Topics Ethics

Question Hi: In meta-ethics there is an ongoing, heated debate about whether moral propositions are "objective" or "absolute" vs. "subjective" or "relative." This debate appears to be progressing nowhere fast. Could it be that moral propositions are like theorems in geometry, i.e. that they are deduced from and depend for their validity on the truth of the postulates or axioms that underlie them? So, nobody seems too concerned about the "subjectivity" of geometry in spite of the fact that it is impossible to "prove" that parallel lines never intersect--we either accept this axiom or we don't. Is it possible that propositions like "it is wrong to take innocent human life" should be viewed as a postulate from which we can then deduce (in combination with other postulates) moral conclusions? Does this approach offer a way out of the "objective" vs. "subjective" debate? Thanks. Mark

Accepted:
October 14, 2006

Comments

I don't see how your approach can provide a way out of the debates concerning the objectivity of ethics. We can use your example of geometry to see why. You may be right that abstract or theoretical geometry is simply a matter of deriving theorems from a set of arbitrarily chosen postulates. But what about applied geometry? I wouldn't be very comfortable working in a building designed by architects and built by engineers who don't care about the objectivity of the geometric principles they're using. I'm not going to hire an architect who is happy to adopt any old set of geometric axioms. Are you?

There are real debates among physicists and philosophers about whether and to what extent space actually conforms to the principles of various geometric systems. These debates are about which geometry is the correct one. And so even if we take geometry as our model, we won't be able to escape those ongoing, heated debates about which moral system is the correct one.