moral relativism

[Skepdick]

Just to say again - the alternative to moral objectivism is moral subjectivism, not moral relativism or moral nihilism. We can keep the baby when we throw out the bathwater. Since there are only moral opinions, fretting about the absence of moral facts is pointless.

Oh, please show us how to keep the baby.

One subject opines that murder is moral.
Another subject opines that murder is immoral.

Which subject is professing true morality?

Both? Neither? Only one of them? Which one?

Please provide us with a procedure which successfully determines which subjective moral opinion is the right one.

[iambiguous]

In other words, from my frame of mind, I continue to refuse to accept your frame of mind -- your point -- about the relationship between human interactions and that which you claim objective morality to be.

I am not claiming it to be that. It is that.

Standards of behavior.

Again, the only way I am able to interpret this is that, even though "standards of behaviors" have varied in radically different ways over time historically and across the globe culturally, if any particular community interacts as they do "here and now" that encompasses objective morality.

And then if different communities have conflicting standards -- re abortion, capital punishment, gun ownership etc. -- they need but contact you in order that you will apprise them of the historical and cultural "trends".

On the other hand, how you make this applicable to capital punishment is still well beyond my grasping.

Not only that but the points I raise don't even matter!!

Only yours do. The classic objectivist mentality to me.

No, idiot.

Ah, so the "trend" here is that I am now a bona fide "idiot"? That it is not an ad hominin to note this, however, since the trend makes it "objective"?

But we still have our own individual reasons for believing what we do about it.

Right?

I don't know about you, but I don't have any believs about any of this.

I know murder is wrong.
I know capital punishment is wrong.

How do I know? Easy! I wouldn't want it happening to me!

Over at ILP, this objectivist frame of mind is encompassed in, among other things, "my intrinsic self" or "my intuitive self". Nothing to do with "trends" though. Some people just know things about good and evil, right and wrong.

And the beauty of embracing this frame of mind is that no one can really refute it. Why? Because the only way you can "just know" that capital punishment is either right or wrong is to actually be them.

As for the Golden Rule, there are any number of critiques: https://effectiviology.com/golden-rule/ ... _solutions

And the main point of my argument "here and now" revolves around the assumption that in a world teeming with "contingency chance and change" I could well have a new experience, relationship, access to information and knowledge and change my mind again.

But you keep insisting that morality is relative. If that's true no information should or could ever change your mind.

No, I make it quite clear that "here and now" given the life I've lived I have come to be predisposed subjectively/existentially to think as I do about it. And that of course a new experience might change my mind. It's just that when I suggest it is the same for all others as well that particular objectivists among us will insist that I am an "idiot".

Not them though! They will take their Gods or ideologies or deontological philosophies or trends with them to the grave!!

You keep claiming I don't believe in morality.

You don't. You can't. To be a relativist is to assert that behavior A is different to behavior B. You are not allower to make any claims of preference.

But of course, you are just lying about being a relativist.

The part you left out:

And I keep pointing out that morality and ethics are just words that particular philosophers use to describe the indisputable fact that when human beings interact socially, politically and economically, there are going to be "conflicting goods". Some revolve around wants, others around needs. Some pertain more to means, others more to ends.

Many have splintered the human race now for thousands and thousands of years. Yet still there are those who insist that there must be an objective morality around to finally bring us all together. Why? Because they themselves have already discovered it!!

Some even dare to call it common sense.

And for those who refuse to be "brought together" with all the "common sense" folks in embracing the most rational and virtuous behaviors?

Well, the rest is history there too.

And we must allow there to be preferences in the behaviors chosen and then reacted to because there must be rules of behaviors in any human community.

Call that morality, sure.

Then squabble "philosophically" over what "technically" it means to be a "moral relativist" given that.

[Skepdick]

Again, the only way I am able to interpret this is that, even though "standards of behaviors" have varied in radically different ways over time

No they haven't.

There is a continuous thread. A perpetuating set of goals/objectives. A prevailing focus (despite changing words) on the illegality of murder.
Things that go as far back as the first codified moral systems - the Code of Hammurabi.

It covers property offences. Land ownership. Commerce. Assault. Murder etc.

