This enhanced audio, the first of a series about ethics recorded on last summer’s retreat, argues that although we are probably more ethical than we used to be on the whole, we are also confused about how to justify ethical beliefs. In the absence of metaphysics to justify ethics we haven’t found an experiential way of justifying it instead, but rather tend to substitute other ways of talking that cloak ethics using law, popular psychology, professionalism, political correctness etc. We might be much less confused if we started by facing up to ethics as such, and the need to justify it as ethics.

The later parts of the series will go on to explain how ethics can be justified in Middle Way terms without appealing to metaphysics.