Ethics
Depending on which normative system you adopt the statements like “He is a moral person” or “In that situation that was the moral thing to do” will have different content, since what is moral is different in different normative systems.
That being said then when looking at ordinary language usage by non-philosophers in everyday life situations I would claim (at least based on my experience) that people tend to use the term “moral person” or “a moral deed” in some sense with a universal meaning, just as if the term would refer to the same kind of people or deeds.
Could you please care to speculate on why this is so? Is it only that people are careless or uninformed or might it be that there really are some “universally moral” things and people want to refer to them or is it just the particular culture they happen to live in? Or something else?
Accepted:March 22, 2008
Accepted:
March 22, 2008