Talk:Moral absolutism

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[edit] Universal value and Moral absolutism are Different

Because Universal value and Moral absolutism represent two sides of a same coin, they may appear to some people as the same thing, but they are actually different. Universal value is a phrase to describe there is a common value among humans despite the apparent differences in culture, race, nationality, ... Moral absolutism, on the other hand, is an attempt to dictate a set of morals onto others claiming that this set of values are absolute. Mikefzhu 01:19, 18 May 2007 (UTC)


April, since you ask--I'm not a specialist in ethics and so I can't provide much help here. "Absolutism" isn't used all that much in ethics in English-speaking tradiprior to the 20th century and very many of them after that have been moral absolutists. (It isn't obvious to me that Hume was a moral relativist--but hardly anything is obvious about Hume interpretation.  :-/ ) In the latterghtttttttttttttttt sense, it would be correct to say that Kant was an absolutist and that many others, particularly the consequentialists (Utilitarians), aren't/weren't.

I think "moral relativism" is almost always used by philosophers for the view that what is actually moral or immoral for a person, or for a group of people, depends on something about the person or the group of people (such as their beliefs). It would be silly (sorry) to call someone a moral relativist just because he was a consequentialist. The whole point of developing a moral theory like consequentialism is to articulate a criterion according to which we can say that something really is or really is not moral (obligatory, permissible, good).

Philosophers also use (perhaps more frequently) "ethical relativism" and "ethical absolutism," and I suspect many philosophers find discussions in terms of relativism vs. absolutism not particularly enlightening. The issues in meta-ethics in the 20th century could be construed as a battle over absolutism vs. relativism (with "absolutism" meaning "naturalism" and "relativism" meaning various kinds of "non-cognitivism")--but is not often couched in such terms.

Unfortunately, confusing the issue further is the fact that many religionists and social and political commentators make heavy use of the terms, referring to attitudes that professional philosophers don't often concern themselves with. E.g., "relativists" in common parlance are often just what ethicists would call "moral agnostics" or "amoralists." More often I suspect "relativism" just means "rejection of traditional morality in favor of the attitude of doing your own thing." This isn't a thing philosophers per se have a name for.

I'm going to leave this to a specialist. It would be really great if you could find a grad student or professor who specializes in ethics who could go to work on these articles.  :-) --Larry Sanger

I'd like my view integrated into the text. I'm a moral absolutist: I do believe that there's an actual moral order. However, I also don't think I'm clever (or anyone else I know, actually) enough to know just what that absolute moral order is. But the article seems to imply that if you believe there's an actual moral order, that you must necessarily be an "I'm right, you're wrong" type of person. I behave like a Moral Relativist, despite being a Moral Absolutist. -- Lion Kimbro (http://speakeasy.org/~lion/ and lion at speakeasy dot org)

[edit] moved from article

' and typified—although thereby also oversimplified—by such phrases as "Right is right and wrong is wrong." '

I don't agree w this, and besides the example is clearly a bad one. POV as well w the "oversimplified" bit. Sam [Spade] 20:10, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)


[edit] A question

How is this different than deontological ethics?

It's a wider concept. Deontological ethics or deontological morality refer to an idea of absolute morality based on duty, regardless of consequences. Consequential morality, on the other hand, relates morality to - as the name suggests - the consequences of actions, making morality inseparable from context. Virtue theory is another suggestion, but moral absolutism can encompass all these terms. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by AngryStan (talk • contribs) 22:05, 18 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Is absolute morality even possible?

Before one can decide whether an absolute morality exists, one must determine whether absolute morality (that is, a moral code which applies equally to everyone) is even possible. This seems hard to imagine, because in any system of law, someone must be above the law, to enforce it.

Not sure this is the appropriate forum for this discussion, and it might have to be removed for that reason, but since it ends with a request for a citation, I'll consider myself loosely justified in responding...
Morality and law are not the same thing. It is not necessary for anybody to enforce morality. Taking your example below, if we assume that violating traffic law was immoral, then police would be acting immorally for breaking it. If we took a more consequentialist approach, we might argue that the consequences of allowing police to break the law led to good (e.g. by enabling them to better apprehend criminals) but those consequences do not follow are a result of allowing the rest of the public to break the law (e.g. on the argument that private citizens have no business apprehending criminals). So I think absolute morality is *logically* possible, although as a moral skeptic I have no idea at all where such absolute moral standard may derive from.

