(November 21, 2017 at 10:36 am)alpha male Wrote: You pay lip service to ethicists being humble enough to not claim true knowledge...then you imply that you know that slavery, rape of slaves, genocide, and a list of other items are indeed immoral.
Except that I don't. I approach ethics through REASON which, as I admitted in the OP, has failed to produce an unproblematic theory. Through reasoning, one can try to discern what is right and wrong. Hedonism, for example, forbids rape because it causes a great deal of pain and suffering. Through reason, I have come to accept that rape is wrong in much the same way a cosmologist ascertains that the universe is (probably) around 14 billion years old. New evidence or thinking could present itself which causes either the cosmologist or the philosopher to rethink their positions.
Not so with religious thinking. Religion holds fast to its stubborn precepts and so cannot modify its "theory" in order to reassess its ethics.
