Ethics is fundamentally subjective, but not relative.
You cannot “judge” an ethical system objectively. But you can observe it objectively and you can measure it objectively.
Yes, but that doesn’t help. Suppose you want to objectively measure old testement biblical law.
You grab a bunch of people, force them to live under those laws, and observe the results.
You find that people living under these laws aren’t that happy, spend lots of time preying, and don’t make many paperclips. It is only your own sense of ethics that focusses on the average happiness, not the paperclip production.
Ethics is shaped by cultural evolution, within the mostly fixed framework created by biological evolution.
This does not imply any kind of ethical progress. Our notion of current ethics being better than past ethics could still be due to us drawing the target around ourselves. Looking back at our ancestors, we see animals evolving to become more human-like.
It is possible to have something like ethical progress if you have some notion of ethics that depends on physical or logical statements about which you are uncertain.
Yes, but that doesn’t help. Suppose you want to objectively measure old testement biblical law.
You grab a bunch of people, force them to live under those laws, and observe the results.
You find that people living under these laws aren’t that happy, spend lots of time preying, and don’t make many paperclips. It is only your own sense of ethics that focusses on the average happiness, not the paperclip production.
Ethics is shaped by cultural evolution, within the mostly fixed framework created by biological evolution.
This does not imply any kind of ethical progress. Our notion of current ethics being better than past ethics could still be due to us drawing the target around ourselves. Looking back at our ancestors, we see animals evolving to become more human-like.
It is possible to have something like ethical progress if you have some notion of ethics that depends on physical or logical statements about which you are uncertain.