g. giving a chewing gum to pay for murder. People’s sense of justice is surely more advanced than that, you could argue, but you have no guarantee that the community would not pass a law that in your opinion would be very unjust. What makes you think that a community of people necessarily would come up with fair principles? They have been inventing customs throughout history, but all customs are not just. (Communities have practiced human sacrifice etc.)

Is there something inherently not ok about being average? — DingoJones

No. No level is inherently ok or not ok. From a universal/moral perspective there is no such thing. People decide what they find acceptable for whatever reason. They make laws about what is acceptable behavior, but that’s only aimed at what would make the community work. Excellence would be too high a standard because it would make most people criminals and too much lenience would make society fall apart. Whatever the community decides, it is not to be confused with actual ethics (although by chance it may coincide with your ethical standards).

Your original question was: “Can we pay off moral debt?” and I realize that the question is one of principle and not concerned with the exact measurement of each act of charity or transgression. The problem is not about subjective/objective, but that a debt to an unspecified collective doesn’t make sense. How could there be a debt to mankind? The idea of repayment necessitates some unity of feeling on the part of the creditor. Someone feels a loss and a repayment somehow relieves the pain. That unity of feeling obviously doesn’t exist in mankind.

If we still judge the moral value of a person according to how we think his good and bad deeds add up, that doesn’t include any notion of debt since we only assess the achievements and shortcoming of the moral agent. If a student gets some excellent grades and some lousy ones, we call him a medium level student, but there is no preconceived assumption that overall grades are always ok if they balance in the middle. Grades should be as good as possible and so should a person’s moral standing. There’s nothing inherently ok about being average. It’s just that we don’t find it fair to judge a person too hard if he’s no worse than most people.

There is no correspondence between the original transgression and the presumed reimbursement.
— Congau
Yes there is, it corresponds to whatever satisfies as reimbursement. This would be true even if I was talking about the individual, which Im not. — DingoJones

How can you know what satisfies if you are not talking about an individual? Compensations that are actually unconvertible seem to work because the individual is content. The damage can’t be undone, but a million dollars sort of makes him happy, so he accepts. Another person would demand more a third person less.
What would satisfy the abstract mankind?

people reach satisfaction over moral transgressions all the time. — DingoJones

Yes, people reach agreements, individuals, that is.

We dont judge someones moral worth on whether they’ve did 1 good thing or 1 bad thing, we take account of both and weigh them against one another. I dont think thats controversial. — DingoJones

If you are only talking about how we morally judge people, it’s a rather trivial point. Sure, I could say, this guy has done a lot of bad things but also a lot of good, so he’s moral worth is about medium.
But you are clearly talking about something more than that when you use a concept of moral debt. Who’s to say that a person should have a medium moral worth or the worth of an average human being? If you are above that level, it’s great, below is bad and balancing is just ok?
Why? Let’s say all actions, good or bad, were assigned a moral value unknown to us, but maybe existing in the mind of God or the universe. Then we could assume that each of us had a real moral value, a number that we wouldn’t know but was still existing. If good acts had a positive value and bad acts negative, why would it necessarily be ok to have the value zero? Maybe objective morality would demand a positive value for an acceptably moral person. (Btw, total inactivity would produce a zero.)

No, the principle of paying off moral debt doesn’t make sense even to start with, and the reason is what I have been trying to convey: There is no correspondence between the original transgression and the presumed reimbursement.

Whatever is paid back, most be paid back in kind, or else it just isn’t real. If you steal a hundred dollars, you can pay back a hundred dollars and at least there is some logical correspondence between crime and compensation. But when paying back in an unconvertible currency so to speak, there’s no way to reach satisfaction.

Let’s say you slap someone on the cheek and then pay a million dollars in compensation. The insult seems small and the compensation enormous, but since there is no correspondence between the two you have in no way erased the original insult. (The offended party may happily accept the compensation, but you’re right that that’s not the point). The insult stays and will stay there forever whatever you do.

You seem to imply in your argumentation that you can morally commit any immoral act as long as you pay back somehow, and that it is as if the bad thing you did never happened. No, what was bad remains bad. If you kill someone’s child and later save the world, that child will still be gone.

