roachboy

i think this question of ethics is caught in a false binary as they say: either ethics are transcendent or they are situational. this opposition is not new and generally gets advanced by folk who come out of a religious background and expresses their underlying belief that without some god-term, there can be no ethics...this is usually of a piece with a kind of panic about human autonomy, which gets run out via sequences of scenarios during the course of which the writer gets to fret about situational ethics and that sort of thing. the premise is generally: if human beings make up the rules that govern their own behaviour, then there can be and is considerable variability in what is understood as ok.

from a viewpoint informed by dreams of a transcendent ethics, presumably one dropped by a god, relativism means anything goes.
the selection of scenarios to fret about is generally meant, one way or another, to reinforce the claim that anything goes.

so lots of folk who work in ethics look for some type of overarching guidlines or a set of claims about norms that they can substitute for the god-term. because ethics is itself relative, internally relative: it is an applied philosophy. in this context, it makes some sense to point to united nations charter and other documents---the impulse is to locate a transcednetn grid of norms and then busy oneself with application problems.

what is strange in this is the assumptions about human agency and capabilities that underpin it. if you move from a christian/kantian frame to a secular one, going from stuff this god character said to the un charter, you would think that the conception of human agency would change along with it--but often it doesn't--human beings ae still meat puppets that left to themselves perform the consequences of original sin--they are incapable of managing themselves, they need some Big Daddy to lay down the Law because.....well why exactly? i mean if you are going to pine for religion as if it worked against the degenerate tendencies of us meat puppets, you have to forget that human beings made religion.

you could also say that a religions tend to substitute a reward/punishment structure for choice and in so doing erase the space for autonomous action. nietzsche said as much, and pretty convincingly.

anyway....
there are 3 levels at play in the thread already--transcendence/god; social norms; situational ethics.

the first question seems to me the wrong way round--an action would define the situation and not the reverse. imagine a tribunal that reviews ethical decisions and what the argument before that tribunal would be, how they'd work. each argument concerning an action would be a narrative about the situation. each narrative would be an attempt to define the situation. the situation and action define each other.

i think that the rules of the game we play are social.
because of the characteristics of words, we can map these social rules onto a transcendent register---what you make of that move is an aesthetic matter.
situational ethics has more to do with individual interpretations of social norms.

i dont know if this gets to the question i set out to address.
it is early in the morning and i am stil drinking coffee to wake up---i'll revisit this later, once i am awake.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite