>>2259
So far, all philosophers have failed to come up with a method that allows us to judge the validity of a system of ethics without resorting to making ethical statements. We can judge the logical consistency of a system of ethics, true, but we can't judge whether it's truly morally sound while standing outside any and all system of ethics.
You ought to kill one person to save a hundred, says the utilitarian. Why do you have to do this? Because it serves the greater good. Why do we have an obligation to serve the greater good? In other words, what makes the greater good "good"? They are silent on that matter. The only way out is to regard utilitarianism, as well as any other system of ethics, as systems on how to maximize a certain property we defined as good beforehand.
This is not to say that morality was relative, or arbitrary. It is not relative because you can apply one system of ethics anywhere on the globe, to any situation. In that sense, they are all absolute. It is not arbitrary because a system that is logically inconsistent does not deserve to be called a system. When you change the rules as you go along, you're acting on whims, or upon a broken system. We can also pass judgement on whether a system actually functions to maximize a certain property or not. A system of ethics can define what property is good, but it can't define anything else about the property in question. It is for that reason (among others), for example, that the Social Justice Mentality is unsound: It purportedly serves to maximize equality, but it does so by granting certain groups privileges over others
If we apply ethical systems in a descriptive sense, we can theoretically apply them to everything, including non-living matter. This is commonly regarded as absurd. I haven't yet figured out why, though, but it might be different from system to system. What I do know is that we can judge a human brain on whether it's capable of making sound moral judgement and acting accordingly, without introducing free will into the equation.