But to talk about debt and pay back, both creditor and debtor need to be identical, i.e. if A harms B, A must later benefit B (and not C or D)
— Congau

B would be the “we” I mentioned in my OP. This is about humans judging humans. — DingoJones

We have to be dealing with the same consciousness to decide if the compensation is appropriate since there is no objective way to measure it. Say someone takes a human life, what would be an appropriate pay-back to mankind? What good deed could in any real since make up for this bad deed?

The law stipulates a certain punishment for murder, but that’s entirely arbitrary (punishment differs between various times and places). You may have an individual feeling about approximately what punishment would be right for a crime, but that can’t be reached by means of logic. What should be the punishment for murder? Capital punishment, life in prison, twenty years in prison, a million dollars? You may have a feeling about it, but it’s just a feeling. There’s no direct correspondence between killing and deprivation of liberty. Likewise, it would be impossible to decide on the correct compensation for murder.

On the other hand, the individual who is hurt by a crime could at some point declare that he is satisfied with the compensation. What could be the compensation for a punch on the jaw? A thousand dollars? A handshake? Since it is subjective, only the person involved can decide.

can we pay off moral debt? — DingoJones

If the only connection between two acts is that they are committed by the same person, it makes no sense to talk about debt and cancellation of debt.

If you do something bad against someone and then something good towards the same person, he may feel that you have made up for your bad behavior. Or if the good act was directed at his child or another relation, that may amount to the same thing.

Or you may assume that the bad deed was directed at God, then any good deed would also concern God. That, however, would be a theological question.

There is no logical reason why a bad act would increase the demand for a good act. You should do good regardless and even if you have already done good, that is no reason to stop.

There may however be emotional reasons, a personal way of doing repentance and no one has the right to argue against that. Sure, if the good deed makes you feel better, do it. After all, you should do it anyway.

But to talk about debt and pay back, both creditor and debtor need to be identical, i.e. if A harms B, A must later benefit B (and not C or D)

The free will explanation of the problem of evil imagines that alternatively God could have created human beings so that it was impossible for us to do evil. Whether evil was natural for us or not, it could have been impossible for us to carry out evil acts (the sword would instantly turn into a flower or something like that).

Another alternative could be that God could have created people so that evil was unnatural for us.

It is assumed that God doesn’t want evil, and the only way it can be explained that God doesn’t get what He wants is to say that He rather wants people to be able to act the way they want – that is, they are given a free will.

What God wants and what humans want are different, but God lets us have it our way in some cases. So, assuming you are right that evil comes naturally to us and that we are evil by nature, that doesn’t contradict the explanation. In that case, God lets us act according to our evil nature although He could have stopped us if He had wanted to – that is, if He had not given us a free will.

Ah, I think there is a moral reason for having and following the traffic law. Not having driving agreements, or violating the traffic agreements, can have very bad consequences. If the law says to drive on the left or the right does not matter. What matters is having a system of agreements and going along with it, That is being moral. Amorality is a failure to have laws. — Athena

Morality or amorality refers to individual conduct. If you lived in a society without laws or with bad laws, your behavior would still be moral or immoral. It would still be morally wrong to kill someone even if there were no law against it.

If there were a society of angels, no laws would be necessary since it would be perfectly moral anyway.

There is certainly a moral reason to follow the traffic laws, and the proof is that one’s conduct in the traffic matters even if there were no such laws. We should drive carefully, not because we are afraid of getting caught by the police, but because we want to avoid hurting other people. In fact, the presence of traffic rules blurs this fact since we are led to believe that the rules are important in themselves and not for moral reasons.

If there were no laws most people would probably follow the most important tendency of the laws we now have anyway. The laws are there to take care of those relatively few who wouldn’t. Social conventions would regulate much of our behavior in the absence of law, and the intuitive sense of morality that many people have, would stop them from being immoral. (For example, normal people wouldn’t kill even if there were no law against murder.)

Saying “I know” means “I have information from a reliable source and that information is actually true.

I can say “I know” but later find out that the information wasn’t true, so in fact I didn’t know. I was incorrect when I said I know.

No one could say “He knows there is a Santa, but in fact there isn’t.” If the speaker doesn’t believe that the person referred to is right, he wouldn’t use “know” about the claim.

The source of information is also important. Suppose someone told me that Manchester United won the match and I pass the information on saying “I know United won”. Later it turned out that my informant had had no idea whether United won or lost, but accidentally United had in fact won. When I said “I know United won” I was therefore incorrect even though what I thought I knew was true.

