In today’s podcast, we learned about normative and relative frameworks of ethics. A normative framework is where everyone believes there is a universal truth to the rules, so essentially, everyone agrees on what is good and bad. This is similar to religion because religion discusses how one is supposed to live their life. The difference is that ethics don’t include a ritual practice. In normative ethics, we know that just because people agree, that doesn’t mean they won’t try to convince other people that they are wrong.
In a relative framework of ethics, people believe there is no universal truth to what is good and bad, with a few exceptions. For example, the podcast discussed that some things are decided universally, such as murder, which everyone can agree is a crime. Other things, individuals make their own decisions. In relative ethics, people don’t judge one an another for their different moral beliefs.
If these are the two macro branches, where do we go about compromising in between these two? Ethics gets messy, because most of the time we don’t believe what the person next to us believe. At the same time, can we really say that we don’t judge people for their moral beliefs. For example, last year in one of my psychology classes, the topic of spanking a child as punishment came up. Many said this type of punishment has become outdated because people now realize is is morally wrong. But, what’s changed since then? It can’t be people because my guess would be that the people who now believe it would be wrong to spank their child as a punishment would believe the same thing years ago. Many people who believe this action isn’t okay are likely to judge parents who do spank their child as punishment.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is no way that people will agree on moral beliefs. We know that. But, it also doesn’t seem practical to think that we live in a world where people don’t judge others for their moral beliefs. So where do we go to find a happy medium?
Your last question is a really good one and I am not sure if we ever will find an answer. Everyone in our society is so different and grows up in several different cultures, school culture, family culture, ethnicity, the list goes on and on. Maybe there can be a happy medium when someone is participating in an action that you may not agree with, but if it is not actually causing much serious harm in the long term or if they are not harming other people, it may be ok. Judgment here I guess is ok if you do not agree, because that is human nature, but telling them they can’t do something when it does not really cause harm is kind of unethical in its own way.