Over morning coffee, I stumbled across Hot Abercrombie Chick's succinct description of objective moral standards.
Objective moral codes are problematic, not because they are really subjective, but rather because they are only form and intention. Please allow me to explain.
Morals and morality tend to result into logical confusion, if only because there is one more factor that inevitably complicates the discussion. This is application. Discussing morals and morality outside of their application in the life of the "moral agent" yields something like a formal and intentional objectivity, but when introduced in the ethical life of the "moral agent" promptly reveal their absurdity.
Borrowing from Kant, whose Categorical Imperative stands at the apex of moral theory, we can find two objective morals laws which must always be followed. The injunction against lies -- a lie jeopardizes all moral action -- and the Categorical Imperative are rules that remain the same, no matter what the case, and are the same for each and every moral agent in each and every concrete instance.
However, assuming that you were guarding a nice family from the secret police in your attic, because they are likely to be taken away in cattle cars and never to be heard of again, and the secret police arrived at your door and asked you where they were -- do you tell them?
Assume you don't. Your lie -- while self-evidently a moral action -- is in fact, the undoing of morality, because it jeopardizes the possibility of right action because the latter necessarily relies on a web of truths.
Assume you do. You tell the truth, you respect the authorities -- self-evidently a moral action -- and feel as though you have done your duty as they promptly take the family away to the camps. Surely leading someone off to die is never a moral action, especially is it is done solely on the premise of "Thou Shalt not Lie".
I realize that "an objective moral standard need not demand the same actions of all people in the same circumstances," because, in truth, it cannot. The lives of moral agents will always be confounding, contradictory, and while the example of telling the Gestapo where Anne Frank's family is hiding is a little extreme, it does recognize the fact that as "moral agents" we will always have to navigate between conflicting objective moral standards.
This is the problem with Moral Philosophy is this -- how can you codify, or attempt to make objective rules for action that are necessarily found within the life of human beings? (Another objection, which I don't want to enter in here is, how can you codify objective moral standards without the benefit of a diety of some kind to articulate them for you?) Often it ends in paradox, and makes laws more important than human lives.
The Greeks had it right from the start. Ethics, the practice of a way of life devoted toward the Good, remains superior to "objective laws" precisely because it realizes that ethics requires a blend of understanding, interpretation, and application to arrive at the best possible action in any given, concrete instance of human life. We must understand the situation, interpret its significance, and apply such knowledge toward a beneficent ending. There is a role for moral standards within that scheme. But they are not objective standards, rather they are societal, or civic, or cultural standards which belong to the specific context of the moral agent.
Objective moral standards, whatever their content or origin may be, inevitably result in paradox. This is why ethics has to sort them out, not because "individuals have no choice or personal preference in how they act upon it," rather it is more like an act of self-jurisprudence: how we valuate competing moral standards constitutes the art of living well.
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