Integrity, Commitment, and Consequentialism

Damian Cox

Abstract

Extract:
Concerning ethics, we have two intuitions that might seem to conflict. On the one hand, we want to have respect for different moral views. On the other hand, the essence of morality is that we should be able to criticize each other. Today, many Westerners are anxious not to be ethnocentric and no longer want to claim that our norms and values should be universally accepted, as this might indicate disrespect for other cultures. At the same time, this might lead to a form of moral skepticism that does more harm than good. If there are no universal norms and values, the idea of universal human rights becomes void, and constructive criticism of other cultures impossible. Our respect for a certain culture might imply that we have to tolerate that the rights, or at least our conceptions of what rights are, of individuals in the culture are violated. This indicates that a reasonable position about human rights should avoid relativism and dogmatism. The apparent tension between tolerance and criticism can be resolved by taking certain moral rules that hold for everybody as objective truths, whereas we can be more liberal about others. Ethical intuitionism provides for a theoretical framework for this view.