Moral Values Are Absolute

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Many people ponder if our morals and values are absolute, and if not, what worth do they possess. First, we should understand where we learn them. What we learn as values, morals and taboos strongly relate to where and how we are raised. Our culture, societal views, and religious beliefs are inherited by us from our parents. From birth till we reach our grave, we are continuously learning what our values are and how they fit into our morals. A problem of ethics appears when we try to communicate or come to an agreement with someone who was raised with different beliefs. If we look at this objectively it seems to be difficult to decide who is right or wrong. This is often when the modern doctrine of relativism is brought up. Relativism states …show more content…

The debate over the death penalty relates to the value of justice. Mostly everyone believes that there should be justice in the world. They agree that there needs to be a way to reward the good and punish the bad. Though, what causes an argument over this value is that some see the euthanization of criminals as a fair punishment, whereas those who disagree believe its too risky as someone innocent could lose their life. Appiah talks about capital punishment and states that, “[...] we may be unable to agree on how to strike the balance between avoiding the injustice of punishing the innocent and other values, even though we agree on what other values are at stake: security of people and property, justice, retribution… there's a long list” (Appiah 66). In this quote he says that there are disagreements with the use of capital punishment, we universally agree that there's other values in danger. This relates to the topic of abortion because both sides have an “thin” universal belief but the idea becomes “thick” in the translation and application. Just the idea of justice is “thin” and shared universally but it quickly becomes “thick” when the application is debated. Believing that sentencing someone who is possibly innocent to death is as much as an injustice as not sentencing someone who is guilty and deserves the

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