We can of course make the claim that we can’t really be sure if anything is the truth and even if I was present at the game and witnessed United’s victory, I can’t be a hundred percent certain that I can believe my eyes. Well, that’s a philosophical point. For our daily life our normal criteria for truth are sufficient.

The laws have very little to do with actual morality. They are there to make society function as smoothly as possible. Sure, often law and morality coincide since it’s easier to accept a law that is in harmony with existing social customs, but there are also many instances where there is no correlation.

Many laws, traffic regulations for example, have no moral value at all. Driving on the right is not ethically superior to driving on the left and even evil people would choose to travel on the conventional side for their own convenience, even if there were no law.

Further, most moral issues that we generally obedient citizens encounter, are not dealt with by the law at all. We all do things against others that we later regret and find bad, and it certainly merits an “I’m sorry” even if we know that no law has been broken.
In fact, it’s perfectly possible (and maybe not so uncommon) to be a very bad human being without ever breaking a law.

We generally respect other people and are more or less polite even though there is no law telling us to do so. For most of us, the law is not the reason why we behave decently.

So now you know all this, are you to deny my artist's statement and insist that we all stay where we were before I wrote this post? — Punshhh

Any background information you could provide about a work of art would not leave us “where we were”. Any details about the artist’s biography, his time, his cultural and geographical origin and his sources of inspiration, all of it may be interesting and useful for understanding the work and appreciate it in a wider perspective.

But I would deny that all this information (which in principle could be infinite) is a part of the work itself. It’s perfectly fine and absolutely possible to enjoy it without any specific information at all. Your painting conveyed more than enough meaning at first glance to qualify as art and some might even find this new information to be unnecessary noise (are we now not allowed to think that the black shadow is standing on clouds, for example?)

If it’s really true for one particular work that it can’t exist without an artist’s statement, I would argue it’s not art at all. The language of communication for a piece of art is the one used in that art (paint for paintings etc.) and if that language doesn’t express anything, it can’t be called art any more than a baby’s babbling can be called speech.

The author has no interpretive authority? Isn't that kind of contradictory? — Metaphysician Undercover

I said he has no special interpretive authority, meaning that he doesn’t possess the right to give a final and uncontested interpretation of his work. But of course I would find it more interesting to listen to the artist rather than any random observer, expecting him to be an expert on his own work.

if the artist thinks that a statement of some kind is required to appreciate the work, then that is valid, a valid aspect of the work. — Punshhh

By valid aspect of the work, do you mean that the statement may belong to the work itself so that without it, it would be unfinished? In that case I disagree. Visual art speaks a visual language and its genuine message can only be expressed visually (or else the artist would have chosen another medium of expression).
(That is not to say that you can’t mix the mediums (book illustrations or opera for example), but you can’t pretend that the picture and the words are saying the exact same thing.)

Can’t the artist be completely wrong about this requirement? Imagine a mad van Gogh rambling on about his paintings. Do we have to take him seriously just because he is the artist?

What if an outside observer has detected an aspect that no one else has seen and thus changes everyone’s appreciation of the work. Does that observer then become the artist?

I could try to interpret the work but whether I’m able to do it well or poorly is not the point. I’m sure you could do it better, being intimately acquainted with it, and since you are probably an articulate person, I don’t doubt that you could do it better than other artists interpreting their work. But even though you yourself is the artist in this case, that is no guarantee that you could produce a better and more truthful interpretation than any other critic. In fact, being the artist doesn’t give you any special interpretive authority. What if you told me that the painting depicted the war in Syria. Maybe you had that in mind while painting it, maybe it inspired you, but so what. It’s not there for any other viewer and including such a statement as a part of the art work would be nonsense. (Although it would be interesting to know what inspired the artist.)

Your painting is not in need of a statement to be a work of art. I was saying that if a work can’t exist without an artist’s statement, it’s worthless. A painting speaks the language of paint and if a written word must be included to give it meaning, it’s not a painting.

PS: I like your painting

If you are a visual artist, a painter or an installation artist, you have presumably chosen that profession because you have something to tell the world that can only be expressed in the particular language of your art form. If your message could have been articulated using words from the spoken language, there would be no reason for you to dabble in visual art. In that case you should be a writer instead since after all, a natural language like English, however fallible, is the most efficient way to communicate thoughts from one person to the next.

