You seem to be confusing different senses of these words.

See Objective Moral Facts.

Execution only has validity if it has utility. The main reason it is deemed unacceptable is its lack of utility: science shows the death penalty has no deterrence effect, and jurisprudence shows the frequency of accused innocents getting executed is unacceptably high.

So execution appears to have negative utility. A life sentence at least allows the correction of a mistake and the possibility of reform and serving life to a purpose. Especially if we design the correctional system to facilitate and amplify those effects (rather than hinder or suppress them), as many countries other than the US have done.

But the same can be asked of life sentences. When are those even a positive utility? There are non-specious answers to that question. But they do illustrate that even life sentences have selective utility and thus should not be over used.

Likewise, one might contrive circumstances that would justify execution, e.g. a recalcitrant murderer who keeps killing people even in prison. There may be finally a net positive utility then in executing that person. But if so, that’s the only relevant way to argue for it. The facts have to be true. And no relevant facts can be excluded (like systemic effects). And a conclusion must be derived from those facts without fallacy.

Just as with everything else.

this desire is still irrational

It is objectively pointless. To rationally order desires by objective outcomes is what I document in the linked article.

Everyone else is insane.

So, if you or I encounter someone irrationally bent on mass murder, we morally ought to kill them.

Then there are no such people left to fret about.

Thanks for the reply, sir. However, I don’t think it really addresses what I was asking. My hypothetical was about any sufficiently powerful agent, regardless of their psychological makeup, who wants humanity to end. Whether such an agent would, in practice, be a psychopath isn’t the point, so the parts of your reply about why psychopaths usually comply with moral norms don’t really engage with the question I was asking.

The conditions I set out weren’t just additional details. They were the entire point of the thought experiment. I wasn’t asking whether a real-world agent could ever actually be free from all risk. I agree that, in reality, they couldn’t. My question is different. If we simply assume, for the sake of argument, that the powerful agent faces no risk whatsoever (even if he does, he gets pleasure by dealing with it), achieves complete and lasting satisfaction, and never experiences any form of punishment or retaliation, does your view still say that their action is wrong? If so, why, given that the usual considerations about risk, consequences, and self-interest have been explicitly set aside?

As I understand it, your view is that moral facts ultimately depend on what a fully rational person would want if they had complete understanding of their situation. So my question is this: could wanting the extinction of humanity, thereby eliminating every future moment of happiness, wellbeing, or flourishing that could ever exist, still count as something a fully rational person might want? Or does being fully rational rule out that desire altogether, in much the same way that it rules out holding contradictory or incoherent beliefs?

I don’t think this question can be dismissed easily. If rationality consists only in being internally consistent, well informed, and effective at achieving one’s goals, then it doesn’t seem to exclude any particular goal in principle. Wanting humanity to end could be just as rational as wanting a pleasant dinner, provided the agent isn’t mistaken about the facts and isn’t reasoning inconsistently. Satisfaction is still satisfaction. On a purely instrumental conception of rationality, there doesn’t appear to be any basis for saying that one source of lasting satisfaction is more rational than another.

If, however, your theory wants to say that this desire is still irrational, or that acting on it is still objectively wrong, even after we’ve assumed away all risk and guaranteed complete satisfaction, then it seems to require a stronger conception of rationality. It has to build something substantive into what it means to be fully rational. A common response is that someone who genuinely and completely understood what it is like to be every person whose future would be erased could no longer stably maintain such a desire. The desire would dissolve simply through that deeper understanding. That may well be true, but notice that this is no longer an argument about risk, consequences, or instrumental reasoning. It is instead the claim that a sufficiently complete understanding of other conscious minds necessarily transforms what one can rationally want. At that point, it begins to look as though a moral commitment has been built into the very concept of rationality, rather than being something that follows from rationality alone.

suppose a powerful agent wants the human race to end

Why would it want that?

Facing any threat, the first question is cause. You attack the cause first. So in any such hypothetical, step one is talking to this “powerful agent” and working out why it’s doing something so stupid and whether its needs could be met by some other compromise. Objectively rational agents will oblige. Even psychopaths (that’s why most psychopaths are compliant; they aren’t all rapists and serial killers for a reason). And that’s even despite psychopaths being cognitively disabled (they are insane).

So you are describing a massively irrational agent—essentially a lunatic. To whom no truth or logic would matter anyway so what they would do cannot inform what we should do. The last thing we should behave like is an irrational lunatic. So describing why an irrational lunatic would do an unstoppably irrational and crazy thing is of no relevance to what a rational, sane agent should do.

