The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

Maybe, but a measure of the phenomenon is not an explanation of how human societies came to have an ethical aspect.

It is also possible that the metric is considering only one aspect of a society's ethical position, especially given that things like trolley problems, and some of the things that are done in the name of nominally ethical religions, suggest that people are not consistently rational in their ethical thinking and behavior.

One might, for example, value another's life purely on the economic value it is to oneself - would that be an ethical position or the absense of one? I don't doubt that one could make some sort of argument for the former, but ethics are really only interesting when they are at odds with perceived self-interest.

On the one hand you dislike semantics, on the other hand you want me to understand your meaning. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am arguing that the social aspect of morality isn't about measurement, but about whose yardstick we should be using.

Said differently: How do we calibrate our measurement instruments?

Man is the measure of all things. --Protagoras.

The idea is to not look at individual choices but at the aggregate of choices made and measure what mankind considers good.

"We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or points us toward evil rather than the good."

What is cruelty? He's just juxtaposing abstract "cruelty" with some unspecified hypothetical and assumes it is meaningful. Cruelty presumes opposition to nature, so it makes no sense to say that some act A, understood in the abstract, is cruel.

"Different statues are made of different clay; on the container view in contrast, everything that does, or could, exist is a manifestation of the same Reality."

Prima facie, sounds like a vulgarization of God-as-Being, i.e., all things exist as potentially existing in relation to actually existing things, and actually existing things are like potential things in relation to the act of existence that causes them to be, which is God.

"If we follow Aristotle in grounding moral truth in the goal-directed nature of human beings, then we fail to account for the necessity of moral truths."

The aim was never necessity but nature. The natural law is called thus for a reason. I don't know what "good" or "bad" is apart from the nature of a thing.

"My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."

He's elevating the world of plural substances to the level of a single substance and referring to it as Reality. But this does nothing to convert the natural moral law into the necessary moral law because you've just reduced the universe to one thing whose nature is such that such-and-such is good for it and such-and-such is not. To accomplish that kind of necessity, he would have to identity nature with necessity and that would require identifying what he called "Reality" with God. If Reality is God, then this is pantheism. But why this need to posit necessity?

"Foundational theories of morality have been locked in a perennial tug of war between the supernaturalism of Plato and the naturalism of his opponents."

Has he explored Thomism? Forms exist only in things and the mind, but also in God. Thus, you have both access to moral truths by knowing the natures of things, but even with the destruction of those things, they continue to exist in God (even if we may not be able to know them). Also, it is bad for human beings to harm others at least because it harms the common good and thus their own good. It is against our own natures to do so.

I don't think so. In this view, the concepts of what constitutes ethical behavior have arisen from individuals coming to understand what sort of society is most likely to give the best outcome according to their own long-term self interest. This is no more begging the question than the concept of survival of the fittest in theories of evolution, the point being that there is a coherent concept of fitness in that case, and self-interest in this one. In both cases, the question being addressed is "how did we arrive at the current state of affairs, when other outcomes are at least logically possible?"