True art can’t be translated from one form to the other. The purpose is to communicate ideas that can only be transferred in this particular way. This particular hue of red gives me a certain feeling and I want to try to convey that feeling to you: naturally I show you that color, I don’t try to explain it in words.

If an artist’s statement is needed, it means that work of art is uncapable of fulfilling its purpose of communicating the intended idea, and consequently it is worthless.

(A written interpretation is something different. It’s not a part of the work and the artist himself is not necessarily the best interpreter.)

Is there any end in the world that would justify any means however horrible?
— Congau
No. Not without undermining its end (i.e. 'destroy the X to save the X' — 180 Proof

Well, that would be merely a practical consideration. Obviously, destroying your goal in the quest for that goal would be a rather imprudent strategy regardless of its moral content.

The question was rather if there is an end that is so great that if you could actually achieve it, it would justify any horrible action. Say you could reach Utopia, your perfect society, by cutting off ten million heads. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Utopia would be reached for sure if only you made that sacrifice. (In reality, of course Utopia could never be reached but in this thought experiment a successful outcome is a hundred percent certain.) Ten million killed and a hundred million get to live in a perfect society: Would it be worth it? Would it be moral? It still sounds horrible, doesn’t it?

Now instead of ten million, make it just one single person. To reach Utopia only one insignificant human being would have to be sacrificed. Wouldn’t it then be quite unethical not to kill that person? What right does he have to steal the happiness of a hundred million?

But then, what’s the difference between one and ten million? If in principle it’s ethically acceptable to kill one person, why not ten million?

The reason the dictum “the ends justify the means” is usually dismissed, is that it would allow for an action that are unequivocally bad in itself if only it produces an ultimately good result. For example, killing a million people to produce Utopia. Jumping off a cliff is not bad in itself, like your example shows (you could be safely diving into water). Killing a million people is always bad, but jumping off a cliff is only sometimes bad.

How about killing just one person to produce Utopia? That one killing is still bad, although one might argue that it’s worth it.

What if it was only a matter of hurting your toe to reach Utopia? Hurting your toe is still always bad in itself (not like the jumping off a cliff example), but few people would have a problem with it.
Obviously, the ends justify some (bad) means.

Is there any end in the world that would justify any means however horrible? A yes to that question would make you an extreme supporter of the phrase.

The utilitarian standpoint is that an end would justify some means that may be immoral considered in itself. It’s ok to lie to save a human life, for example.

The deontological standpoint denies that: It’s never ok to lie even if it saves a human life.

That’s right, you have no moral obligation to society at large since you have never willfully committed yourself to it. An obligation can only arise when you make the equivalent of a promise to someone. When you sign a lease, you are obligated to pay the rent to your landlord.

We usually don’t have to worry so much about paying back to society what we have received since the taxes we are forced to pay take care of that whether we want to or not. If you are in a situation where you receive more than you give you are probably in unfortunate circumstances (unless you are a child) and you don’t need the additional blame for not contributing.

You should probably still contribute, not because it’s an obligation but for personal mental health reasons. Most people find it satisfactory to be a part of a larger system, a well-working society. But if you are sure you don’t find any satisfaction in that, so be it.

Also, if you try to escape from what society requires you to pay, you risk getting into a habit of personal greed and that may not be good for your moral well-being. It’s like stealing from a large supermarket: you can’t hurt the supermarket by running away with a few items, but it wouldn’t be a good habit to acquire.

giving up isn't self-destructive is it? — Wallows

The tree would never give up stretching out for water and sunlight. The wolf would never give up looking for prey. That would be self-destructive. Nothing in nature ever settles for what is second best even if it could survive without it.
Only humans can act against their own nature and give up – only humans can act unethically.

That being said, giving up is usually a result of some form of depression and I wouldn’t add to anyone’s burden by condemning him for giving up. It is understandable, although it’s not the right thing to do.
In the same way we can imagine the agony a suicide has gone through and we don’t want to be too harsh on him. Still, he did the wrong thing.