For more on this point see The Objective Value Cascade.

I’ve a quick hypothetical, sir: suppose a powerful agent wants the human race to end, and he has the means to bring this about. He has calculated everything perfectly, and it is stipulated as fact, not just his belief, that he faces zero risk of failure, punishment, or retaliation at any point in the process. He gets full, lasting satisfaction from this goal. Since no other rational agents would remain afterward, there is no total war scenario to deter him either. Given your view that moral facts are relative to an agent’s real wants and situation, would ending the human race then be objectively moral for him?

many thanks – highly apposite.

I am not sure. But not because anything you say is incorrect, but because it’s not engaging with what they are trying to do, so they’d just twist it back into their rhetoric. This happened with my recent debates with Christian nationalists on exactly that question (see comment thread there which was in response to this comment there).

So, rhetorically, I think when the God-grounder asks, ‘What is your standard of morality?’ the best answer is to start somewhere they can’t escape from: “that which follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world.” Then they will try to wriggle out of that by arguing that standards can’t be derived that way. Which will be an ironic own goal, because that amounts to admitting moral facts are not rational. Which is the actual significance of denying the Euthyphro dilemma that they usually avoid by deploying rhetoric against it that avoids that revelation. So don’t let them avoid that revelation. Make it the center-point.

I answer this way because I realize now that we should not be assuming they are merely confused and actually have a coherent point for us to take seriously. When they ask, ‘What is your standard of morality?’, to them that is just the opening move in a rhetorical chess game, and not a sincere concern for your answer. They are waiting for that line to trigger some common response that they have practiced a gameplay around, so they can out-wordgame you.

The only way to win that game is not to play. Force them right onto the horns of the dilemma but without any way for them to try jumping from one horn or the other mid-argument. Start right at square one: that which is moral is and can only ever be that which is concluded without fallacy from true premises about people and the world. And keep defending that proposition; don’t let them change the subject (and they will try, so keep sharp and be ready to catch when they do).

A sincere person who asked that question would welcome a more substantive answer because they actually want the answer, and are not just taking a “kata stance” to “fight” whatever you say. But you will almost never hear that question from someone sincerely asking it. So never act like that’s what’s happening.

If by rare chance it turns out your interlocutor is sincere, their questioning will get there smoothly from your starting point, because they actually want to know how it gets there, rather than wanting instead to deny whatever you say. And you will quickly see the difference in the direction of their discourse. And since it ends in the same place anyway, the better move is always to take the rhetorical move I recommend.

But just FYI, that “sincere” line of inquiry will go something like this:

Q: What is your standard of morality?
A: That which follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world.

Q: What does follow without fallacy from true premises about people and the world?
A: That cultivating empathy, honesty, and reasonableness makes everything statistically go better for you.

Q: By what standard of better?
A: That which will bring optimal satisfaction to you, with yourself and your life.

Q: What if being evil satisfies you most?
A: It can’t. Science shows that that is always self-defeating and leads to perpetual dissatisfaction with both yourself (Bergman) and your life (Axelrod), which you will deny but admit when being honest. And true facts only follow from true premises, so the “being honest” part is what is actually true about you and thus entails what would actually be better for you even when you are committed to denying it.

Q: What if you just want to be irrational and believe false things?
A: It would still be objectively true that you will honestly be more satisfied with yourself and your life if you weren’t irrational and didn’t believe false things.

Q: What if you don’t want to be satisfied with yourself and your life?
A: That is a self-contradiction. If you genuinely want to be dissatisfied, then being dissatisfied is what satisfies you. And that’s again another goal, and goals are always statistically best served by being rational. And being rational leads to the conclusion that that you don’t genuinely want to be dissatisfied, that in fact that is self-defeating and exactly what no rational person actually prefers when aware of the alternative.

That last point brings us all the way to The Objective Value Cascade.

The rest is just science.

But every step is grounded the same way: it always comes back to “It’s better for everyone, in all possible preference cases, to be rational and informed” and that always ends in the same place, with “what follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world,” which is therefore always the standard of morality in all possible worlds, whether a God exists or not.

Indeed, even if God exists, that has to be his standard of morality, and thus when God doesn’t exist, it remains our standard. God cannot make “what follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world” different than it is. That’s literally logically impossible. And therefore that has to be the same standard God uses to determine the standard of morality. But that standard exists even when God does not. And so we do not need God to determine what is moral.