But of course, for the purpose of philosophy you can (and you will) pretend that those legal systems are "vastly different" to what we have today. Of course you could never explain the "vastnes" of those differences.

historically and across the globe culturally, if any particular community interacts as they do "here and now" that encompasses objective morality.

And yet you continue being unable to explain why so many "heres" and so many "nows" across thousands of years of human history seem to have an over-arching consensus on a bunch of moral issues.

Magic.

And then if different communities have conflicting standards -- re abortion, capital punishment, gun ownership etc. -- they need but contact you in order that you will apprise them of the historical and cultural "trends".

They need not contact me. They need to resolve those differences. And the fact THAT resolution of difference is possible, the fact that these disagreements are not eternal - it says a lot about the objectivity of morality.

Ah, so the "trend" here is that I am now a bona fide "idiot"? That it is not an ad hominin to note this, however, since the trend makes it "objective"?

No. It's an objective fact that you are an idiot. Having failed to understand what I am saying afte rmultiple explanations.

Of course, my alternative hypothesis is that you are simply intellectually challenged, or brain damaged.

All of this is consistent with the principle of charity. IF I am to assume you are charitable in debate, and if I am to explain to myself how you continue to misrepresent and misunderstand me then I have no better explanation than to assume that you are stupid.

If I wasn't charitable I would call you intentionally obtuse.

Over at ILP, this objectivist frame of mind is encompassed in, among other things, "my intrinsic self" or "my intuitive self". Nothing to do with "trends" though. Some people just know things about good and evil, right and wrong.

But it has everything to do with trends. In as far as it's pretty fucking obvious abstract knowledge causes concrete action.

And so if it happened to be true that I believed murder is right; and if it happened that other people believed the same it would only follow (by causality) THAT murder would become more popular and more frequent.

We would murder before breakfast. We would murder to signal the start of the Olympics. We would murder a slave to cook a barbeque.
Murder would be everywhere. Oh look! It isn't!

And the beauty of embracing this frame of mind is that no one can really refute it. Why? Because the only way you can "just know" that capital punishment is either right or wrong is to actually be them.

Obviously! The advantage of objectivity is precisely that.

It would be mighty weird if the wrongness of murder were refuted, don't you think? Here we were for 10000 years not murdering ourselves.

I guess we were wrong. LETS GO BRANDON! Where are your children at? I want to test out my new machete.

As for the Golden Rule, there are any number of critiques: https://effectiviology.com/golden-rule/ ... _solutions

It's not the golden rule. It's the silve rule.

I would NOT treat you in a manner that I would NOT want to be treated myself

Which is why I am treating you like an idiot. Because I don't object to being treated like an idiot if I am being an idiot.

No, I make it quite clear that "here and now" given the life I've lived I have come to be predisposed subjectively/existentially to think as I do about it. And that of course a new experience might change my mind. It's just that when I suggest it is the same for all others as well that particular objectivists among us will insist that I am an "idiot".

Ergo you being an idiot. You are biased to your "here and now" while ignoring everyhere and everywhen. All the people who live now; and who lived before you.

You ignore all the similarities across all moral codes despite the differences.

The part you left out:

And I keep pointing out that morality and ethics are just words that particular philosophers use to describe the indisputable fact that when human beings interact socially, politically and economically, there are going to be "conflicting goods". Some revolve around wants, others around needs. Some pertain more to means, others more to ends.

Many have splintered the human race now for thousands and thousands of years. Yet still there are those who insist that there must be an objective morality around to finally bring us all together. Why? Because they themselves have already discovered it!!

Step 1 towards finding it - stop thinking in words and start thinking in experiences.

I can punch you in the face and call it moral. Even though both of us know it isn't.

Then squabble "philosophically" over what "technically" it means to be a "moral relativist" given that.

The trouble with philosophy is that it's trying to capture those things in words while ignoring the limits of language.

That path leads to symbolism - a dead end.

[iambiguous]

Again, the only way I am able to interpret this is that, even though "standards of behaviors" have varied in radically different ways over time

No they haven't.

There is a continuous thread. A perpetuating set of goals/objectives. A prevailing focus (despite changing words) on the illegality of murder.
Things that go as far back as the first codified moral systems - the Code of Hammurabi.

It covers property offences. Land ownership. Commerce. Assault. Murder etc.

