Judgment, made possible by…

Igno­rance. Well, not exactly. Since writ­ing my pre­vi­ous post on the “Foun­da­tions of Moral­ity” I had a thought. Not a series of thoughts, just one thought. I thought that if we live by the objec­tive moral stan­dard, even in igno­rance, we make judg­ment pos­si­ble.  I would imag­ine it some­thing like a per­son on vaca­tion in a cer­tain coun­try, who breaks the laws of that coun­try. This per­son might appear in court and reply, “but I didn’t know it was the law!” and still be found guilty, because igno­rance isn’t an excuse. They were still under the law. My anal­ogy in insuf­fi­cient in the fol­low­ing way, which I think only makes my orig­i­nal thought that much more potent: the law-breaker did not fol­low the law, the moral rel­a­tivist does. Both of these peo­ple act in claimed igno­rance, but there is still a law to which they answer and must fol­low (and in one case, do).

All the per­mu­ta­tions of this really seem quite fascinating…