However, if by giving up you mean leaving an ambitious plan that now appears meaningless to you, it’s a different matter. Then you are not giving up as such but merely changing your mind about what is worth pursuing.
If you are really content with it, it may mean that you now prefer the present stage to what you were trying to achieve. If that’s the case, you haven’t really given up at all. “Giving up” in its proper sense means stop trying to achieve what you still want to achieve.

Giving up is contrary to the innate purpose of anything in nature. This is not an external purpose handed over by God or society but inside any organism itself. Anything in nature has a potential that it strives to maximize. A tree will try to get as much water and sunlight it needs to reach its strongest and most healthy state. It will grow its roots and stretch its branches for that purpose. (Unconsciously of course, since a tree has no consciousness.)
An animal will also try to fulfill its maximum for itself and its young.

Only human beings can go against their own purpose and be deliberately self-destructive because of this nasty thing called a free will. At the same time that’s what makes us ethically relevant creatures. In fact, ethics is all about making our will conform to what is in our nature. Ethics teaches us not to hurt others (that is, not obstructing their nature) but it is just as much about not hurting ourselves.
It is unethical to obstruct our own nature because nature defines what is ethical in the first place. In the absence of religious authorities, nature tells us what is right and wrong.

a good artist cannot help create images which contain eye pleasure. There is a natural flow of harmony that the eye picks up, and 'knows' that it came from not-trying, as if created unconditionally. — Invisibilis

“Pleasing to the eye” can’t be a criterion for good art. Wallpaper may be pleasing to the eye or a Mercedes Benz for someone who likes expensive cars. Sure, artistic harmony may please the eye because of its connection to a higher idea, and it may be considered beautiful whenever there exists some unity and balance just like a mathematical equation may be considered beautiful for the same reason, but this kind of harmony is hardly pleasing to the eye in a literal sense.

Good art may sometimes be downright ugly. What makes it good is the skillful way it conveys an idea and makes the audience think. There shouldn’t be a goal to make the eye know without trying. On the contrary great art is rarely immediately accessible but requires that the mind is set to work. Whatever is too easily available is shallow and brings no great ideas.

That being said, one shouldn’t force art, not even great art, on an unwelcoming audience. Whenever a piece of art is placed in the public space (as opposed to at an art gallery), it should be pleasing to the eye. Then the passers by can choose for themselves if they want to look at it as art or just decoration.

Cannot an artwork which copies something still be good art. Most landscapes and portraits are copies — Invisibilis

By copy I mean a copy of another work of art. If I take a photo of a van Gogh painting, that photo is obviously not a work of art and I’m not an artist. If I try copy the van Gogh with a brush and paint and somehow manage to do it perfectly, that’s no more a work of art than the photo (although I’d be an excellent craftsman if I could do it.)

Painting a landscape is not the same as copying it. It will always be an interpretation from the artist’s perspective and so a unique and original creation (even when it appears to be highly realistic).

Cannot an artwork be good art without conventional art skills, — Invisibilis

Sure, unconventional skills are also skills and can produce good art. The only problem is that it is not easily recognized. How would I know that it is skillfully made if I have nothing to compare it to and don’t understand it. Whenever an artist uses unconventional skill, he in fact introduces a new genre of art. Until we have learned to understand this new genre, there’s no way to decide if the work is good or bad. I think some artists take advantage of that and make trash hoping to be recognized by an ignorant audience.

Bad art is a product that is created without skill and originality, but still with enough originality to qualify as art (not a mere copy).

If I draw a stickman on a scrap of paper, it is likely to be bad art since I am lousy at drawing in the first place and since a stickman would be quite a conventional idea. Still, it would be art since I drew it freely with my own hand and didn’t try to copy any specific stickman that I have previously seen. But if you tried to copy my stickman, it wouldn’t be art at all since nothing of what you made would be your idea.

Any original human creation anywhere must qualify as art (if it’s not copied). Art is everywhere, not just in art galleries and that’s why pretty much anything can in principle be admitted to a gallery. When something at an art exhibition appears to be junk, the question shouldn’t be “Is this art?”, but “Is it good art?”

The tragedy of modern art is not that the definition of art has been extended in comparison to past centuries but that the standards for good art has been blurred because of the great variety.

