The question of ‘what is right (or wrong)’ or ‘what one ought to do’ is possibly the earliest and the most pervasive philosophical problem. Countless arguments and methods of justification of ethical, moral and, more generally, normative claims have been developed over the millennia, but no argument has fully satisfied the desiderata of objective truth. An authoritative answer to the normative question requires grounding of the alleged truth in objective facts or some self-evident principle.
Ethical convictions that are not well grounded in objective facts but only in the belief that something just is right have the logical consequence of validating their opposite as also right, that is, such convictions are immanently self-defeating. Were I to validate an ethical claim as objectively and universally right on the basis of my subjective belief, I would have also validated subjective belief as a sufficient basis of ethical judgement in general, and thus implicitly justify your acting according to your subjective belief in what is right, irrespective of whether our beliefs were in agreement or opposed to one another. This would amount to ethical pluralism, but an affirmation of a plurality of possibly incompatible ethical judgements as independently right implies a negation of a universally binding, objective criterion of being right. If no one can be universally right then the conflict of rights is reduced to the conflict of might, and resolution can only be achieved through violent repression or destruction of one’s ethical adversary. The only universal principle affirmed by ethical pluralism is therefore violence, but an affirmation of violence by everyone against anyone is not ethically normative at all: it is a radical rejection of the possibility of being objectively right or wrong in any conflict.
But perhaps your position is not that of an ethical-pluralist; perhaps you just know that you are right and that I am wrong, and you do not claim that two conflicting views can both be right at the same time. Let us call this attitude ethical elitism. But ethical elitism leads to the same impasse as ethical pluralism. If you just know that you are right and I am wrong, and I just know that you are wrong and I am right, then violence is still the only means of resolving conflict, irrespective of who is objectively wrong and who is right. Both attitudes preclude peaceful resolution of conflict via public deliberation.
Successful deliberation (that is, deliberation per se) requires meaning: a commonly accepted normative structure for discerning sense from nonsense, logically valid from logically false. Rejection of a common structure has the same effect as ethical pluralism or elitism, that is, it also necessitates violence in situations of conflict. The most fundamental normative structure, without which meaning could not exist even on the subjective level, are the laws of classical logic: the law of non-contradiction (no statement can be both true and false at the same time and in the same context), identity (at any given time, everything is absolutely identical only to itself) and excluded middle(every statement must be either true or false, or be composed of parts that are either true or false). But ‘so what’, one might say, ‘I might be contradicting myself but I don’t care as long as I get what I want’. The problem which this position is that by even thinking about what I want I already apply the law of identity, and by acting with the intention to get what I want out of action I must act consistently and unambiguously towards a goal, otherwise my actions would contradict one another and could not reliably achieve the desired result. We all affirm the fundamental laws of logic simply by acting intentionally, and this affirmation is presupposed in every instance of intersubjective conflict. (See also Lord, Errol. What You’re Rationally Required to Do and What You Ought to Do (Are the Same Thing!). Mind, 2017) READ MORE
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