There’s also a question of how practical such an objective measure will be, should anyone ever get around to formulating it – given all the thought that’s gone into it, chances are it won’t be anything simple (if it exists), meaning it’s not likely very useful. If in order to decide what’s morally right in any given instance one needs to heft a moral calculus of forbidding complexity, chances are people are just not going to bother. After all, in the overwhelming majority of cases, if we’re not deciding whether it’s permissible to throw fat people in front of trolleys, our heuristics seem to work well enough; and if we have to resort to complex reasoning first, chances are the trolley will have passed the junction already, so to speak.
I agree about the value of trying, though; and if I only thought about things I believed I could come up with definite answers about, then I’d hardly do any thinking at all…
Congrats!