You don't find anything ethical because you are not looking at the question of an ethical foundation. — Constance

Please share this firm ground with me, so that I may gain understanding. — Pieter R van Wyk

It is exactly this foundation, this firm ground, that you claim exists, that I am looking for.

I do not deny the validity of the question posed by this thread: What is right and what is wrong and how do we know? You do not refute nor negate my answer, but keep on insisting that the question is the fundamental question of the study of ethics. If it could help I will stipulate: this question is the very fundamental question of the study of ethics. My argument is that, even after thousands of years of study, this study of ethics have not found an answer to this question - by proposing an answer that is apparently outside the ambit of the study of ethics - therefore, apparently, not to be considered.

Let's consider the right or wrong of the decision of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as a salient example. My argument is that there are absolutely nothing ethical (right or wrong) about this decision. It was made purely on political and economic considerations. The horrible deaths and suffering of the citizens of Hiroshima versus the deaths and suffering of a million more US soldiers and the salient possibility of bankrupting the US economy.

Consider: decisions risking their own lives to hide runaway slaves from a posse of slavers or to hide Jews / homosexuals from gangs of Nazis ... or families of murder victims opposing the executions of their murderers ... — 180 Proof

Any person or group of persons can make the decision to disagree with current politics and try to change it or somehow to circumvent the politics that they do not agree with:

• By hiding runaway slaves or even start a war where brother kills brother in order to change a political expedience that was 'right' for some and 'wrong' for others.
• By hiding Jews/homosexuals from gangs of Nazis even though millions of people tacitly supported national-socialism - even to this very day.
• These families of murder victims that oppose the execution of murderers live and presumably voted in those countries and states where murderers are executed.
• By organising riots, throwing stones and burning cars if the electorate has re-elected a 'king' to the Whitehouse.

Anyone can presume some chimerical 'foundation' or 'firm ground' on which this question can be contemplated, then call it ethics. We humans have conducted politics for as long as philosophy has been studied; we still have wars, and poverty, and a growing unbalance between ourselves and our environment. Perhaps it could benefit us to relook our very foundation ... to confirm this assumed firm ground on which we have build our civilisation. Consider:

"Philosophy:= The study of questions without answers. Trying to give an exact meaning of an ambiguous notion in terms of other ambiguous words - at its very best merely an interesting conversation." How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence

We all live under some political dispensation that we sometimes agree with and sometimes not. We can endeavour to change this dispensation but we cannot take it away - it is exactly this dispensation that props up our very civilisation. That gave us some scope to even discuss the very question of what is right and what is wrong.

I am right. You are wrong. Because I say so.

Infallable!

I am right. You are wrong. Because I say so.

Infallable! — I like sushi

If infallibility is self-declared, then I, too, am infallible - and I say you’re wrong. Now what?

What do you mean by "God is a moral concept"? (or by "moral concept' itself?) — 180 Proof

Ask then, what is it for something to be moral? This takes the matter to moral actualities, and strong examples are the most poignant, so, a question: Does the prima facie moral prohibition on torturing others sustain in the case where utility favors torture? Of course, one has to look at the case itself, the manner of torture, the consequences and the nature of the outcome, the precedents for this kind of thing, the culpability of the tortured, and so on, but this very important discussion presupposes a philosophical issue that never really shows up here, which is the question of the nature of what is at stake. This is what you might call an armchair question, fit for philosophy only in the "leisure time" apart from pressing issues. What makes something moral? Not whether an action IS moral or not, but what it is, and for this we go into the issue of torturing, ask what is THERE that warrants the term's application. The term applies IFF there is value at stake. The issue of value takes one to an analysis, and an analysis is a reduction, a putting aside of of incidentals, the merely factual or merely states of affairs, and so what is a "mere" fact? Moonlight is reflected sunlight; this pen is smaller than a typical watermelon. One can see why the term 'mere' is used here, for facts as such carry no significance. They are not even trivial, for the menig of a fact lies entirely in the context of it use, and so the critical question emerges, set side by side, a moral proposition and a merely factual proposition both possess factual content, and when this content is removed the factual proposition vanishes, but the moral proposition does not. This residual survivor is the, in this case, the ethical bad: torture is painful and pain is bad.

