I apologize if this makes me cranky and/or length.

But to answer this question, I am seeing you do a false dichotomy, that is so strange and alien to me. So feel free to continue using it if you are comfortable with it for yourself, but that is not how I would describe myself.

I was an economist by training and thus a specific guy and his best friend greatly influenced my cognition over 16 years ago. But once you start to think like him it does not stop there and one adds more layers and it deepens.

And that guy is David Hume (which I talked about recently in the thread Mookie was drunk and wanted some fellow feeling) and his best friend Adam Smith (the author of the moral sentiments and the wealth of nation.

Before I explain further read this and there is like another 12 good posts in his blog about ethics but you just need to read this one post.

https://kevinbinz.com/2017/04/13/ethical-theory-intro/

See that pie grarph at the end of the article, it lists 5 ethical meta-theories we see recreated across human cultures in different times. Each of those five has some form of lack / slip where they have tremendous insights but they also have their weaknesses and in my opinion that is where the other 4 theories slide in.

Lets start with the Natural Law one and David Hume.

Natural Law before we get to the British Example and St. Thomas of Aquinas defines good where human individuals and human societies have some form of basic hierarchy of needs in order to thrive. People need food, shelter, healthcare if injured, and so on. They need this to thrive.

Likewise we live in a society this natural law theory goes and thus there must be a way to deal with multiple generations of care.

Very basic stuff. The problem with Natural Law theory is that it is way too basic, it is important some of the time when in times of crisis but there are other times Natural Law theory starts smuggling in one of the 4 other forms of ethical theories. Like rules concerning reproduction, well if a society reproduces itself why does it matter if someone masturbates? Or birth control? Or abortion? Well that is where the Divine Command theory kicks in, or some form of Cultural Aesthetic appeal to Authority, and so on.

Or one can make a Virtue Theory, Utilitarian, or Obligation Theory (Deontology) appeal. I separate these last 3 for we been seeing these 3 being the main form of arguments in the last 400 years in the secular age with people living together from multiple culture traditions. Some intro to ethics in philosophy focus only on these 3 things, but really if you look at history and sociology it is 5 things.

Well David Hume has this "is-ought gap" which if one is being a reductionist on twitter there is a gap between what I think is (aka facts) and what ought to be (values), and that gap is often filled in with opinions. Well that is your opinion man! Furthermore David Hume is one of the people to point out motivated reasoning for the first time in traditional English Language.

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Now I have not really told what I believe, nor I haven't told you what David Hume believes and why he believes it, for that was several paragraphs but I am telling you my framework. I really like the basic natural law stuff, I am a live and let live guy who distrusts authority which can't explain why it believes what it believes.

So before I actually answer this, let me do a point of comparison. David Hume's most famous work is 1740 (a treatise of human nature) and his prominence was the 1740 to 1776s in the Scottish Enlightenment that greatly influenced any English readers. (It is called the Scottish Enlightenment for in the 1700s they had 5 universities and good parish schools that fed the universities, plus rich people sending their sons there and at the time it was one of the best centers of knowledge in the world. Unlike England, unlike future German States both of those places will play catch up in the late 1700s and the 1800s.) Likewise Adam Smith's Hume's best friend wrote his book on the Moral Sentiments in 1759 and Wealth of Nations (Moral Sentiments 2.0) in 1776, and some later books after Hume's death up to the 1790. All of these Scottish Enlightenment people influenced American Revolution but also are responding to some of the theories that emerge from the English Civil Wars (1642 to 1651), the Oliver Cromwell period, the time after that, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Blah blah blah other things about philosophy involving empiricism (the senses) and does beauty or taste mater more concerning judgement and prudence. Very very important for the late 1600s and the 1700s this circular arguments concerning "aesthetics" (which is not Ethics but is hyper-related for lots of aesthetics and ethics is studied not by empiricism but instead by axiology, many of these terms coined by David Hume.)

The style of study you are describing where it is all cultural is a German Tradition from the late 1800s to the 20th century. Stuff tied to even more books (for the printing press is exponential, first 100 years there was less than 1000 "new books" being printed in those 100 years) and when you start doing comparative text methods such as Genealogical Study (popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche but he is not the only one), that and the rise of sociology.

I do like and listen to this style of writting about Culture and so on. And culture is still important to ethics but to me I am most concerned about first principles and those hierarchy of needs stuff tied to ethics. You see the natural law stuff used as justification of rebellions when there is no bread (X country's ruler's lost the mandate of heaven) and there is a rebellion. Likewise you see it used to do as a justification of the American Revolution for the American Revolution had many causes (not one) and the settler colonialists were big mad that the Proclamation of 1763 happened where the UK gained all of this French territory between the Mississippi river and the mountains, but the UK King George the 3rd said white people are not allowed to settle there, for this is going to be for the Indians and I the king am going to separate these two people and hopefully there will be no more wars. Well something something Natural Law theory we want that land for we must provide food for our people with that rich bounty. (are you seeing the limits, the slip, the lack in the theory I like, are you seeing why David Hume points out lots of Is and Oughts are united merely by opinions and not self evident truths?)

But if everyone gets fed can't you see people start turning to other forms of ethical theories to justify themselves? And things like "culture" start rising as things we think are first principles?

And this is the problem of those 3 main branch of ethics of

Utility (utilitarians which David Hume and Smith help inspire but I would not call them utilitarians) lots of Econ people are Utiliarians for the whole idea of economy as Smith proposes it and is then OVER REDUCED to is we trade goods for our utility and other things. (this is way over simplifying Wealth of Nations which is a 700 page book, and Smith has critiques of the over simplified critique in that book I described.) Since we can't know the future due to the complexity of future utility may be made and created but we can't perfectly justify present actions with future results for we can't measure future results perfectly. There may be a hurricane season but we do not know which cities on the coast are going to get smashed by the hurricanes.

Obligations (Deontology) people like Kant (which I mentioned in that mookie thread a while ago.) What do we owe one another is debated to death, but often the obligation theory of ethics is either too little obligations or too many obligations and these obligations come into conflict, and it is a form of rigid moral inflexibility.

Virtue Theory (Theory of Excellence, of Arete to use the Greek word, or Vir to use Latin which is where we get the word Virtue, Virility, and so on, Vir means mature adult human male.) Well the problem of Virtue Theory is it balances things to the needs of the moment and against excess. What is courageous depends on the situation of the moment, and thus Virtue Theory is everything and nothing. The idea of virtue theory is practice, practice, practice by putting people into challenging practice games and eventually they become good citizens via such practice. Except there are problems with this which I am not going to list for this thread is already too long.

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The thread is too long and I never got to talk about why David Hume is fricking awesome, and his "moral sense" theory and how it is tied to sympathy, empathy, fellow feeling, and how we experience judgement aka "to feel" , "to think", "to desire and long for"

Yes I am a tease / insufferable.