24.230 Essay 2

December 9, 2015 It is often assumed that people are moral absolutists. Although Paul Boghossian supports this claim by seemingly defeating every reasonable type of relativism, Sarkissian et al. provide reason to think that people are generally moral relativists. I will argue that people really do believe in moral relativism, but that we think that all humans should agree to one universal moral code by which any member of our society should abide. I will develop and examine this argument in more detail, and argue that my theory not only explains the data from Sarkissian et al. but that it also overcomes one of Boghossian's arguments against relativism. It may seem contradictory to argue that we are relativists but at the same time we want to have a universal moral code, so I should clarify. When I say people are relativists, I mean that they don't think that there actually is an objectively true moral code that exists outside the scope of human existence. Instead, people think that humans have had a part in creating the moral code that we abide by. That is, when I say that people believe everyone should abide by a universal moral code, I am not saying that such a moral code is objectively true or right. Instead, humans try to create the optimal moral code for our society, where “optimal” means some combination of practical, beneficial, and reasonable, among other criteria. For example, killing people may be against our moral code because it makes our society more unstable and causes more overall harm than benefit to the members of society. Another example is donating money to charity: It is considered morally good because it usually has a net effect of benefitting people, but it is not morally required because doing so might be less reasonable and even harmful for people who have very little of their own money to begin with. I think my way of explaining how we choose the optimal moral code is fairly intuitive and it seems that most people use this type of criteria (even if sub-consciously) when trying to decide whether they believe something is right or wrong. So my claim is that people strive to find this optimal moral code, and that people generally