Grey Areas with Moral Absolutism

For background, “Moral Absolutism is the ethical belief that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, regardless of the context of the act.” These inherent moral standards are most commonly seen among religious people. When simplifying this definition and applying it to the world we live in, moral absolutism is a way of labeling the inherent goodness or badness of an action, regardless of context. The last part is important, because this lays the foundation for my objection. While some absolutists use ethics that follow from their axiological beliefs, I believe, as a relativist that it should be the other way around. This is because while the deontological approach seems appealing on paper, it can situationally produce horrific outcomes. Take for example, an absolutist position that the wellbeing of the masses will always be better than the wellbeing of the few. Now under this principle, we can apply it deontologically, without a problem, to the situation of a human experimenting. However, through the scope of a moral relativist, a situation such as sacrificing a few hundred people through human experimenting in an attempt to produce a cure for an entire population raises obvious questions. How would one go about choosing the humans who will die for a greater cause? These people did nothing to deserve to die, so is it ok to kill them to raise the wellbeing of an entire population? Another problem lies in how one chooses which absolute standards to believe in in the first place. Many religions have absolute moral standards that somewhat overlap, but when considering cases that apply outside of this common ethical ground, which religion, and which absolute moral standards should be chosen? There is no way to know for sure. Hence, I always see philosophical grey areas as a problem for the moral absolutist.


A Moral Absolutist defines actions as intrinsically right or wrong.

If one can’t consistently apply absolutist values in every situation, one should not hold them.

Absolutist values cannot be applied in every situation because the world produces events that require human responses that are too specific and situational to fit rigid guidelines of “right and wrong”.

One should not hold absolutist values. (2,3 MT)