Terminology and Axioms

Terminology:

• The words ‘ethic’ and ‘moral’, and their related forms, will be used interchangeably throughout my series. I do not make a distinction between the two.
• Agent: The being or one of the beings who take some intentional action which is of ethical consideration. My post Wikipedia's Definition
• Object: The being or one of the beings who could potentially be affected by an ethical consideration. I will show that this requires the ability to experience. My post
• Free will: Can experience the environment, reason to form understanding, possess volition towards some end, and has some power by to pursue that volition. Note: The implementation does not need to be successful in all cases for the being to be possessed of free will, so long as the power is sufficient to take the action under consideration in the ethical concern. My post Wikipedia's Definition
• Sentience: Possessed of reason and the ability to experience the environment. My post Dictionary Definition Wikipedia's Definition
• The Generic Condition: The Generic Condition is fulfilled when:
1. All people are equal in power, ability, sentience, etc., though they may be different in ways which do not make them unequal. Ie: individuals may think and reason differently, come to different conclusions, and choose different actions.
2. No one involved values anything more than their own survival and there is nothing about the situation which requires one person or another to die.
3. All involved parties are self-interested individuals.

Axioms, Assumptions, those things I take for granted:

1. All ethical concerns have at least two parties, an agent, who is considering a given action or inaction, and an object, who could potentially be affected by the ethical concern. Note: A being can be both agent and object in any consideration.
2. Sentient beings can only be affected insomuch as they experience an affect. My Post.
3. Metaphysics: Objective reality My post Definition
4. Epistemology: Science and reason. My My post Wikipedia article
5. Meta-Ethics: Universal Prescriptivism;
1. Moral statements cannot be objectively true or false; they rely on a value judgment. See Hume’s Guillotine, and the Naturalistic Fallacy. In other words, good is a concept, not a property like mass. Therefore the statement “X is good” is not a description of nature, but a value judgment being applied to an object.
2. Moral laws are universalizable; they apply equally to all similarly situated people.

                                                              i.      The ethical law of identity: If a law must apply to person A in situation 1, and there exists a person B which is identical to person A, and a situation 2 which is identical to situation 1, then the law must apply to person B in situation 2. Therefore the applicability of ethical statements to individual cases is variable only in the amount that the person or the situation varies from that of the stated rule.

                                                            ii.      See Immanuel Kant and R.M. Hare. 

This will be discussed further.