The metaphysical component of metaethics involves discovering specifically whether moral values are eternal truths that exist in a spirit-like realm, or simply human conventions…
[Truths about what is/isnot ethical] …are absolute, or eternal, in that they never change, and also that they are universal insofar as they apply to all rational creatures around the world and throughout time. The most dramatic example of this view is Plato, who was inspired by the field of mathematics. When we look at numbers and mathematical relations, such as 1+1=2, they seem to be timeless concepts that never change, and apply everywhere in the universe. Humans do not invent numbers, and humans cannot alter them. Plato explained the eternal character of mathematics by stating that they are abstract entities that exist in a spirit-like realm. He noted that moral values also are absolute truths and thus are also abstract, spirit-like entities. In this sense, for Plato, moral values are spiritual objects…
The second and more this-worldly approach to the metaphysical status of morality follows in the skeptical philosophical tradition, such as that articulated by Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, and denies the objective status of moral values. Technically skeptics did not reject moral values themselves, but only denied that values exist as spirit-like objects, or as divine commands in the mind of God. Moral values, they argued, are strictly human inventions, a position that has since been called moral relativism. There are two distinct forms of moral relativism. The first is individual relativism, which holds that individual people create their own moral standards… ...The second is cultural relativism which maintains that morality is grounded in the approval of one's society - and not simply in the preferences of individual people…
Read more at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Ethics.
So... where do you stand... and WHY? Can you support your personal claim that ethics are absolute or relative?
1 comment:
I see ethics as relative, especially if they "apply everywhere in the universe". This is because no one had any ethics before the humans, the planet's rationalizers, came around. In that way, they differe from fields like math and science. In biology, for example, plants are going to photosynthesize and make cellulose and do all that other nice plant stuff, whether or not we know that they're doing it and how it works (theoretically: if a tree falls in the forest...).
Ethics are different, because they exist inside the human mind and inside societies that humans have created. Maybe this is just because there were no "rational thinkers" for ethics to apply to before. But if ethics are absolute and don't need anyone to think them up, then why only apply to rational thinkers?
Ethics as weird spiritual thingums, I can't see. Ethics like emotions, occurring chemically in the brain, I can. Perhaps their a biological mechanism to help humans live at peace with eachother. It would make sense for our brains to make us decide it was wrong for someone to be killed for no reason and therefore preserve the species.
In that case, however, our ethics only apply to humans, because it depends onthe individual functions of the human brain. Therefore, ethics are relative because they are not "timeless concepts that never change and apply everywhere in the universe".
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