What's Your Meta-Ethic? Part 2

If you have a bad meta-ethic, you get bad ethics; bad ethics lead to bad morals; bad morals lead to bad actions. So, it's important to start from the right place. [Part 1]

Here's a (simple) example.

Meta-ethic: Life is universally good.
Ethic: Death is bad, because it deprives people of life.
Moral: Killing people causes death; therefore, you shouldn't do it.

Starting from somewhere else leads to different results.

Meta-ethic: Freedom is universally good.
Ethic: Things or people that restrict freedom are bad, because it inhibits freedom.
Moral: Killing people who restrict freedom is ok, because it increases freedom.

Now the latter example is, in fact, ethical and consequently moral, because it is consistent with the stated meta-ethic.

It is consistency which determines whether or not something is ethical. Something is immoral if it is inconsistent with the ethic. It is the meta-ethic which determines what is good, or goodness itself.

Take politicians. (Please.) Jonah Goldberg writes:

[USA Today] Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." [...]

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness.

So next time you hear about some pharmaceutical company or some Bio firm who is experimenting on human embryos and justifies it because their Ethics board said it was OK, ask them: what's your meta-ethic?