Anti-Climacus

WELL: So there was this moment in modern political theory today where everyone more or less jumped on the Hobbesean bandwagon and said that moral judgments are just reflective of passions, except for Joel and (I believe) Amber, who wanted to argue that good and bad are not just societal constructs. Here's how you can square that circle relatively easily:

Assume, as does the moral realist, that good and bad are ontological facts about actions that are just naturally occuring parts of their description. You can hold, then, as does the deontologist, that people can be mistaken in their judgments of what is good and bad--you can go even further, in fact, and agree with Hobbes that people almost always index their judgments of good and bad to their own desires or interests. Where Hobbes and rat choicers err is in assuming that the indexing people do implies that there are no actual moral statuses of actions.