Absolutism And Morality

If morality is not entirely relative, then what moral values are absolute?

There are several possible answers, and each one must decide which one one believes. These answers relate to concepts such as any one or combination of the following:

1. Those absolutes that arise from one's faith.

2. Those absolutes that arise from one's solemn contemplation of the human condition, past, present, or both.

3. Those absolutes that arise from one's reflection upon one's personal history.

4. Those absolutes that arise from one's aspirations for a better future.

5. Individual precepts arising from the Golden Rule (do unto others only what you would have others do to you), or related concepts such as the Kantian idea of categorical imperatives.

6. Absolutes arising from the mere state of existence (existentialism, essentially positing the idea that nothing is certain except for one's own existence).

7. Pure religious tradition.

8. Critical analysis of specific situations generalized to rules.

9. The rule of utilitarianism itself -- that is, that which defines good as only that which benefits the greatest good for the greatest number.

10. Rules arising from utilitarianism (e.g., rule-utilitarianism).

These are only a few of the possible permutations of absolutism in morality.

It may be easier to associate absolutism with a tradition -- the Western tradition, for example, or the Eastern tradition -- than to broadly and inductively derive claims about specific absolutes as if they themselves were certain. Morality is, in practice, relativist, but by its very nature, it may be absolutist, in precisely the traditions to which I've alluded. The value of having moral absolutes depends on whether one subscribes to any of the above threads in the Western tradition of morality. (There are equivalents for Eastern traditions of morality.) If one does not, then one arguably sees no value in morality at all.

In fact, in some cases, morality cannot be absolute from the point of view of the moral agent if one subscribes to particular views of morality.