amateur metaethics part 1: on ethical systems

okay, due to some discussions with G i kinda wanna develop my thoughts on ethics. so this is kinda what i've come up with so far:

any ethical system can be reduced to a set of axioms of what isn't permissible. a hypothetical, single-cause environmentalist ethics would include pretty much one axiom: {hurting the earth or any natural things therein is impermissible}. anything that adheres to that axiom is okay, although up for debate, under that ethical system, and anything that violates that law is condemned as "wrong".

of course, it's very rare for anyone to follow such a simple ethical system, and probably nobody does. irl, people have multiple axioms they attempt to incorporate in ethical systems. so it also seems to me that some of these axioms are weighted. if, for example, you subscribe to a fundamentalist evangelical right-wing pro-lifer christian ethical system, you'll put more emphasis on axioms such as {abortions are impermissible} than on {not attempting to treat your neighbors as your kin is impermissible} (or some other variant of the golden rule). so in the case where some one who follow the system i just described is faced with a choice of (a) acting civilly towards a someone who decides to have an abortion and (b) attempting to deny their choice of aborting, they'll go for (b).

the reason for the different weights in the axioms of ethical systems may or may not be due to derivation. that is, there are a set of basic axioms and other, derrived axioms may be consequences or someway related to the basic axioms, yet the basic ones are more fundamental in such a way that violating those would cause more harm to the ethical edifice.

now, it's the job of the philosopher, ethicist, or metaethicist, to figure out if there's even a chance of any of these criteria for constructing ethical systems will yield a system that is the correct ethical system by any objective standard. further, if there IS a way to figure out if there's a "right" ethics, the philosopher should then use that method to figure out which ethics IS right after all, and then proceed to spell out the axioms involved.

a lot of people just see the variety of ethical systems and assume that, due to the sheer number of them, there must be something wrong with the concept, and ethics is really a word influenced by power, linguistic habit, gender, or whatever the flavor of the month is. although i'm all for throwing away concepts that are harmful to inquiry, i want to be a bit more rigorous as well.

we all know that people, people in power, have done horrible things and attempted to justify it in ethical terms. in a similar vein, we know that, historically, even arguably now in some cultures, women are treated as inferior and there exist ethical systems in which that's okay. but just because these systems of ethical justification exist doesn't mean that there isn't a system that actually gets the axioms right, or at least a way for us to figure which ones are right, or righter than others.

also, we all know that "ethics" is a word that is applied in individual instances by given people, and they may use it to refer to different things. but it, again, it doesn't follow from this that "ethics" is just a linguistic construction applied at given instances and nothing else, it might be that this word is being used to attempt to single out a particular conception with given properties (as anybody who adopts ANY ethical system would have to commit to).

okay, so in my next post i think i'll talk about some of my ideas on how to find the methodology of assessing ethical systems.