What is your fundamental moral compass?

Whether we like it or not, understand it or not, life has a purpose and good and bad are derived from that as subjective values, but some can also be grouped as common values that a species would collectively hold true.

Family members like Ms. Kamukama and her cousin will often share one set of pills, an act of love that leads to disaster. Incomplete treatment means both will probably die, but may first develop drug-resistant AIDS and pass it on.

Stopping subsidies for AIDS drugs provides a classic demonstration: they keep people who contracted the disease via their own deliberate actions alive long enough not only to infect others but also to destroy the usefulness of the original drugs:

It's not just sub-Saharan Africa, and it's not just AIDS. Would the ethical course of action have been not to supply the original patients with medication in the first place? If your criterion is to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number, that's obviously optimal.

Suffering is bad because it hurts.

No, hurt is good because it teaches the way it is supposed to...

some people have no feeling and they have great problems with injuries.
Hurt teaches you not to do it.

So why is suffering bad ?

Death can be procrastinated, not avoided.

We are a cog in a machine. We simply have to know what is good for us, not what the machine does.

The word good has a predetermined basis of good for us.

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So? What's wrong with waste? What's wrong with pointlessness?

The universe is increasing in complexity, from life to stars and galaxies, that is a point. Moving in other directions is pointless.

Life having a purpose is much like a rock falling towards centre of the earth. It could fly off the other way, or shatter or a thousand possible things, but out of many possibilities, it falls. Purpose is what was meant to happen.

All judgement is subjective, whether it has value or not is determined by the greater number of valuers.

Our instincts are beyond our control. If our life is not valued as good, forces beyond out control will extinct us. There is an external good and bad.

but it ultimately boils down to a subjective value judgment somewhere.

I have not read every response to this question, but I have been thinking about it.

For ME, I have come to believe over the years that Human Kindness is the most valuable thing to human beans.

Thus, I try to practice that kindness virtually every time I come into contact with another human being.
Every time, everywhere. If I cannot be kind, I will be silent.

Sigh. I think I've failed to answer the initial question. But I couldn't think of any more "fundamental moral compass,"
in my own life and understanding.

Cripes, this sounds like the parents' mantra of "If you can't think of anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Never mind. Move along, folks, move along.

Why, thank you, friend, for this post.

I must have accidentally stumbled upon the things important to those who have died & been resuscitated,
because only learning (to me) is as important as human kindness.

Humans, in all their glorious differences, are delightful to me.

Learning is, to me, the cure for depression (from which I've suffered).

I've probably already said that my brother (now passed away) told me that, when he was "dead," he saw/felt nothing at all. He told me the only difficult part of "dying" was, in fact, living, and feeling all of the pain again.

Note: Er, my brother was "saved from death" (a 15-minute one), to tell me these things, and only actually died several years later.

You are still defining what is "good for us" based on your subjective values

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The word good has a predetermined basis of good for us.

Says you, this is your subjective definition of "good for us".

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The universe is increasing in complexity, from life to stars and galaxies, that is a point. Moving in other directions is pointless.

You answer what is wrong with pointless by saying it's pointless.

Upon what basis do you declare "what was meant to happen"

then that this is our "purpose" in life and furthermore that our "purpose" in life is "good"?

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All judgement is subjective, whether it has value or not is determined by the greater number of valuers.

So are you saying that popularity makes right, or popularity = "good"? Is this the basis you use for defining "good"?

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Our instincts are beyond our control. If our life is not valued as good, forces beyond out control will extinct us. There is an external good and bad.

Why is our extinction "bad"?

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No, hurt is good because it teaches the way it is supposed to

..."supposed to" by what authority??

That can be and has been learned painlessly by greater and more meticulous application of attention.

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Death can be procrastinated, not avoided.

U have evidence of this ?

Someone said that the in the US during the 20th C., we put forth an idea that work is bad, so we made work largely inane and purposeless by mechanizing it which actually made work more boring and demeaned the worker more than handcrafting does.

The point of the commentator being that work and leisure are opposites and both have value as part of a pair. It strikes me, therefore, that suffering . . . not to the level of masochism but to the point of self-denial or temporary self-sacrifice is a good and is a necessary complement to indulgence. One abstains from gratuitous satisfaction until one has saved enough or done enough work to earn the satisfaction one desires.

As far as death is concerned, that depends on the culture.

Perhaps spending a couple weeks with someone who has experienced it could cure you of that delusion.