Some people's belief systems are so strong that they refuse to understand. Thanks for calling me a "waste of skin" Thunder Rider, I genuinely appreciate it. No one insulting you.
I will illustrate another example so perhaps some of you can comprehend.
A region is at war. Picture in your mind something similar to the violence and cruelty of Vietnam. Soldiers are conquering the town, and a platoon of men who serve the enemy side raid a home. Of course they are heavily armed having engaged in combat, so to attempt to fight them would be futile. They see a beautiful teenage girl in this family and unfortunately desire to use her for sexual purposes.It is obvious they want to have their way with her. They ask for the girl, and make it painstakingly clear that if they are denied they will kill the entire family. Is it morally wrong for the girl to give in to unwanted, forced sexual intercourse to save her family? An instance in which a rape saved the lives of people? Ethics itself teaches that people must act for the greater good of the majority, and no matter what, different people's opinions are going to vary on this subject.
Expatbrit explained it best in his most recent post.
Something else that occured is that it is very easy to confuse an action with a label for an action. Take rape for example. Rape is not actually an action. Rather it is a label for a specific occurence of an action that fits certain criteria. The action is sexual intercourse.
In order to make a moral judgement on a specific occurence of sexual intercourse, we ask questions that will shed light on the context and circumstance of that specific occurence. Questions such as: what were the ages of the participants? Was the act mutually consensual? What are the personal circumstances of the participants as respect to relationships with others etc?
Once we have this individual information, we then assign a moral label to the specific occurence of the act. These can be negative, such as "rape" or "adultery", or they can be positive, such as "making love" etc. There are a range of labels to suit the various circumstances of the specific act.
In order to be a moral absolute, you would have to say that all occurences of the act (i.e. sexual intercourse) are either wrong, or right. This is obviously unworkable, and show why moral absolutes do not exist.
It is also why saying that "rape is an absolute wrong" doesn't really have any meaning, because,"rape" is a morally relativistic label, applied using the process of moral relativism.
as for your other unnecessary comment Thunder:
As a side note, why is it that if a "professor" teaches it at a higher learning establishment, that it bears more credibility than simple common sense?
Obviously you are again referring to me. The explanation given in ethics courses make absolute sense. Just because someone disagrees with you does not make them wrong. I have presented scenarios and facts to support my position. What have you done? Relied on emotion and opinion? If I am not mistaken, you have a book which is advertised on this site from time to time. You experienced abuse in your past. Therefore, you are speaking from a biased perspective. This is not intended to insult you in any way. You just may wish to rethink insulting others as you are composing your post and hit "submit."