The new and original idea happens in the creative moment of the work of art. You don’t have to be an artist to come up with a new subject matter. If I gave an artist an entirely new motive: “Paint polar bears climbing palm trees.” And he makes such a painting. Which one of us is the artist? Me? No, he is of course. The artistic idea that matters is in the execution of the painting. Likewise, if a painter sets out to paint the “Madonna and Child” for the millionth time, he may still be a great and original artist. (Raphael’s Sistine Madonna was not the first such painting.) He may find a subtle originality and his own unique expression, or he may just be a copyist and thus no artist at all. That can’t be decided in advance based on the chosen genre (subject, technique, style)

But if you’re working in a specific genre then by creating something original you’re breaking away from the tenets that define that genre. If you maintain the tenets of that genre then you’re not creating anything original. — Brett

Say you are giving the Madonna a certain mysterious divine look that has never before been depicted while keeping strictly to the tenets of the genre. Couldn’t that be enough to qualify as something great and original?

Sure, if you call any slight innovation a new genre, anything unique will be a new genre by default, but that’s of course not what is usually meant.

What do you mean by genre? Do you mean it in terms of subject, or technique, or style? — Brett

I mean all of the above. They all have very little to do with artistic creativity. You can have a great technique and still be a lousy artist. Anyone can choose an interesting subject, and a great artist can keep the general style of his predecessors while surpassing them.

There’s nothing good in itself about new art movements. One genre can never be exhausted anyway and if all artists had continued to explore the classical styles and subjects beyond the 19th century, mankind would now have possessed an even greater treasure of classical art. Of course we would have missed many great works from more recently developed genres, but there’s no way to determine what would have been objectively better.

It is my opinion that many modern genres suffer from not having been around long enough to develop a sure foundation of style and content. Many of them never get off an experimental level because artists are afraid of exploring genres they have not invented themselves and hurry on to find new ways of doing art.

Great art is always a breaking of rules, but some rules must be kept so that others can be broken. Within each genre (even within the subject of “Madonna and Child”) there are ample possibilities to break the rules and produce great art.

It cannot be a copy of anything that existed previously, and it cannot be a physical object that is just a combination of other physical objects without an idea behind it.
— Congau
Interesting point. Original and consequently unrecognisable as art. What then happens? — Brett

That was not quite what I meant. Originality does not at all require that a new genre of art is invented every time an artist goes to work. It’s perfectly possible to be creative within a genre that has been explored thousands of times. It’s a modern misconception that new forms of art have to be perpetually invented. That puts the emphasis on invention rather than performance; on whims rather than quality.

Think about all the masterpieces that were produced in classical painting. There was not an enormous development in style between the Renaissance and the 19th century compared to what has happened since then, but each one of the old masters showed an incredible creative power in their works while still staying well within the frames of what was acceptable art.
The “Madonna and child” was painted again and again, but although the motive was the same, the best performers could prove an impressive creative energy. The sublime ideas they expressed were not found in the motive as such, but in the unique message of each painting.

Sure, creativity is the opposite of copying, but as long as the essential idea of a work of art is unique and not copied, it is real art.

Expression of human consciousness? That would be pretty much any human action that is not performed as a result of a mere instinct. Any utterance, even the most trivial like “I want a banana”, is an expression of consciousness and any moderately determined movement like walking from point A to point B expresses that the person is conscious.

My definition of art is “whatever is the result of human creativity”. To create is to make something out of nothing, that is to make an independent and original idea in someone’s mind into a physical expression that can be conveyed to another mind. It cannot be a copy of anything that existed previously, and it cannot be a physical object that is just a combination of other physical objects without an idea behind it.

A house is a work of art when it harks back to an architect’s original idea, otherwise not. An utterance may be a part of a work of art (literature) when it expresses an idea not previously known to have been thought, at least not in that way. “To be or not to be” is art, “I want a banana” is not. If it is an action, the main purpose of it must be an expression of an idea (it must be aesthetical). Walking from A to B is not art, but dancing is.

I also assume you mean good moral agents. A moral agent is any rational being, and I doubt anyone would argue that increasing the number of people is a serious moral goal.

The wish to increase the number of virtuous people sounds like a viable combination of virtue ethics and utilitarianism. It wouldn’t be a rejection of either, but rather a confirmation of both.
In virtue ethics, virtue is the path to happiness and only a virtuous person can be truly happy. There is no contradiction between virtue ethics and utilitarianism and a believer in the former would naturally equate an increase of happiness with an increase of virtue.

