Talk:Moral absolutism

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 traditions. But when it's used, I think it means more or less the view that there are facts of the matter whether something is right or wrong, or that we ought to do something or not. I think there is a more specialized use, where it is applied to moral codes which are particularly rigid, where a category of behavior or a virtue or vice is said to be moral or immoral no matter what, but that (I guess!) would be a different sense. In the former sense, virtually all ethical philosophers prior 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 latter 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