As an example, ordinary road users must obey traffic law, but the police who enforce traffic law routinely violate various aspects of it. Governments do things which are illegal for their citizens to do, such as imprison (or even execute) criminals, send police officers undercover in which they falsify their identities in ways that would be illegal for ordinary citizens, sieze private property, spy on citizens, carry weapons of greater destructive power than ordinary citizens may possess, and so on. Either nobody knows how to constitute a government which obeys the same restrictions it places on its subjects, or nobody has seriously tried.

Extending the analogy to divine punishment, one can argue that a punitive God who sends people to Hell is doing something much worse to them than the worst human tyrants in history did to their victims. Is sending people to Hell for eternity an absolutely moral act? If it is an absolutely moral act, then why is punishing people to far lesser degrees considered immoral? If one argues that only an omniscient God is qualified to send people to Hell, then one has rejected absolute morality, by making the morality of an act relative to the one who does it.

But this is nothing unusual. For instance, we may say that it is moral to eat the meat of (and therefore kill)) animals, but immoral to eat the meat of (and therefore kill) other humans. In the same way, a consistent code of absolute morality may leave it perfectly moral for a god to kill people, but not for people to kill other people. In the case of eternal torment, the qualifying distinction might be that only a god has the capacity to judge such a case, and the act of eternal damnation only becomes moral when the actor has such a capacity. The morality of certain actions being contingent on various events is not incompatible with absolute morality, so I do not think your point follows.

As another example, most people would agree that crimes such as murder, pedophilia, and theft are immoral acts. In legal terms, a person can become an accessory to such a crime, without committing the crime directly, simply by having advance knowledge that someone else is going to commit such a crime, and failing to report it to the proper authorities. A person with knowledge of an impending crime has, in many jurisdictions, a legal obligation to report it, and most people would probably say the obligation is moral as well. However, an omniscient God appears to be under no such moral obligation, by knowing the inner thoughts and intentions of people, and failing to report evildoers to the (human) authorities, either before or after they act.

If we agree it is absolutely wrong to remain silent if one knows one's neighbor is regularly molesting children, then we agree that God's behavior is absolutely wrong, because an omniscient God must know where all the child molesters are hiding.

Yes, but only if we agree that it is absolutely wrong to do that. This is not required for moral absolutism, since we could just as well agree that it is only absolutely wrong for people to do that (for instance, we wouldn't be likely to agree that it is absolutely wrong for dogs to remain silent in such a case).

One possible counterargument is that God is trying to tell the authorities these things, but they are not listening correctly. However, even a fairly young child knows how to call the police, and we would expect a sufficiently capable child to talk to the police in a way the police can understand readily. If God is under no obligation to do what a young child could be considered responsible to do, then we are saying God obeys different morals than people, which is just another denial of absolute morality.

As another example, suppose a human has knowledge of some impending natural disaster and fails to take any action to warn people in its path. If the warning would have been easy to give, the person who failed to act might be found liable for negligence, perhaps criminal negligence. An omniscient God, of course, must have full knowledge of when and where all such disasters will occur, and thus is negligent for failing to warn people in language they can understand. The only way to let God off the hook is, once again, to deny absolute morality---we have to make the definition of morality relative to the actor. It's OK for God to be negligent and fail to warn people of impending calamity, but it is not OK for people to be similarly negligent when they have comparable knowledge and similar capacity to warn potential victims.

Again, the concept of negligence applies to law more than morality. It is perfectly possible that from a god's point of view, failing to prevent - or even directly causing - a natural disaster would be a good thing. I think you are making the mistake of thinking that a coherent system of absolute morality *must* include particular standards, but it need not. "Torturing babies for sexual pleasure is a good thing" could be part of a consistent absolute moral standard, even though hardly anybody alive would agree with it. It's logically possible that there is an absolute moral standard which results in us acting immorally when we don't randomly kill every third person we meet.

An omniscient God in a world with persistent, preventable evil is routinely negligent, even an accessory in every sort of preventable crime or disaster, and thus is incompatible with the existence of absolute morality. It does not make much sense to postulate the existence of a God as the source of morality, when God routinely fails to report impending crimes and disasters, and this negligence defies the human moral sense.