But of course, for the purpose of philosophy you can (and you will) pretend that those legal systems are "vastly different" to what we have today. Of course you could never explain the "vastnes" of those differences.

We clearly understand "standards of behavior" differently. You seem to focus on the fact that all human communities have goals and objectives and moral codes. And even though in regard to particular "conflicting goods" these factors may well be vastly different in regards to what particular behaviors will be rewarded or punished, it's the fact that they have them at all that makes morality objective.

Thus...

historically and across the globe culturally, if any particular community interacts as they do "here and now" that encompasses objective morality.

And yet you continue being unable to explain why so many "heres" and so many "nows" across thousands of years of human history seem to have an over-arching consensus on a bunch of moral issues.

Magic.

Like resolving moral conflicts with respect to abortion and human sexuality and the role of government and animal rights and capital punishment and gun ownership and the dozens and dozens of other conflicting goods that generate newspaper headlines is simply accomplished by tapping someone like you on the shoulder and asking for the latest historical and cultural "trends".

Like to some that's not the equivalent of "magic".

But, you insist, they need not contact you, they can simply "resolve" it on their own. And while for thousands and thousands of years countless moral conflagrations have never been resolved -- and for reasons I note above -- you can then fall back on the assumption that "these disagreements are not eternal".

Sure, I agree. They may not be. But, as of today, they still are. And that's because, in my view, in a No God world there is no secular -- Humanist -- font equivalent able to make the reasonable arguments given by those on both sides of the issues go away.

With capital punishments, it's these: https://deathpenalty.procon.org/

Ah, so the "trend" here is that I am now a bona fide "idiot"? That it is not an ad hominin to note this, however, since the trend makes it "objective"?

No. It's an objective fact that you are an idiot. Having failed to understand what I am saying afte rmultiple explanations.

Of course, my alternative hypothesis is that you are simply intellectually challenged, or brain damaged.

All of this is consistent with the principle of charity. IF I am to assume you are charitable in debate, and if I am to explain to myself how you continue to misrepresent and misunderstand me then I have no better explanation than to assume that you are stupid.

I will simply allow others to make of this what they will. I suspect, however, that most here might conclude that it tells us more about you than about me. But then "politics" often prevails here. I'm suggesting to members here ways of thinking about morality which can be discomforting. Most tend to accept that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about things like capital punishment. That's what the discussions and debates revolve around. But I suggest that value judgments themselves are rooted existentially in dasein and that sans God there is no Humanist/deontological/ideological equivalent for resolving them. That, in fact, in coming to the conclusion I have "I" am now "fractured and fragmented".

And that's what the objectivists among us are most intent on avoiding. Becoming "drawn and quartered" themselves in regard to conflicting goods rooted problematically -- at times precariously -- in dasein.

Thus, the more that the exchanges come to revolve around making me -- the obtuse idiot -- the issue, the more convinced I become that my own frame of mind is starting to "get" to some.

Though, again, this in and of itself is no more than a profoundly problematic frame of mind on my part. I don't doubt that I might well be wrong. All I can do is to consider the arguments of those who claim that I am. Especially those who don't allow themselves to sink down to the point where they are calling me an "idiot" because I have failed to understand what they are saying after multiple attempts on their part to explain "the objective truth" to me.

Their own of course.

[Skepdick]

...
I will simply allow others to make of this what they will.
...

You know what this says about ALL of your posts?

You don't speak what you believe. You don't interact with your interlocutors so that your true state of mind can be revealed. You are just performing for a broader audience beyond just the two of us participating in the interaction.

Which is exactly what I said when I said that you can discuss moral relativism philosophically, but true moral relativists don't exist.

In pretending to be one you are being intentionally deceitful. For the purpose of philosophy. Obscurantism 101.

[Belinda]

...
I will simply allow others to make of this what they will.
...

You know what this says about ALL of your posts?

You don't speak what you believe. You don't interact with your interlocutors so that your true state of mind can be revealed. You are just performing for a broader audience beyond just the two of us participating in the interaction.

Which is exactly what I said when I said that you can discuss moral relativism philosophically, but true moral relativists don't exist.

In pretending to be one you are being intentionally deceitful. For the purpose of philosophy. Obscurantism 101.

