2025/12/06 by Willis, Bry · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Decision Sciences · Neuroscience · #Ethics in Business and Education #Philosophical Ethics and Theory #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
paper · pdf · doi:10.5281/zenodo.17837774
openalex publication_date 2025/12/06 · openalex created_date 2025/12/07 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper offers a diagnostic critique of the universalist ambitions embedded in the major normative ethical frameworks of the Western philosophical tradition: virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and contractualism. Drawing on conceptual genealogy, linguistic philosophy, and cross-cultural moral psychology, it argues that these frameworks presuppose a degree of semantic stability that moral vocabulary does not possess. Their claims to universality rest upon historically contingent, culturally parochial, and linguistically unstable concepts that cannot sustain the theoretical weight placed upon them. The paper develops this critique through an application of the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), which demonstrates that moral terms lack stable, context-independent meanings across times, languages, and forms of life. This instability undermines attempts to articulate universal moral principles, for such principles rely upon the very semantic fixity that moral discourse structurally resists. The consequence is not relativism but a reframing: normative ethics functions as a family of context-bound heuristics, effective within particular conceptual ecologies but incapable of legislating for all moral agents in all contexts. The argument is deliberately non-constructive. Rather than proposing a revised universalist theory, it clarifies why universalism in normative ethics cannot succeed on its own terms and why its persistence reflects a misunderstanding of the conceptual materials upon which moral philosophy depends.