Pain is, of course, a fact when it exists, but its facticity is exceeded by its existence, which simply means something that hurts is not a proposition in so far as there is hurting, not exhausted by the potentiality of propositional possibilities. As Rorty once put it, there are no propositions over there in those bushes. Of course, he was a qualified naturalist (a pragmatist, like Dewey, whose basic thinking is pragmatics, but who also affirmed the natural sciences to be, well, the only wheel that rolls. I do not buy this at all, but here his comment is useful).

Now, your question about God being a moral concept has some ground. Language possibilities constitute a finite totality of meanings (beingS? That is one way to speak of this) and the pain of being tortured stands apart from this, outside of this, and therefore outside of finitude itself, after all, finitude is determined by the determinateness of this very totality. The long account of this is very long indeed, and cannot be brought to light here. The short version is this: morality deals with that dimension of our existence where our pains and blisses are, and everything contained therein, and the language that speaks of this is finite, and this finitude of language is finitude itself, and what there is that is not language, the pains and blisses, belongs to eternity, if you can stand the term, which simply means it is NOT language. Pain is not language, exceeds the finitude of language's imposition of meanings and delimitations. It is, as John Mackie put it (in order to deny it), in the fabric of the world, issuing from Being as such, or from "the world" in the way early Wittgenstein meant this term in his Tractatus, as well as value, ethics, aesthetics. Pain, and this dimension of our existence, is transcendental, there before us, yet outside of categorical possiblities.

Thus, God is a term the essence of which is found here, in this radical indeterminacy of our value-existence. All things belongs to this indeterminacy, as well as to the conceptual determinacy brings understanding to its threshold, but ethics is sui generis because value is ontologically sui generis vis a vis all other analytics of Being. What is important in this absurdly brief account is that metaethics rests with metavalue. Our ethics is a metaethics at this level of inquiry. This is the ground for religion and its God, the real reason why people had to come up with all of those narratives about Jesus, Zeus, Odin, and the rest: they were "thrown into" moral indeterminacies that by their own nature reach out to remedy, to a meta-redemption and a meta-consummation, which is just what we are talking about when we say a person should or should do something in a given moral case, but the matter being contained within the finitude of language.

Thank you for such a rich and thoughtful elaboration. I deeply respect the metaphysical continuity you describe - from Husserl through Heidegger to Henry - and your insistence that all talk of “reality” already presupposes consciousness or Dasein as its horizon. I don’t reject that lineage; I simply ask a different kind of question within it.

Where you pursue the whatness of Being, I’m drawn to the ought that emerges within Being: the affective and ethical textures through which existence discloses itself. When a child is burned or a slave is whipped, what matters first is not that Being manifests itself in suffering, but that suffering calls us to respond. This “call” is not derivative of ontology; it is equiprimordial with it.

That’s why I invoked Hitchens - not as a metaphysician, but as an ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre. His critique may lack ontological precision, but it exposes the pathic structure of moral life: how conceptual fictions (like “God” or “sin”) can channel either empathy or cruelty. The moment consciousness awakens to that relation, philosophy is already in motion.

So when you ask, “What is ethics?”, I would answer: ethics is the self-manifestation of Being as concern for the Other. It is not an add-on to ontology, nor a sociological derivative, but the dimension in which Being feels its own vulnerability. Perhaps that’s where our projects intersect - your ontological monism and my existential compassionism are two ways of naming the same intimacy between consciousness and value.

I do not deny the validity of the question posed by this thread: What is right and what is wrong and how do we know? You do not refute nor negate my answer, but keep on insisting that the question is the fundamental question of the study of ethics. If it could help I will stipulate: this question is the very fundamental question of the study of ethics. My argument is that, even after thousands of years of study, this study of ethics have not found an answer to this question - by proposing an answer that is apparently outside the ambit of the study of ethics - therefore, apparently, not to be considered. — Pieter R van Wyk

Well, Pieter, I cannot help but notice that your response makes no reference at all to the things I said. Errr, curious.

I gave examples of ethical decisions that were politically defiant and not "expedient" – ethics is not a shallow (or conformist) as you suggest. Read Laozi, Kongzi, Epicurus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Spinoza ... Philippa Foot et al.