If something does not inflict unnecessary or unjustifiable harm, it cannot be immoral.

Despite the quagmire of competing frameworks that is "moral philosophy", typical real world moral dilemmas of today play out in a somewhat narrow field of inquiry: "How do we co-exist in peace and comfort?" where pain and pleasure (in all their forms) then become the most common basis for human morality that we have available to us. For instance, behaviors such as mutilation or murder are nearly universally regarded as undesirable on the grounds that they cause pain and inhibit pleasure (in the rare case when they are not considered harmful, it is only very specific cases of mutilation and murder that are looked upon as not harmful or justifiable). It is these fundamentally human and nearly universally agreed upon desires which forms the basis of the moral outline which this razor serves.

If something does not cause harm to anyone or anything, on what grounds could we deem such a thing to be immoral? In my experience, for any and all given examples, whatever must be invoked to condemn a harmless act as immoral can either be easily and directly reduced to a standard of pain and pleasure (an interpretation of "harm") or is inexorably based on something far less real and far less persuasive than pain or pleasure.

The utility of this razor might not seem eminent, but I have found that when confronting actual moral dilemmas it can serve to shave away the unnecessary peripheral (and unpersuasive bits) by focusing directly on the tangible harm that something causes, and asking whether or not that harm is necessary or justifiable. It can also help to put magnitude on the immorality of a harmful transgression and the efficacy of a proposed moral judgment and response. It's not perfectly sharp (no razor is), and after you've used it you may still need to question what constitutes harm, and what might constitute justification for harm, but at the very least this razor helps to more comfortably ignore many of the pesky biases which can make moral questions more confusing than they need to be.

Most notably this moral approach runs contrary to so called objective moral truth (especially the god-based kind) which stem from intangible and unknowable metaphysical suppositions. Much of the persuasive power of many religious systems can be easily reduced to the persuasive power of pain and pleasure (i.e, heaven and hell as incentives) and what is left generally cannot compete with the realities of the human condition in terms of believability; pain and pleasure are parts of the real world which are constantly and brutishly thrust upon you, while hypotheses of god and spirit are highly ethereal.

One objection to this approach might be that "harm" is left totally undefined. If we actually start discussing the specifics of harm though, we will find high degrees of concensus concerning some basic tenets: restriction of freedom, theft of one's property, the loss of one's life, physical injury, psychological torture, etc... If we restrict our moral questions to "what can we agree is undesirable?" rather than "what do we all agree is the most desirable?", we're then able to cover quite a bit of moral ground which helps to answer most kinds of moral dilemmas which we normally confront.

To try it out, take an intuitive moral belief that you hold (including possibly the accompanying moral reaction) and ask yourself "does the thing I condemn cause unnecessary or unjustifiable harm?" and then possibly "is any harm implicit in my reaction (incarcerating a murderer for instance) justifiable or necessary"?

Thoughts?