The phrase "a moral baseline" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a fundamental standard or principle of morality that serves as a reference point for ethical behavior or decision-making.
Example: "In discussions about ethical dilemmas, it's important to establish a moral baseline to guide our choices."
Alternatives: "ethical standard" or "moral foundation".
A moral baseline is very much a thing of the head, whereas a spiritual dimension is very much a thing of the heart.
Studies show liberals are more likely to treat equality as a moral baseline, and to see wealth and poverty as lucky or unlucky draws in the cosmic lottery.
Indeed, libertarians and others can still make out their case that rights-infringing redistribution has occurred by specifying and justifying entitlement producing rules that, if accepted, would grant pretax income significance as a moral baseline.
The considerations above do not in themselves show, as Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel (2003) have recently argued, that "Taxes do not take away from taxpayers what is antecedently theirs; pretax income has no status as a moral baseline for the purpose of evaluating the justice of the tax system".
Follow Manisha Krishnan on Toitter.
But, and this is a critical question, one wonders whether a sound moral baseline is enough?
A third respect in which global poverty may be seen as coercive is by comparing the actual conditions of the world's poorest residents to a minimal moral baseline needed to make acceptable any institution of coercively enforced property rights.
High standards of leadership and an embedded understanding of core values provide a very sound moral baseline from which the military can move forward in the conduct of its business.
They further explain the difference between threats and offers as their moral baseline: a threat is apparent when the person being made the offer is worse off than their baseline position if they do not accept the offer; it is an offer when the person is no worse off if they do not accept the offer.
Because the relevant baseline is the moral baseline, research in which a non-human animal's moral status is enhanced to that of a normal human adult raises the following problem.
3. The appearance of a closer connection between causation and justice may reflect the use of the same moral baseline for determining both, i.e., the view that a disadvantage is caused by a social arrangement if and only if it would not have existed under a morally-privileged baseline – e.g., a state of nature or a collectivist utopia.
