The moral nihilist thinks there is no moral truth…..sometimes this takes the form of relativism, either a subjective individual relativism (morality is like taste) or a cultural version (when in Rome do what the Romans do).
The moral realist thinks moral truths are like scientific, mathematical or logical truths…out there, waiting to be discovered (or the dictates of a supernatural being).
In between are positions like moral constructivism and contractualism. The constructivist / contractualist thinks we make our own moral truths (individually and collectively). But we do so under certain constraints so we should not think that in morality ‘anything goes’. Something like objective truth is possible.
In my talk I want to survey positions taken by a range of thinkers in the middle ground, focussing on constructivism but also looking at recent books such as Philip Kitcher’s ‘The Ethical Project’ and Mark Johnson’s ‘Morality for Humans’. Both see human morality as contingent, experimental, a work in progress. Johnson’s most provocative statement, that moral fundamentalism is not just incorrect, but immoral. “Moral absolutism is immoral,” he argues, “in that it shuts down precisely the kind of empirically informed ethical inquiry we most need for our lives.”
Philosophy in Swindon - click here for next talk 
A criminal conviction, even when it follows the most scrupulous police investigation and the public formalities of a trial, provides no certainty: it tells us only that the convict is probably guilty, but we must always be aware that he may not be. The empirical examples of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four must be always in our minds.
The convict must accept that the probability of his guilt gives us good reason to regard him as dangerous, and therefore to take precautions for our own protection; but we in turn must accept that the possibility of his not being guilty means that, in our treatment of him, we must do nothing that risks harming him if it isn’t really necessary for our own safety.
It follows from this that we can never justify doing anything to a convict with the intention of harming him, either as retribution or as deterrent.
This reasoning is both empirically informed and logically irrefutable and its conclusion therefore morally binding: in this case, then, how could it be that “Moral absolutism is immoral?”
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