>The notion that moral judgments are not just true or false claims about human conduct helps explain the failure of ethical theories as far back as Aristotle’s. These theories started out on the wrong foot, by treating morality and immorality as intrinsic to the actions themselves, instead of our responses to them.
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Factoring human emotions into moral judgment explains much about them. Why they are held so strongly, why different cultures that shape human emotional responses have such different moral norms, even why people treat abstract ethical disagreement by others as a moral flaw. And most of all, this meta-ethical theory helps us understand why such disputes are sometimes intractable.

Basically, this is emotivism-the idea that statements of moral value indicate nothing more than personal preference, and implore the listener to agree.

Rosenberg is known for being a brutal nihilist who completely rejects the idea that morality exists, and claims that the only thing that causes us to be "good" is a "core morality" we mostly happen to share intuitively. His book The Atheist's Guide to Reality is a good read, even though I agree with very little of it.

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>Still another way of attempting to justify moral judgments goes back to Aristotle: What is morally right is what virtuous people do. We can see what is morally right by observing how virtuous people behave. The very existence of honor killing reflects the problems this approach faces. The practices one culture identifies as vicious are virtues in other cultures. And there is no culture-free point from which to adjudicate such disagreements about what counts as a virtue.

This isn't entirely accurate-Aristotle doesn't claim that virtuous actions are "morally right"-he had no concept for morality divorced from reality the way we do. Virtuous actions are just that, virtuous. They lead to eudaimonia, the state of human flourishing in which a human is living in accord with their function to the greatest possible degree.

Aristotle recognizes the fact that different cultures have different ideas about what constitutes human flourishing, but he doesn't take this challenge seriously-they merely describe different forms of good citizenship in relation to a different polis, and (depending on the polis) good citizens are different from good men.

Aristotle is wrong about many things (slavery, women, physics), but he's not wrong about the idea that there are certain behaviors which lead to a more harmonious, happy, and effective human life, and the capacity to engage in those behaviors constitute virtues. He believes that if you're temperate, courageous, prudent, etc. you will have lived a better life than if you didn't have those virtues. You can say he's wrong about that, and there are certainly problems with his virtues, but it's hard to deny that it's better to be cowardly, bad at decision-making, prone to addiction, etc. If you want to argue that's true, I'd wonder in what sense you want to claim it's true, because it's not in any sense relevant to actual, day-to-day human life as far as I can tell. That's Rosenberg's problem, in my view-he's concerned with morality rather than virtue, and if you're concerned with a metaphysical morality while also having a materialist ontology, nihilism is your only real option.

I believe such stance does not come from moral philosophy but from positivism who tries to skirt everything according to observatory science.

>Ethics shouldn't be as hard as rocket science.

That is true. Ethics should be much, much, much harder than rocket science. Ethics should be harder than quantum mechanics. Morality should be the hardest thing the human brain ever has the opportunity to consider, and if you aren't working that hard, you aren't being moral.

The esteemed professor of philosophy from Duke demonstrates the paucity of his approach in his final sentence, which hinges on the word "might". "Might" is not sufficient for any moral claims, one way or the other. As in so much philosophy, resigning yourself to conclusions which rely on 'maybe' or 'could' or "might" is pointless flum flummery. What we need is "is", and "does", or at least a conscientiously moralizing "should".

His central example exacerbates the problem: honor killings. His analysis leaves no possibility of any ethics other than 'cultural norms'. There is a seed of a worthwhile approach in his premise, that focusing on "the act" is problematic, but immediately grabs the stick by the wrong end by suggesting we should focus on how 'we' respond to the act, hopelessly leaving morality to founder as, again, 'cultural norms'. The problem with the traditional approach to ethics is that it seaks to be physics, and when simplistic logic is insufficient for considering moral claims, there is no recourse but to reject the notion that morality exists in any way.

It is not the act which determines if something is moral, but the reason for the act. Most notably, but not necessarily entirely, whether that cause is honestly and accurately elucidated responsibly. Honor killing is always wrong, and would be even more wrong, not less, if the purported functional reason cited, to restore honor to someone other than the victim, is true. Is all killing wrong? No. Is all murder wrong? That depends on how it is justified, and, yes, includes "cultural norms" to some degree. In our culture we couch this in gedanken of low hanging fruit to determine whether a particular intentional killing is legally murder or "justifiable homicide" or "self-defense", and suffer from this approximation of morality. Is honor wrong? No, but this demands an honest and limited (but not necessarily "well defined"/mechanistic) understanding of what "honor" is. Is honor killing wrong? Yes, always, in each and every case.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

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As someone who sympathizes with Hume I found this article to be in line with many of my own thoughts, but I do not think Aristotle can be taken as reducing ethics to simplistic logic. For example, eudaimonia implies experience, without which, we speak of nothing. That said it seems certainly possible to take an Aristotlean route and end up on the wrong foot.

So what if morality exists to us because we are at some level, and perhaps not at one which is purely intellectual, moral beings? What if morality is necessarily meaningless to us apart from this aspect of ourselves, be it culturally instilled, psychological, biological and/or interpreted as spiritual? If it is, we have no expectation of it, whatever it is, to conform to simplified ideas able to be grasped by limited minds. Why should we expect it to be uniform like a simplistic fact as opposed to something more akin to a multi-faceted landscape? Well, for one, that would be inconvenient for attempts to replace what is, with something else more suitable to other interests, as each and every attempt would almost certainly result in consequences violating what was originally there.

That said, as for honor killings, I think the author can trust his moral instinct in the wrongness of the act, but I would go further, suspecting that there may be a real basis for the honor killing itself. It's not impossible that the perpetrator has experienced a wrong. That may not justify the retribution, however, as much as it reveals that the culture within which these social and phsycological realities persist is itself contradictory, and morally twisted.

Morality will always be subjective go group consensus over time, its an emergent aspect of human society.

Any claim of definitive or objective morality is just foolish, like claiming rocks are good/evil without considering the subjectivity of human development.