Relativism Ethics Essay

Yet I attributed subjectivity to (2) because judgments of taste do in fact depend on what we think or how we feel.Ask yourself a simple question: What makes a given claim true or false — something inside the head or something outside the head?In other words, is morality an objective or a subjective enterprise?

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For (1), what makes it true is something our heads—namely, our experience of taste.

Even if everyone in the world believed the Earth is flat, that wouldn’t change a thing about the truth status of (1). Yet when it comes to (2), what the person uttering it thinks or feels about (2) is of its status.

These two positions — a relativistic view of morality and an objective view of morality — are rival frameworks within the field of study known as , but these tend to assume an objective view of ethics as their starting point.

Applied ethics has to do with contemporary moral issues.

Relativism is the great enemy of an objective view of ethics, which sees right and wrong as features of the world neither constructed nor determined by human thinking.

Against this objective view, relativism holds that human beings define what is right and wrong.

That’s because there is a question that must be settled before we reach the point of selecting a principle or answering a moral dilemma.

That question is whether morality even exists at all.

Let’s view this as the ground floor of ethical inquiry.

One question within applied ethics is whether and to what extent abortion is justified. But go up one level of abstraction and you’ll find yourself doing normative ethics, which looks at ethical .