However, such a moral goal cannot exhaust the goals of either ethical theory since not only virtue has an influence on happiness. Stealing and killing is wrong because thieves and murderers are less virtuous and therefore less happy, but obviously it is also wrong because someone who grieves the loss of life and property is less happy. No ethical theory can care about the agent only and ignore the moral patient since a moral wrong is always identified through someone suffering a moral wrong (at least potentially). The goal of any ethical theory would necessarily be to reduce both evil doing and evil suffering.

“Moral” and “right” are synonymous. The right thing to do is always the moral thing to do. The reason for the confusion that leads to this question being asked at all, is that for some “morality” is equated with preconceived principles or rules that are detached from real life circumstances. That is not so.
A strict follower of rule ethics, or deontology, would think that a moral rule should always be obeyed regardless of consequences. The principles are always moral and always right. If you find that unreasonable, as your introduction indicates, it’s probably because you prefer a consequentialist ethics. Consequentialists, or utilitarians, believe that the moral action is the one that has the best consequences and that would also be how to measure morality in your example.
Now, if you are correct that it is impossible to predict the consequences of free migration, we will have no way of knowing what would be the right decision, and we also can have no idea about the moral decision. In that case there can be no moral position.
A utilitarian can only make a claim about the moral and right decision when he thinks there is a reasonable possibility to predict.

So are you saying that when an individual subscribes to an ethical system, they bind themselves to that system and are therefore no longer in a position to question the demands of that system? Does an ethical system exist in and of itself? What is an individual’s relationship to that ethical system? — Possibility

By an ethical system I simply mean whatever ethics a person supports. It can even be completely individual; that person being the only one in the world to follow a particular system. You bind yourself in the sense that if you act outside it, you are inconsistent.

How do you know those conditions have been met by someone? Maybe the guy COULDN'T turn the kid around and save him from drowning because of some disability — khaled

Of course I assume in this example that he really can save the child, that’s a part of the premise. If you can do a great service to someone with a minimal effort on your part, then it’s deeply immoral not to do it. Make the service smaller and the effort bigger, and at some point it becomes debatable whether the act can be demanded of you. But in an extreme example like this, there can be no doubt that it would be very bad not to act. Or do you disagree?

the ACT of conception itself doesn't harm anyone at the time it is done but that doesn't mean it should be allowed — khaled

To turn it around: The act of conception itself doesn't benefit anyone at the time it is done but that doesn't mean it should not be allowed. No one is either harmed or benefited at the time. There is a chance it will harm someone in the future, but there’s a greater chance it will benefit someone.

You keep assuming you can convince anyone of anything. That as long as you explain it slowly enough everyone will agree. I don't think that's the case at all. — khaled

I couldn’t convince a monkey or a chicken or a retarded person, but why do you care about those who lack the intelligence to understand? The point is that an axiom like A+B=B+A can indeed be explained. You don’t just say it’s true “just because”.

My basic premise is: if he/she didn't cause it, they cannot be punished for not stopping it. Simply because: it's not their fault. Why are you assuming I need to justify MY premise? You're the one proposing that people should be punished for not stopping actions they didn't cause. So if someone was robbing a store and I didn't intervene am I doing something wrong? — khaled

I didn’t say they should be punished. I don’t care if they are punished or not. What’s important is to acknowledge that they are doing something morally wrong by not intervening. If you passed a child who was lying face down in a pool and you could save it from drowning just by turning it on the back, you would be a terrible person if you didn’t do it.

This is an instant were positive ethics becomes a command. Normally, it can only recommend good acts since the number of good deeds we could perform is infinite and cannot be specified. But when the possibility of acting comes very close to you and the amount of inconvenience it costs you is very small it becomes an absolute demand. In such cases you can’t say: if I do A, I can’t do B.

You could go to Africa and save a starving child hitherto unknown to you, but if you do that you won’t be able to perform good deeds closer to home. Therefore, it cannot be demanded that you do so. But when it’s a matter of easily saving that child in a pool or blinking to prevent an Armageddon, those simple acts don’t stop you from doing anything else. Your task is clearly defined by the circumstances and it must be considered a moral demand.

(Actually the law also sometimes identifies a duty to act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_(law) )