That, Skepdick, illustrates my opinion of postmodernism. It's great that PM happened but PM is a staging post on the way to a revised personal opinion. It would be silly to think that philosophers are minds that float around in an atmosphere devoid of actual contexts.

[RCSaunders]

...
I will simply allow others to make of this what they will.
...

You know what this says about ALL of your posts?

You don't speak what you believe. You don't interact with your interlocutors so that your true state of mind can be revealed. You are just performing for a broader audience beyond just the two of us participating in the interaction.

Which is exactly what I said when I said that you can discuss moral relativism philosophically, but true moral relativists don't exist.

In pretending to be one you are being intentionally deceitful. For the purpose of philosophy. Obscurantism 101.

That, Skepdick, illustrates my opinion of postmodernism. It's great that PM happened but PM is a staging post on the way to a revised personal opinion. It would be silly to think that philosophers are minds that float around in an atmosphere devoid of actual contexts.

PM may be the very last stage in the total corruption of philosophy and its ultimate demise. One can only hope. The obliteration of philosophy and religion would be like the clouds parting allowing the purifying light of the sun and knowledge to bring life to the world.

[Belinda]

You know what this says about ALL of your posts?

You don't speak what you believe. You don't interact with your interlocutors so that your true state of mind can be revealed. You are just performing for a broader audience beyond just the two of us participating in the interaction.

Which is exactly what I said when I said that you can discuss moral relativism philosophically, but true moral relativists don't exist.

In pretending to be one you are being intentionally deceitful. For the purpose of philosophy. Obscurantism 101.

That, Skepdick, illustrates my opinion of postmodernism. It's great that PM happened but PM is a staging post on the way to a revised personal opinion. It would be silly to think that philosophers are minds that float around in an atmosphere devoid of actual contexts.

PM may be the very last stage in the total corruption of philosophy and its ultimate demise. One can only hope. The obliteration of philosophy and religion would be like the clouds parting allowing the purifying light of the sun and knowledge to bring life to the world.

And yet there are some religionists who hark back to the Age of Faith and who would take a retro stance against enlightenment science

[RCSaunders]

That, Skepdick, illustrates my opinion of postmodernism. It's great that PM happened but PM is a staging post on the way to a revised personal opinion. It would be silly to think that philosophers are minds that float around in an atmosphere devoid of actual contexts.

PM may be the very last stage in the total corruption of philosophy and its ultimate demise. One can only hope. The obliteration of philosophy and religion would be like the clouds parting allowing the purifying light of the sun and knowledge to bring life to the world.

And yet there are some religionists who hark back to the Age of Faith and who would take a retro stance against enlightenment science

Well, it used to be, "enlightenment science." I'm afraid very much of what goes by the name science today is as much under the cloud of superstition and ideology as any of the religions.

[iambiguous]

...
I will simply allow others to make of this what they will.
...

You know what this says about ALL of your posts?

You don't speak what you believe. You don't interact with your interlocutors so that your true state of mind can be revealed. You are just performing for a broader audience beyond just the two of us participating in the interaction.

Not only that, but I can't really know for certain if either one of us possess the free will needed to make this exchange anything other than what it could only possibly have been given the only possible reality in the only possible material world. Human brains being no less just along for the ride.

In any event, my point is that what we think we believe or know about the morality of, say, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, is rooted existentially/subjectively in dasein. That, in the absence of God, there appears to be no way in which mere mortals can determine if the invasion is in fact inherently/necessarily rational or irrational, inherently/necessarily moral or immoral.

Although there are any number of moral and political objectivists among us who insist it must be possible to determine this. Why? Because they already have determined it!

And others are "idiots" if they don't believe exactly the same thing.

For example, this...

Which is exactly what I said when I said that you can discuss moral relativism philosophically, but true moral relativists don't exist.

In pretending to be one you are being intentionally deceitful. For the purpose of philosophy. Obscurantism 101.

...must be true because you say it is.

Whether with respect to capital punishment, abortion, gun ownership or the war in Ukraine.

[iambiguous]

Is Moral Relativism Really a Problem?
Psychological research suggests it is not
By Thomas Pölzler at Scientific American

This research suggests that relativist attitudes may manifest themselves in more varied ways than is often thought. Some of these effects are negative; others are positive. Finally, I suspect that in most everyday contexts, relativism’s effects will be simply negligible. Numerous kinds of nonmoral reasons and influences motivate prosocial, and counteract antisocial, behaviors, too.

