Moral Values as Objectively Valid for All People - Essay Example

It is my position that some moral values are objectively valid. This is because certain individual rights deserve protection in all situations and because certain ethnic groups deserve protection against extermination in all situations. Some have argued, based on different cultural values, that a husband ought to be able to rape his wife. A legal arrangement, however, is no moral basis for overcoming the moral right that a woman has to protect her own body from unwanted actions. This situation can be contrasted with certain types of justifiable homicide; to be sure, there are situations where the killing of another human being may be justified in terms of self-defense.

There is no such competing moral value, such as the self-preservation of one’s life, in the case of rape. It is wrong in all instances. It is objectively wrong because the right to control the sexual use of one’s body is a predominant moral right, and any moral standard prohibiting the rape of a woman is objectively valid in all situations.Moreover, there are certain ethnic rights which deserve protection in all situations. An ethnic group, for example, has a moral right not to be targeted for genocide.

This is to be distinguished from conflicts or wars in which armed combat results in death. It is to be distinguished because any group or alliance which promotes a policy of killing a group of people based simply on their ethnicity is violating the right of a people to exist. The moral right to exist, regardless of ethnicity, transcends any possible justification that one might offer for exterminating a group of people. The killing of Jews could not be defended by the Germans just as the killing of the Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda could not be justified.

It is difficult to imagine how a moral relativist would argue the genocide case. It is a case that cannot, in my view, be argued successfully. In short, a moral standard which prohibits genocide is objectively valid for all people.In conclusion, the implications of this paper are twofold. First, because some moral values can be characterized as objectively valid for all people, it is reasonable to assume that pure moral relativists ignore the priority that must be placed on certain moral rights.

The right to protect one’s body from sexual attacks and the right to exist as a unique ethnic group illustrate weaknesses in the moral relativist position. Second, because there are no moral justifications for certain actions, the moral relativist position is too broad and lacks a nuanced view of different situations. This is not to argue that many situations do not present ambiguous moral considerations, they do, but that there are particular moral values which are objectively valid for all people.