Meta-Ethics

[maelstrm]

Was doing some random reading online and came to the Wikipedia page on Meta-Ethics

(which I will now blatantly steal and post below, with some minor formatting and fluff removal

While normative ethics addresses such questions as "Which things are good and bad?" and "What should we do?", thus endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others,

Comments

[saiyanprince]

I subscribe to Divine Command.

That however, does not mean 'what the church says'. For although the Church is supposed to bring to us the Divine Command, it is sadly led by humans who often put their own interests above that of god.

Further food for thought

[maelstrm]

A famous dilemma from Plato is normally transformed into the following:

“Is what is moral commanded by god because it is moral, or is it moral because it's commanded by god?”

On further reading Divine Command Theory is said to be the second answer in that dilemma. Which implies that morality is arbitrarily God's based on God's whim. (If God said murdering was "good" then it would be)

The first answer puts a limitation on God (ie that "good" is outside of "God", God just happens to know perfectly what is good and what is not)

I think Thomas Aquinas has the right of it when he says that it is a false dilemma. "Yes, God commands something because it is good, but the reason it is good is that good is an essential part of god's nature. So goodness is grounded in god's character and merely expressed in His commands. Therefore whatever a good god commands will always be good."

[ataxi]

Nice bit of extra vocab at the very least. Cheers.

I probably go the gamut from moral relativist to individual subjectivist to nihilist.

In my opinion there are very few practical ethical propositions that are true, simply because ethical principles are neither absolute for the whole, groups therein nor single actors, nor are they simple enough to articulate.