Capella University Week 6 Ethics and Moral Relativism Discussion
Capella University Week 6 Ethics and Moral Relativism Discussion
Capella University Week 6 Ethics and Moral Relativism Discussion
https://topnursingpapers.com/capella-university-week-6-ethics-and-moral-relativism-discussion/
Question Description
Open discussion week. You choose what you would like to discuss from the week’s course material.
Moral Relativism – Topic
Be sure to provide reasoned evaluations of the issues and discuss them philosophically rather than just stating your opinion.
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Moral Relativism
In metaethics (previously discussed in the first Lesson), the main divide lies between objectivism (also known as realism) and subjectivism (relativism). Metaethics concerns the nature of morality and its subject matter, and therefore views in metaethics differ not primarily about what is morally good or bad, but about the nature of moral fact themselves, and whether or not moral facts even exist. Moral subjectivism holds that moral judgments answer to subjective feelings and thus are non-factual. With this as the case, what is morally “right” is relative to the observer.
Moral relativism is a natural response to the initial discovery that there is a diversity of moral opinion in the world. When a young person leaves home at the age of eighteen to attend college, they meet a wide variety of people from diverse backgrounds, and in many cases this may be where they come to this realization for the first time. From a purely detached perspective, it seems to account for differences and long-standing disagreements better than to say that some people are right and others are wrong, which sounds arbitrary.
One challenge to moral relativism comes at the level where “the rubber meets the road” and one tries to reconcile relativism with one’s own strongly held moral beliefs. To be consistent with relativism, one cannot claim that anything is just plain right or wrong. Relativism also appears to entail the idea that no one ever morally errs as long as one believes their actions are permissible. This can be very difficult to swallow, since people are continually pointing out where others have morally erred. However, according to relativism such moral judgments are made correct by their own perspective, and if another’s beliefs about what is right or wrong simply differ, then such judgments don’t apply.
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From this perspective, moral disagreements would be more like matters of taste. When two people make two conflicting statements such as “Broccoli is delicious” and “Broccoli tastes disgusting,” they are not exactly disagreeing; instead, they are making statements that reference their own experiences. But what if two people stated that “Murder is wrong” and “Murder is okay”? A moral relativist would seem to only be able to say something like “there’s no accounting for taste.” Moral relativism must make an account of what moral disagreements are about, since according to objectivism, there’s a third element—objective moral facts. This element is external to both parties in that they are both discussing the same topic. But if moral relativism is true, it appears that there cannot be even genuine moral disagreements since all people do in a moral argument is talk past each other.
Ethics and God
Religious believers in God, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition, tend to make strong connections between God and morality. Their argument holds that if God is all-powerful and ultimately responsible for mankind’s existence, then if God has expectations of the people he has created they would owe it to him to obey his commandments.
Thus, the Divine Command Theory requires an answer as to how it is that divine “commandedness” can make an action properly moral. In terms of Judeo-Christian theism, one possible answer is that since God is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent, what he commands will be morally good as a matter of course. This would mean that Divine Command Theory should be formulated in a more sophisticated way than by simply making the statement that “An action is morally good if God commands it, and morally bad if God forbids it.”
The Euthyphro dilemma might instead generalize to pose a problem to a different theory, one according to which what makes action good is that it is believed by one or more people to be good. One such theory is moral relativism, since it holds that it is the beliefs of an individual or a culture that make certain actions morally good or bad, and that in turn generates worries about arbitrariness.
Divine Command Theory
Further, if God is all good and omnibenevolent, then what he asks of his people (his commandments) will also be good, and following them will only bring good to mankind. These ideas are encapsulated in normative ethics in terms of Divine Command Theory.
In Plato’s dialogue “Euthyphro,” Socrates and the Athenian prophet Euthyphro discuss what makes an action pious (piety being religious moral obligation, or in other words doing what the gods would like one to do). Assuming there is a set of commands on which all of the gods can agree and that humans can discern what the gods wish for them to do, this fundamental question remains: What is it that makes an action pious?
If it is pious simply in virtue of the fact that the gods command it, then what is it that makes it good? For all this says, the gods’ commandments could be arbitrary. But an ethical theory must account for goodness, and not merely for obligation.
The Euthyphro Dilemma
Alternatively, if the gods only command those things which in fact are pious (which one can assume are also good), that still leaves the question of what makes them pious—that is, good—ontologically prior to their being commanded. This means that piety in itself, as what-the-gods-command, is an unnecessary “middleman” in the theory that can be eliminated. What makes this such a dilemma is that there appear to be only two options, neither of which is palatable. This poses a problem for the original notion of piety and whether it meets the needs for an ethical theory. The dilemma between piety being the arbitrary will of the gods on the one hand, or ultimately not stemming from the gods’ will at all on the other, is known as the Euthyphro dilemma.
“Modern Moral Philosophy.” http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html
“Divine Command Theory.” http://www.iep.utm.edu/divine-c/