Is stealing a bike not immoral until the owner of the bike notices it? Or until he misses it? Let's say he has a bike that he never uses, and never will. Is it not immoral to steal that bike?

If you really mean what you say and understand the implications, I am disturbed by your ethics. I'm usually disturbed by utilitarians - they're the ones who end up saying 'torturing a couple of terrorists is morally OK when it means that we can save the lives of 50 innocent civilians'.

Well, you have started upon just the pertinent path, so let us consider the conclusion.

Would it be immoral to do something 'to' someone, when it has no effect on them at all? Hmmm, that seems rather difficult to find any immorality in -- after all, any moral concern must eventually bottom out on some actual effect -- deontological or consequentialist.

If all that can be said is that it would be 'spiritually' wrong or 'god' decrees it to be wrong, or merely that 'we' have decided it is wrong, that is unlikely to satisfy anyone rational.

What can be done to someone that has no effect on them at all? Is there actually something being done then? I'm not understanding the situation. If you're asking if acts can be moral or immoral even if they have no consequences, then the answer is yes, they can.

Objective morality doesn't have to be derived from god or a spiritual being, or feeling; there can be objective morality that we deduce, or interpret or find, depending on how you look at it, through reason. From a limited set of axiom (which I referred to in another post in this thread), we can derive objective morality. The problem with morality is epistemological, not about its nature. We just don't know yet how to deduce what is moral in some circumstances. Maybe we will some day, we'll see; but that morality is subjective seems to be a commonly held belief but one that usually doesn't stand up long when one examines the consequences. When enough people think that it is morally OK to execute all those with hair growing out of their ears, is it? No it's not, and it never is. It's not because it violates the right to life of those people (leaving aside issues of death penalty etc).

People often argue to me 'but if there are no people, there is no morality, so morality has to be subjective' (actually someone said that to me last week right after saying how her Christianity was such an important part of her identity - I think she didn't quite get the memo on the nature of morality in her church, but I digress). My point is that morality always exists; it's like the fundamentals of mathematics or the laws of nature. Would Pythagoras's theorem hold even if there would never have existed humans who formulated it? Of course it would.

> If you're asking if acts can be moral or immoral even if they have no consequences, then the answer is yes, they can.

If you are going to make a rule -- i.e. that restricts people in the real world -- yet it has no purpose in real-world effect, why on earth should anyone be interested in agreeing to it?

"We are not allowed to go out in the sun on wednesdays. Why? Because it has been unimpeachably objectively derived from the 'axioms of morality'!" Anyone with any sense will just go elsewhere.

Ultimately, one has to be sensible with philosophy.

> It's not because it violates the right to life of those people

And why is it wrong to violate right to life? Because it has a real harmful effect. This is the point: all these rules come down to actual effects. If it were possible to remove the harmful part (maybe like killing someone in Quake Live), such rules would lose their meaning or worth. What really counts in moral evaluation is the real-world effect.