It's about defining justice as a means of acquiring happiness. And it's by no means anywhere near the same conclusion. You can list off any number of philosophers who came to a conclusion, and there will be a comparative group that came to the opposite conclusion. The question is what constitutes justice or morality. Very few of them will past a certain point in history will tell you that any moral is an objective truth, or that any definition isn't inherently subjective. You're taking an arbitrarily defined ideal of morality, justice, and virtue and applying it macro-scale? Some things typically aren't ever allowed; the issue is defining what makes up such concepts. Murder is wrong. Ok. What is murder. How do you define it? Is there a certain styling to how it's carried out? Or rape? Can you define it on a macro-scale? Or heroism? Or courage? Or power?
I don't think you know your history or your philosophy. In fact, judging from your statements and general operation on here, I know you don't.
Oh, I don't know. There are plenty of modern academic philosophers and ethicists who have come to the conclusion that objective moral facts exist. Most academics in the United States certainly seem to do so. The reasoning rests on the same logical premise as something else, which ought to be significantly less controversial: the existence of
any reasoning or motive action behind anything that occurs.
The fact that not everybody adheres to the same ethical framework doesn't imply that objective morality doesn't exist. Perhaps those people who disagree with a certain stance are simply wrong. Objectively speaking, three plus three is six. But if a child answers that question incorrectly on an elementary-school worksheet, and writes that three plus three is five, we don't reason from that event that the entire logical framework of additive mathematics is wrong. Furthermore, it's blatantly apparent to even the most casual observer that most people do not think or act with a coherent ethical framework in mind. Why act as though they are correct in doing so?
It seems to me - and I would hasten to point out that I am
not anything close to knowledgeable about this subject - that it's eminently logical and plausible to believe that objective moral facts do exist. Perhaps the rub is more that those objective moral facts have yet to be conclusively proven or demonstrated in a logical way. That doesn't mean that they
cannot ever be proven: nobody had managed to prove Fermat's Last Theorem before Andrew Wiles did so, either.
Your belief that such objective moral facts cannot exist is
also eminently supportable from academic and philosophical thought. I would like to say, however, that the extent to which academics have argued both sides of the issue indicates that the question is essentially open. It would be a gross misreading of the evidence and the theory to suggest that a supporter of
either side "does not know their history or philosophy". The, ah,
intellectual put-downs are a bit much.
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