The notion of someone 'having morals' or of being 'morally responsible' is, I hope, one of the most ridiculous things you have ever heard of. The problem occurs when philosophers begin to formulate criteria for their ethics. Most of the time, philosophers begin by laying out their metaphysics and then having established this base proceed to formulate their ethics by reasoning from particulars up to universals. In this respect, nearly all of western philosophy has been a series of footnotes to Plato, who insisted on reaching from this world to the world of forms as though there was a Truth "out there" that could be reached. Kant stands as an interesting exception who preferred to reason down from universals to particulars in formulating his ethics. For this reason, the critic Richard Rorty has labeled Kant an inverted Platonist, a philosopher who has essentially replicated Plato's philosophical paradigm but flipped it over (Rorty, 32). In any case, the Platonic paradigm fails to make a good case for ethics. What is needed is an ethos - a way of being.
I will begin this essay by presenting two examples of why morals formulated in the Platonic paradigm cannot be considered to be "right" for all human beings at all times and all places or "universal" as it were. I will then propose an ethos which contains the problems associated with constraints, ignorance, and uncontrollable circumstances. I will conclude with a discussion of how determinists, libertarians, and compatibilists might fit into such a world.
Consider the moral that inflicting pain on another human being is wrong or evil or bad. There is a counter argument that says there is the hypothetical situation of the masochist or the sadist, one who derives pleasure from experiencing or witnessing pain and the latter deriving pleasure from the inflicting of pain. There is of course the sexual example, but I believe a more apt and ubiquitous examp...