Negligible for many of us because, for the most part, we might go for days, weeks, months or even years without our lives reaching an existential breaking point...a new set of circumstances where we are forced to possibly reevaluate our moral and political value judgments. To reevaluate how we think about morality altogether.

For example, you are now a citizen of Ukraine.

Thus, even if it were true that relativists lacked strong moral motivation to refrain from murder or rape, this situation would hardly lead them to go out and actually murder and rape. Like most other people, relativists will have a natural inhibition against doing such things; they will feel sympathy toward fellow human beings, they will want to avoid being put in jail or being socially ostracized, and so on.

Here of course things can get tricky. In other words, where does a "natural inhibition" in human beings against doing certain things cross over into something then said to be objective morality? And then those ambiguous contexts in which someone insists that there's "no way" they could ever murder someone...and then either performs or has an abortion. Or rationalizes the state executing prisoners on death row. Or either does or does not include the killing of other animals in their moral narrative.

So is moral relativism the “biggest problem in America”? Or even a big problem? I suggest that Ryan and other commentators look instead at issues such as climate change, increasing economic inequality or insufficient health care. If we consider the available scientific evidence, moral relativism may be more widespread than thought. Yet it likely does not pose any serious threat to American society.

What say you? And how can that not be relative to your own set of circumstances? To your own philosophy of life? To your own moral narrative rooted in dasein?

And, in fact, in America today, with it's Blue States and Red States and ever deepening "culture wars", it's clearly not moral relativism that is the biggest problem. Quite the opposite, right?

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175121

[iambiguous]

Science and Morality
Science doesn’t give us a script for what to value or believe in, but it helps us write that script
Jim Kozubek
at Scientific American

I am a faithful book buyer and an omnivorous reader, but one with a precocious streak—I like to look up authors and email them with questions about their books. Since penning a book about the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-modification system, readers are now writing to me with all sorts of middle-of-the-night thoughts. Many people think of science as a good thing—STEM has cachet, synonymous with our goodness—but the advance of the life sciences unnerves some people.

A teacher in New Hampshire suggested recombinant DNA research—including CRISPR—was dangerous enough in theory that he has proposed to move it all to the moon (he has not yet secured the funding or political will to do this). A therapist in the Netherlands has started a grassroots campaign to stop the application of CRISPR, a motivation which is linked to her views on the divinity of nature.

One thing for sure. Science is all but impotent when confronting minds that insist that science itself must be completely in sync with how they view the world around them spiritually, morally. When confronting those in possession of their very own private and personal "script for what to value or believe in."

After all, when you link together "life" and "science", you are immediately confronted with all of the profoundly problematic ways in which any particular one of us have come to understand life itself. And not only rationally but emotionally as well. And there minds can easily become locked and loaded. Indeed, look at some of them we encounter right here.

Science can discredit our speculations, folk science and illusions about how the world works and what to be afraid of; but the opposite, science as a positive script for what to value or believe has its limitations. Robert Oppenheimer was painfully aware of this when he concluded that “science is not all of the life of reason; it is a part of it.”

The parts for example that most now just take for granted. The parts that go into creating the world around us. The parts that sustain an economy. The parts that allow us the use of technologies that few of us have any real understanding of at all regarding how they work. Science in the either/or world and all of the leaps and bounds it has taken in the past centuries.

But the parts engaged in "gene-modification systems"? What is "spiritually and morally" correct then?

For example...

CRISPR may indeed be used to create bioweapons through the engineering of microbes, or create pathological strains through unscrupulous genetic manipulation. But the unleashing of dangerous microbes has been a concern at least since the 1970s when recombinant DNA first emerged, not to mention giving rise to films such as the Andromeda Strain and The Stand.

