Good and Evil

[Hatshepsut]

Hume didn't get it right, values don't exist apart from the individuals who hold them...

Values don't exist apart from evaluators of some kind, of course. But they need not depend on the viewpoints of single individuals. Values can be held collectively. Drunk driving remains wrong in the USA even for people who don't agree that it's wrong. Whether a 51% majority subscription establishes a value, or a firmer supermajority of say 80% is required, to me is an open question, yet it's clear that a value will be recognized as in force across a society once enough members of a society accept it. The power brokers have more say than other people do in matters of value (per Focault), yet even there a single powerful person usually cannot change prevailing ethics without first getting a lot of support. Nixon couldn't make burglary a respectable campaign tactic.

Since the thread has already correctly discounted pure essentialism as adequate fount for ethics...

If based on the critique by AdamLOV, your dismissal in premature.

Adam LOV introduced the question of whether essences are real in any meaningful sense, which I concede is still open. But one can point to the sociological essentialism holding that traits like race, ethnicity, and gender are immutable. This essentialism was cited to help support colonialism and racial apartheid policies no longer considered ethical. We now hold that race, ethnicity, and gender are all social constructs. An individual still can't change her own race, an ascribed status; however society can change its definition of racial categories and thus reclassify her at any time.

The thread has also discounted pure subjectivism as well. Essentialism and subjectivism are the endpoints of a spectrum of views on ethics. There's obviously something "in" a wrong to motivate us to call it wrong, it can't just be personal opinion. But the fact that ethics evolve over time shows that whatever's "inside" situations of right and wrong isn't immutable, that is, it isn't a pure essence like "triangleness" is for triangles.