Abstract

Western ethics were undergirded for well over a thousand years by the Absolute of the God of Judaism and Christianity, and by the Platonic doctrine of Forms, which entered the fold of Christian theology via neo-Platonists such as Augustine and Origen. ;The rise of Scholasticism during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries represented a change in philosophical viewpoint that may not have been fully comprehended at the time; for Aristotle, rather than Plato, provided the philosophical basis for the metaphysical systems of Aquinas and other clerics, and inductive rather than deductive reasoning began to figure more prominently in their speculations. The growing interest in, and refinement of, inductive reasoning was evident in the development of the scientific method of inquiry that flowered during the Renaissance. ;During the period of the Enlightenment, David Hume and the British empiricists, demonstrated the weaknesses, both of Continental rationalism and of inductive reasoning, so that the transcendental absolute of Plato and the transcendental God of the Clerics were no longer able to bear up the ethical load that had previously been laid upon them. The German idealists--Leibniz, Kant and Hegel--understood the ethical necessity of absolutes, attempted to demonstrate their actuality, and constructed ethical systems based upon them. But this appears to have been to no avail. Kant, in fact, showed the impossibility of reasoning empirically to the noumenal; Kierkegaard argued that becoming ethical finally involved a qualitative leap; Nietzsche stated that God was dead and called for a new ethics based upon power. ;Twentieth century ethicists, heirs to the traditions that have gone before, have, in growing numbers, refused to think in terms of absolute ethical norms, and ethical relativism is the result. I argue that ethical relativism leads, not to true ethics, but to antinomianism, and that in order to make ethical statements with sufficient force to guide and structure society, an appeal to absolutes, in some form, must be made. Finally, I propose a syllogistic model which provides, I believe, a possible solution to the problem. The model begins with the a priori proposition that ethics, at its most basic, must be seen as a tool that aids in the survival of the human race; thus, that which is destructive of this end is ethical, while that which is deconstructive of this end is unethical. From this a priori, deductive reasoning is used to determine whether or not particular actions are ethical or unethical