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On the objectivity of ethical judgments
It is fashionable, these days, to deny that there is such thing as objective morality. It’s not exactly a novel position, as Aristotle pointed out that what goes in Athens doesn’t go in Sparta, meaning that what is considered ethically acceptable in one place may not be in the other and vice versa. Ethics, after all, comes from the Greek word for character, which Cicero translated into what became the Latin root for morality, meaning habit, custom.
Perhaps the current anti-realist and relativist trend is a predictable, and even welcome, corrective to centuries of moral realism founded in religion. As everyone who is brought up within one of the faiths in the Abrahamic tradition knows well, X is right (or wrong) because God says it is right (or wrong). And you better behave accordingly or else. The problem with that sort of deontological (rule-based) approach is that it was debunked by Socrates almost two and a half millennia ago, specifically in the delightful Platonic dialogue known as the Euthyphro. At one point, Socrates puts the crucial question to the obnoxious title character who thinks he knows exactly the difference between pious and impious (right and wrong, in modern terminology) because he so well understands the gods: “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is…
