by Joshua Jones

Created on: October 26, 2009   Last Updated: April 23, 2010

By what can man be judged? Or can man be judged? In order to answer to these questions, a few founding principles must be established. By Judged I do not necessarily mean the stereotypical religious judgment of fire and brimstone. By judgment I mean the value system and the discernment of the properties of actions and things.

We exist as active persons. This is one of the fundamental truths which all people must accept for morality to exist, much less a moral truth. Active persons, otherwise known as moral agents, have the ability to choose and act in accordance to their own will and judgment. Without will, no action is moral or immoral, because one cannot be wrong for committing an action which one had no ability to resist. As C. S. Lewis, the most famous apologist, said, without free will we are all automatons programmed by fate, god, or circumstance. This is not to say that we are not predisposed to actions or are completely sovereign agents. We choose amongst choices presented to us, therefore our will is limited, but essential to a moral judgment.

The principle of free will being established, we must define morality. This definition must set out not to prescribe those actions, but to explain what morality is. Morality is the set (not necessarily written or codified) of principles that man ought to follow. Men of every generation and nation have the notion that man ought to act in a certain way; the only differences are the manner in which he ought to act and the reasons why he ought to act that way. An Aristotelian believes he ought to find the "golden mean" to achieve "eudemonia"; the subjectivist believes he must follow his own belief because he cannot know any objective value; and a Theist believes he must follow the mandates of his God. These differences are less differences as re-phrasings of the same objective. All men, save perhaps those with certain mental disorders, seek a moral life, but the achieving of that life is sought in different ways. This, however, does not imply that these separate ways are all leading to the same outcome, but that morality is expressed in slightly different ways within different cultures.

Having defined morality and realized that all men seek it, we search for the meaning of moral "truth." This concept is vague and in need of re-defining. Moral truth is the, supposed, objective set of moral guidelines to which all peoples are held, or the guidelines which all men should follow in order to live a moral life. Does

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