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For me truth are just things I know (or think I know, more correctly I suppose) to be true. So if someone asks me Is there a God, if I say No, I am telling the truth, and if I say yes I am lying. It's certainly possible I am wrong, and God does exist, but my statement isn't a lie, just incorrect in that case.
I don't myself hold to a specific ethical structure, because I think they all have some useful things to say and some wrong things to say. All of them are groping at part of the unseen elephant as it were. My joke is I am not a consequentialist, I just played one in politics. As in, if you are deciding whether to allocate funding for a new hospital, a new school or an adult social care facility, you kind of have to try and quantify which brings the most "good" to your nation and citizens given you are spending their tax money. So you'll try to quantify emergency department waiting times vs crowded classrooms vs how many care home places you currently have in the region. And because you may be subject to judicial review, you will have to justify your decision beyond I felt that a hospital does the most good. But outside of that I find utilitarianism particularly goes some places I think are incorrect. Virtue ethics is a little wishy washy and deontology can also break down at scale.
Try to be a good person, consider the outcomes, treat people as you would like to be treated, think hard about difficult problems, allow people to make their own choices, are all useful, but I think they all have to be taken as a kind of gestalt where each is shining a light on one particular part of moral thought. I think two genuinely good people can come to very different decisions on the same moral conundrum, even ones they each find in the other to be monstrous and still be good people.
I'm a skeptic so I can't use the word in this way. Otherwise examined thoroughly enough it'd be an empty set. It's a fine coherent definition, we're just not talking about the same thing.
I can't disagree. But I think our disagreement rests not on this, but on the standard of what this demands of people. How serious and rigorous we must be if we are to embark on the journey of actually trying to hold ideals. I am harsh because I do not trust humanity to do right by itself without an incredible amount of discipline. You only get the overman by MK-ultraing people with criticism and debate.
That's my continental brain really. I do think your more gentle approach is a better embodiment of the English tradition in this case.
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