Exactly: conflicting goods. Depending on how each of us defines good and bad in terms of either means or ends. The part where science is no less stymied by the manner in which I propose the "for all practical purposes" implications of dasein in the is/ought world.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175121

[Eodnhoj7]

Is Moral Relativism Really a Problem?
Psychological research suggests it is not
By Thomas Pölzler at Scientific American

Suppose you believe abortion is permissible. Would that belief alone make it so? No? Then how about if most Americans believed it? Would that suffice? If you think the answer to either question is yes, then chances are you are a moral relativist. You may hold that generally, as Hamlet put it, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

This is morality that revolves by and large around what you believe in your head. Or around what the majority of citizens in any particular community believe in their heads. But here that can still be predicated on the assumption that what you and others do believe about permissible or impermissible behavior makes it moral. And how then is that different from someone like me who concludes that morality itself is beyond the reach of, among other things, philosophy.

Not only is morality relative historically, culturally and individually, but, in the absence of God, it can never be more than the existential embodiment of "moderation, negotiation and compromise" among and between mere mortals.

That's the quandary that continues to impale me. Even in professing to be a moral relativist, some are able to convince themselves that their own conclusions are still the optimal frame of mind...the "best of all possible worlds".

Moral relativism has as bad a reputation as any view about morality could. For example, in a 2011 interview for the conservative nonprofit American Enterprise Institute, then representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said, “Moral relativism has done so much damage to the bottom end of this country, the bottom fifth has been damaged by the culture of moral relativism more than by anything else, I would argue. If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics—I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.”

On the other hand, moral relativism might be construed by some as downright constructive next to moral nihilism. The belief that morality itself is basically just a profoundly problematic [at times precarious] existential contraption rooted in the particular life that you lived and, given contingency, chance and change, always subject to reconfiguration given new experiences, new sets of circumstances.

Of course, those like Paul Ryan then insist that what must replace moral relativism is moral objectivism. And that necessarily would revolve around what he and his own moral and political ilk deem to be The Right Thing To Do.

And here, as they say, the rest is history.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175121

Moral relativity leads to moral absolutism as things are justified according to context; outside of said context the phenomenon is unjustifiable.

[iambiguous]

Moral relativity leads to moral absolutism as things are justified according to context; outside of said context the phenomenon is unjustifiable.

Depends on how you construe moral relativism.

Some might argue that different factions interacting in different contexts out in particular worlds might have a moral narrative/political agenda relative to their own set of assumptions about the "human condition". But given those assumptions they are moral objectivists.

So in nations that embrace democracy and the rule of law they use elections rather than theology, force or philosopher-kings to settle things.

But others like me predicate moral relativism on their own assumptions regarding moral nihilism in a No God world. They are "fractured and fragmented" in regard to conflicting goods. Ever and always drawn and quartered given the following frame of mind:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

It's my assumptions here that most disturb the moral objectivists. Why? Because what if one day they decide it is applicable to them as well.

Their precious Self is no longer able to be connected essentially to the Right Thing To Do...re God or ideology or deontology or nature.

[Eodnhoj7]

Moral relativity leads to moral absolutism as things are justified according to context; outside of said context the phenomenon is unjustifiable.

Depends on how you construe moral relativism.

Some might argue that different factions interacting in different contexts out in particular worlds might have a moral narrative/political agenda relative to their own set of assumptions about the "human condition". But given those assumptions they are moral objectivists.

So in nations that embrace democracy and the rule of law they use elections rather than theology, force or philosopher-kings to settle things.

But others like me predicate moral relativism on their own assumptions regarding moral nihilism in a No God world. They are "fractured and fragmented" in regard to conflicting goods. Ever and always drawn and quartered given the following frame of mind:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

It's my assumptions here that most disturb the moral objectivists. Why? Because what if one day they decide it is applicable to them as well.

Their precious Self is no longer able to be connected essentially to the Right Thing To Do...re God or ideology or deontology or nature.

To assume is a natural state of being and as the nature state of being necessitates it as either good or evil, thus moral, as one may be natural or not. The relativity of naturalness being good or evil necessitates good/evil as existing within certain contexts thus existing absolutely because of said contexts. This leads to the question of good/evil thus further necessitating good/evil exists because of perpetual contexts. Because good/evil are contexts and contexts are absolute, in the respect they are universal and continually existing, good/evil is absolute.

The self is a context.

Context depending on further context, with results occurring because of said relationships of contexts, is absolute. Morality being subject to circumstance necessitates a constant value for said circumstance (ie x context and y context always result in z context) as the circumstance is justified by its existence.

Existence is objective.