Tuesday 15 March 2016

Consensus is not Truth: How philosophers deal with moral relativism

If we all agree that earth if flat, that does not mean that it is.

The greatest problem in ethics is that moral beliefs cannot be grounded in objective reality. It is not possible to find evidence in the physical world which proves that one set of ethical beliefs is better than another. You can't get an ought from an is.

Most people who realize this, myself included, simply ignore the fact that their beliefs cannot be justified and go on holding the same morals they always did. For a subset of these moral beliefs, we remain willing to use violence to impose them on others. We hate the baby-eaters, even though we know that we have no reason to assume we are more right than they are.

Most competent philosophers, realizing they cannot show that moral beliefs are objectively true, attempt to show that they are true intersubjectivly, meaning that they are true given the axiomatic moral beliefs a person holds. If you hold the set of beliefs X, then you should believe Y.

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