Absolute Morality...again.

How do you measure / judge "goodness"?

There's a few other options.
- You can search for the best judgment "for me"; i.e. search for judgment that fits your morality, with the understanding that the result is only applicable to people who have a morality like that of yours.- You can simply not judge morally. I think this is the utilitarian approach--you face problems practically only, there is no ideaological morality. Or more likely, the ideaological morality is very, very basic and doesn't necessitate moral judgment in the vast majority of cases.People believing they know what's "right" doesn't logically imply that there is any right. It logically implies... that they THINK there's some "right". There's nothing forcing that judgment to be applicable to all. Post-modern relativism is not threatened

You're basically saying that a relativist morality is NO MORALITY AT ALL. In other words, you're defining morality as necessarily non-relative. That's the only way you could say that having a relativist morality is "abandoning the search basically"--i.e. not actually searching for a moral judgment of a situation.So... of course, when you define morality to mean non-relativist, you're going to come out with the result that making moral judgments assumes absolute morality. But that's not much of a conclusion--that's just playing "p's and q's" with definitions. Seems to me as well that the human race has traditionally assumed an absolute morality. I also agree that post-modern thought on morality seems chaotic. But I guess it's always chaotic in times of change.I'm wondering if what you call post-modern relativistic morality is simply the moral equivalent to globalization of economic markets. When you try to globalize different absolute moralities, I think you're stuck either incessantly fighting with no ability to resolve any conflict, or stuck to accept some type of relativistic morality, even if only on a purely practical level.That's my thought for the day.

I'd have to assume that when there are conflicting goals, one of the goals (or parts of different goals) are against the moral standard and thus "wrong".Can you think of an example where all goals would be judged "morally right" and still there would be a conflict? Off the cuff I can't think of a "pure case" where the situation isn't tainted by some circumstance that involves "moral wrong".

Well, this is exactly what I should have been saying. I think your examples work ONLY if you presuppose NO moral standard. So I thought that it's not a valid argument against an absolute moral standard.I couldn't come up with an example where there's an absolute moral standard and there's a conflict in goals that didn't depend on there being something "morally wrong" with one of those goals. And if we 't be a valid objection against an absoulte morality. This is a tough game to play (i.e. discussing actual situations and how a certain moral system applies to them), and I'm not going to do it for those who need to (a.k.a. Faith). So if it's all the same to you, I'll leave it up to others to see if this scenario has any problems within their moral framework. I just wanted to address what I thought was a weakness in the argument to try and further the discussion a bit.Ben