Again, "preventable evil" being inconsistent with absolute morality relies on that code of absolute morality both specifying that such a thing is evil, and that failing to prevent it is evil. This need not be the case, as discussed.

Could someone with more knowledge of the history of philosophy find a citation for the above argument? Given that the greatest minds in history have hashed over the God question from every angle, I'm sure someone must have realized the logical incompatibility of absolute morality with a sinless (i.e., compliant with absolute moral law) yet deliberately negligent omniscient God.

I do not think it is logically incompatible for the reasons given above - I am not aware of any such argument being made, although that's not to say it hasn't been. There are a number of criticisms of the idea of "absolute morality deriving from god", however, the most crushing being that something is either morally good because a god commands it, or that a god commands it because it is good. In the first case, it makes morality awfully arbitrary and hardly worthy of the title "absolute", and in the second case, it means the god does not decide what is good, and hence morality does not come from a god. Not to mention the fact that it assumes god exists in the first place. AngryStan 22:25, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Again, it's not enough to claim that God has already taken sufficient action against evil, because no amount of prior good deeds are relevant in a specific violation of law. And if they were, that would be another rejection of absolute morality. --Teratornis 00:19, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed deletion

"Moral Absolutism is the belief that decisions that people make are right or wrong, there is no other choice. It does not depend on the situation or the people involved."

I think this needs to be deleted or at least reworded as it is not representative of philosophical thought:

Kant makes quite clear that be believes it is the *intention* that makes an act moral, in particular that for an act to qualify as moral it must be done out of a sense of duty. The same act, done in search of personal gain, for instance, would not qualify as moral. Thus, the intent, as distinct from the "decision" itself is what determines morality.

Also the idea that "it does not depend on the situation" - we would have to exclude consequentialism from our domain of moral absolutism to make this true.

Next, "it does not depend on...the people involved", most moral philosophers would hold that the decisions of a mentally incapable person cannot be called immoral, so it certainly does depend on the people involved.

Finally, there can be room for "morally neutral" actions, so "there is no other choice" does not have to be true.

In the absence of any objections, I'll go ahead and delete this paragraph. AngryStan 22:40, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Update: No objections, so paragraph deleted. AngryStan 01:26, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merger with Moral objectivism

Should the pages be merged? alternatively, should the difference be explained, if there is one.1Z 23:36, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I think merging them makes sense. AngryStan 01:48, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

They are different concepts, however the article on moral objectivism isn't any good, so if you want to redirect to moral absolutism, go ahead. Addhoc 23:10, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Don't merge they are different concepts, and not really sufficiently closely related to be covered on the same page. Both pages need work, but that is a different issue. Anarchia 20:57, 1 September 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Issues with the sudden Minority Opinion...

We've got kind of a contradiction in the first and third paragraphs. The first two paragrpahs describe 'moral absoluteness' as exactly that, an absolute condidtion. But paragraph 3 opens with describing the same conditins outlined in the opening paragraph and the second paragrpah as "a minority position".

to be exact--- "Moral absolutism is the belief that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, devoid of the context of the act. "Absolutism" is often philosophically contrasted with moral relativism, which is a belief that moral truths are relative to social, cultural, historical or personal references, and to situational ethics, which holds that the morality of an act depends on the context of the act.

Morals are inherent in the laws of the universe, the nature of humanity, the will or character of God or gods, or some other fundamental source. Moral absolutists regard actions as inherently moral or immoral. Moral absolutists might, for example, judge slavery, war, dictatorship, the death penalty, or childhood abuse to be absolutely and inarguably immoral regardless of the beliefs and goals of a culture that engages in these practices.

In a minority of cases, moral absolutism is taken to the more constrained position that actions are moral or immoral regardless of the circumstances in which they occur."

I don't know if this was paraphrased from someones work, but the second paragrpah needs some work as well, as it is taking a postion in the first sentence. But the third paragraph basically seems to say "The actual, basic definition mentioned above is a minority view. NJM4 Peterpandus (talk) 22:51, 29 March 2008 (UTC) A better third paragraph might read, "In actual usage, it is rare that Moral Absolutism is taken to the most extreme position." NJM4 Peterpandus (talk) 22:21, 31 March 2008 (UTC)