Is morality subjective or objective?

Subjective doesn't refer to "not hard-wired."

Subjective simply denotes that we're talking about a mental phenomenon rather than a non-mental phenomenon.  Plenty of mental phenomena may be hard-wired so to speak.

All that shows is that if there are objective morals, there is disagreement about what they are.

I'm not sure you could show objective morals don't exist. Better arguments against them are those that try to show they are unlikely or incoherent or we wouldn't be able to tell what they were if they did exist, or that even if we knew they existed and what they were, why would that obligate us to follow them?

More interesting to me is whether moral questions even really make sense unless we assume there are objective morals. Most of us don't act or feel we should act like a child killer just has a different outlook to us even if deep down we may think this so. Most of us when in a moral dilemma try to consider what the right thing to do is, but if there are no objective morals, what are we appealing to exactly? Surely whatever our action, it will be no more or less moral than any other.

One way round this might be to say morality is that which is deemed likely to bring consequences we want. For instance if I steal from Julie, Julie won't trust me in future so it is better if I don't do so and it is better for me if others behave similarly. But while this maybe explains the origin of morals, it doesn't really fit with how most people seem to think of morals - when we do a good deed, we don't feel we do it out of some enlightened selfishness.

I feel Sartre is one of the few philosophers who actually committed fully to subjective morals. If we are the only arbiter of our own morality then all our actions are deemed moral by us having done them. But most of us I think baulk at such an attitude.

Suppose I've wittered on enough so short version of the above: both objective and subjective moral theories seem highly problematic to me.

I think your post here boils down to you being puzzled why our instincts/intuitions/feelings about morality don't seem to align with the supposed-fact of morality being subjective. To that I'd make two arguments: One, what SHOULD we feel like if morals were subjective and how would we distinguish that from what we should feel like if they were objective? What would the difference be? Two, from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that we should feel just as strongly about morality, if not even more so, than things that are objective, like the existence of the sun. I mean, the sun just kinda hangs out and does its own thing a long ways a way from us and there's not much we can do to affect it; but morality profoundly affect our daily existence. I certainly care much more that you think murdering me is wrong than I do for feeling that the sun objectively exists. 

To answer your question about "what are we appealing to," I'd say a few possible things: one would be the consequences you allude to, but another would be what some neutral, 3rd party who had no personal stake in the issue would think was moral. In the latter case, morality becomes like the rules of a game that we all agree to and perhaps need referees (in the case of morality, courts of law; or even just neutral 3rd parties) to sort out. This is basically where we get the golden rule from, because if a society is going to function we each need to feel like there's fairness, that if I don't want to be stolen from I won't steal from you; and we put in place laws to make it official, and police and courts to enforce it; and even in a situation where the latter likely wouldn't be involved, we would still have in our conscience the fact that we're apart of this society that's agreed to these rules and that we'd be breaking them. 

In a way, I'm reminded of what Robert Frost once wrote about free verse poetry, saying that it was like playing tennis without a net. His point was that in art (just like morals, just like games) we impose certain rules, laws, and principles that make the art/game/society possible. If I sit down to play poker, there's an implicit understanding that I'm going to play by the rules, and that if my King-high loses to an Ace-high I'm not going to start complaining that the rules are just subjective so there's no reason I shouldn't win the pot. How could we play poker if we didn't agree on the rules? And how could society function if we didn't come to some kind of agreements about morality? In fact, looking at games it's probably much easier to understand why subjectivity gets confused with objectivity. When playing, you don't think "well, my hand is only subjectively worse than his hand, but since we've all agreed to the rules he should still get the pot;" you just think "my hand is worse than his, he gets the pot." Yet it's also fairly obvious if you think about it for a moment that the former is correct. There's nothing objective about an Ace that makes it better than a king, we just agree that it is in order to play the game, and we can easily invent rules where it isn't (in fact we have them in poker in the form of Lowball games). 

Much of our moral code is subject to arbitrary social mores and trends. However, I'm not sold on the idea that there's no objective basis to morality. Harm is an objectively negative experience - that is an absolute and unchanging truth - even if what constitutes harm to any individual sentient organism may be in some part subjective. Therefore, I believe that it's objectively wrong to create negative conscious experience in sentient beings in the form of the creation of new life which will be vulnerable to sensations of harm.

So my answer is mostly subjective, but there is an objective ultimate truth.

Who's realness, yours or mine?

I wouldn't expect a coherent answer from innsmouth, that is if he does choose to respond after being called out by your simply obvious and well put point here. The only thing he appears to put in his mouth, is his foot.

No, I'm not puzzled. I'm not saying I find subjective morality unlikely because of everything I'm saying, only that we don't seem to act as if it's true, nor can we really do so and still say morals are meaningful. When Sartre says Hitler has behaved morally by his own moral compass well that's all well and good but you could just say "Hitler behaved as he did" and it's no less meaningful. So why bother with morality as a concept at all?


But what about when we believe our society is immoral? That would seem to be an appeal to something beyond society and it's rules.

For those who believe morality is subjective, I really don't see how they "should" act differently than they do. For subjectivists, every proclamation of (im)morality just comes with an implicit relativity to whatever moral standards they adhere to. One doesn't always clarify the standards because there's usually a lot of fundamental agreements within societies. We bother with morality because it profoundly affects society and us as individuals. Saying "Hitler has behaved morally by his own moral compass" is true, but it's just as true he behaved immorally by ours, and the two different moral standards could not co-exist (at least not given how history played out).

To build from the above, society could only be immoral relative to our own standards, and in that case we'd have a handful of options: go along with society anyway, try to change society peacefully/legally, try to change it forcefully/illegally, or join another society. Which we chose would depend on a myriad of factors.

To put it as generally as possible, every action can only be deemed (im)moral relative to some standard, and it shouldn't be surprising that there are opposing standards out there, just as there are different poker games/rules. This relativity doesn't make morality any less important because it still determines how society functions and how that society affects us personally.

The perception of a certain sensation is subjective, but what is not subjective is that negative value states do, as a matter of verifiable fact, exist as events occurring in the universe. Evolution and life itself depend on these negative value states in order to motivate sentient beings to survive in order to pass on their genetic material. Therefore I would class it as objectively immoral to induce negative states out of a vacuum- as is the case in bringing a new sentient life form into being.

And I agree that in most real life scenarios, it would be hard to delineate an objectively immoral act, due to the complicated interplay of variables that are involved. But I have mentioned one act that I would determine as being objectively immoral due to the fact that it is creating negative states out of a void, and not out of any real necessity.