I found the comparative of normative ethics to religion to be very interesting. I was raised with a lot of Unitarian Universalist principles in my family. Although we often did not attend sermons, it was still something my parents used to explain the world to me as a kid. I always had a hard time understanding how someone could be so confident that their religion was the right one when there were so many choices. I wonder if that somehow affected my tendency to be willing to hear out ideas in their entirety, even when I don’t agree with them. I also had a difficult time understanding why people relied on religious reasons to be ethical, and I wondered if the goal to get into heaven corrupted the moral action. The TV show The Good Place had a really interesting response to this question and exploring the relationship between intention and consequence in ethics.
On an unrelated note, I think the relationship of normative ethics and relational ethics to imperialism to be particularly interesting. A lot of feminists rely on normative ethics in a neo-liberal frame-work to justify excluding multiculturalism and condemning cultural practices that they perceive oppress women regardless of what women in those countries think (ex. the veil in Muslim countries). Meanwhile, relational ethics can also be used to justify actual oppression of women. I think this just goes to show how any ethics code could be used to justify actions that I would consider morally abject, and that neither is universally applicable.
I had to reply about The Good Place! Aside from being obsessed with the show, I agree it did provide a lot of insight about ethics and the consequences of our actions. I touched on this in another one of my comments, but while reading the example in the text about the 1940s southern US town and the decision the sheriff needed to make about essentially killing one innocent man to save many more lives, I immediately thought of the trolley problem shown in The Good Place (I know it is a famous dilemma and the show didn’t create it, but that’s where I first learned about it), and this really proved to me how difficult ethics really are. Sure it’s about right and wrong, good and bad, but where we derive these meanings from is unclear. As you talk about, many people ground themselves in religion as a way to offer definitions of these seemingly simple phenomena. I also think society has us believe in the power of religion and its connection to morality when in reality, I agree with you that it is difficult to understand how religion can be so powerful if there are so many of them saying different things.
I feel like you could use both relative and normative ethics to justify imperialism, and that’s why the US keeps participating in it. Those who believe in the former are more likely to rationalize that imperialism is about survival of the fittest (the fittest being the more developed nation in this example). Those who support the latter can argue for imperialism by suggesting that the US’s “greater purpose” is spreading its domain of power to third-world countries who “don’t know any better.” Imperialism was an interesting example to bring up because you could really rationalize it either way by using both forms of ethics.