The Relativity of Ethical Issues

Nowadays moral ethics are considered relative. Relative to culture, relative to the needs of a person, relative to circumstances and relative to what one assumes is right or wrong. Everyone has a different perspective on what is true; a person might believe that ‘x’ is true while another may not. The same concept applies to ethics, one person might say killing animals for food is correct and another might say it is incorrect as we can survive on natural food. So each person has a different estimation on making truth claims about ethics, the opinion depends on what is right or wrong and what is ethical and what is not.

Social relativism lessens ethics to sociology: what is right is whatever a particular society says is right. Radical relativism reduces it to a matter of taste: what is right is whatever the person believes and feels. And this is not just an academic challenge. If there is no truth in ethics, then parents are also left in a discontented state of trying to persuade their children that they ought, or ought not, to act in certain ways because to do, or not to do so, matches to the desires of others in that society or the parents themselves. However, if there is no purpose in “right” to back up this caution, there can be no justifiable fault, just as there can be no convincing answer to the question of why youth ought to put back to the wishes of others, including their parents, at the expense of their own. Truth is so fundamental to the sense of our life, that it can be argued that anyone who claims that there is no truth, i.e., not even truths about the physical world, is being duplicitous. The fact that such individuals are alive to make such claims shows that they have depended most of their behavior on what they...

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...tizens and the government come as one we can work this out.

We must teach our children that, if they wish to be moral, though they can never be absolutely sure that the decision that they come to is the right one, as in science, if they follow the process as rigorously and as objectively as possible, they decrease the risk that they may be wrong. As Kant so expressively argued, it is the process rather than the product that ultimately defines an act, and the individual who pursues it, as moral, or otherwise. In ethics, as in science, the worth of any claim is measured by the process to which it has been subjected. We must teach our children that in ethics, as in science, it is important to think, not merely feel and emote; and the reason why thinking is important is because, if done directly, thoroughly and creatively, it will lead the thinker closer to the truth!