Absolute Morality...again.

For sure, absolute nonsense exists. You need only look at what has been posted in this thread to see that.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

At my age, I probably can't survive 30 years even with oxygen, eating and drinking. I would have to include you in the group of those with inability. LOL . You have provided examples which all depend on human conventions. And the disagreements you saw in the answers show that people don't agree over those conventions. Your examples were not of absolutes. As if there were no disputes about what is true The laws of physics are not absolute. Get over it.

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Show me a moral absolutist, and I will show you a moral relativist who absolutely wants to impose his relative morals on everybody else

No, that's absolutely wrong.You can have "absolute" in your sense by having a ruthless dictator. But we would consider a ruthless dictator to be immoral, so that's the wrong meaning of "absolute" for moral questions.Purpledawn has it right (Message 39) with:

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Show me a moral absolutist, and I will show you a moral relativist who absolutely wants to impose his relative morals on everybody else

Observation shows that morality is changing, has always been changing, and likely will always be changing.

That's because "murder" is a relative term. Murder is that kind of killing that is considered to be wrong. It is relative to the standards of the culture.

This is a somewhat complex issue.Consider the Celsius temperature scale. It is relative to the melting point of ice, since we arbitrarily choose that point to be 0⁰C. By contrast, the Kelvin scale can be called absolute, since it does not depend on this arbitrary choice. Strictly speaking, the Kelvin scale still depends on the arbitrary decision that a degree is one hundredth of the range between the melting point of ice and the boiling point of water, so still not completely absolute.That example illustrates the meaning of the term "absolute". But it doesn't give the whole picture. We can still say that temperature is objective, even when measured on the Celsius scale. That's because we can reach agreements as to what it means. The melting point of ice, although an arbitrary choice, still serves to anchor the scale in physical reality. So although the choice is arbitrary, we can consider it objective and we need not have great concern of epistemic relativism (whether truth/falsity of statements about reality are relative).On the question of moral judgements, we observe that they are relative. But, unlike the case of the Celsius scale, there does not seem to be any way to anchor these in physical reality. Instead, they appear to be anchored in purely cultural conventions.The appeal to God given absolutes doesn't work either. For even if we consider biblical rules, how they were interpreted by the early Christian is different from how they were interpreted by the Jews, and is different from how they are interpreted by modern Christians. Even looking at today's world, we can see differences in rendering by different Christian denominations. Thus it looks as if there could be no purely physical anchor for moral judgements.I'm not sure how you want to relate this to objective/subjective. It seems to me that the objective/subjective distinction works well enough for epistemic judgements (what is a fact about the world). I'm not sure that it works at all for moral judgements. It seems to me that two people (perhaps from different cultures) could completely agree on an epistemic account of a person's behavior, yet disagree on whether that behavior was moral.

You are arguing against a strawman. I doubt that any relativist would agree with "truth may change at the discretion of personal opinion." You also fail to distinguish between moral relativism and epistemic relativism. They are not the same, and only moral relativism is relevant to the current topic.In your definition of absolutism, you assert "Absolute truth states that truth is truth and to deviate from it would nulify its definition." However, that is completely circular and leaves "truth" as undefined and apparently without meaning.Some suggested reading on relativism:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy;
Wikipedia.

And they all lived happily ever after.It's a fairy tale idea. The real world is filled with different, often conflicting, goals. What's best for one is not what's best for another. There is no absolute best.

But that doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't even address the problem."Best" is relative to goals. Different people have different goals. You only have to look at politics to see this. Conservatives, socialists, liberals, libetarians -- there you have 4 different groups, with 4 very different ideas as to what should be the goals of a society. And that doesn't even mention the rather different goals of other cultures (American indians, or Australian Aborigines, or Fijians). There is no absolute way of deciding what is best, because there is no absolute best.

You are presupposing a "moral standard" - I thought we were debating that.Conflict lead to things that will be considered wrong.Here's an example.Goal 1: What's mine is mine, and nobody should be able to take it away from me.Goal 2: We have an obligation to our children and our grandchildren, to leave them a decent world to live in.I don't see anything morally wrong about either goal. But they are in conflict when it comes to economic policies. The economic conservatives emphasize Goal 1, and have successfully cut taxes on the rich. A lot of people, myself included, see the result as an immoral violation of Goal 2, in that the tax cuts run up the national debt and will have to eventually be paid for by our children and grand children.

You are presupposing that there is such a thing as "the fairest judgment of a situation". But that is often what is in dispute. Sure they can. I gave an example in Message 256.

If Social Security collapses anytime soon, it will be because the conservatives raided the trust fund and used it to give themselves huge tax cuts.

That's evidence that morality is relative to the culture, rather than to the individual. It does not make the case for an absolute morality.

Yet if I got on a subway train in Chicago, and took somebody's seat, most people would understand that it is entirely proper for someone of my age to have seating priority over a younger person. (There is even a sign on the train saying as much).