Great posts. Thank you for your contributions.
I love the distinction that those who have posted are drawing between two different ways in which context might be said to matter when we evaluate the morality of an act.
1. First, acts which share a name -stealing a cat, or hitting a child with a car, to use others' examples- should be evaluated very differently depending upon surrounding factors of both intent (illustrated in the child example) and outcome (illustrated in the cat example.) I totally agree! Sometimes, this is what people mean when they say that morality is context-dependent. (I think I might frame it a little differently, and say that these acts, in themselves, are inherently different across these conditions. But that is just a matter of framing, I think...)
2. At other times, when people say that morality is context-dependent, they mean something entirely different; they mean that an act (even when all the particulars of intents and outcomes have been well-specified) has no moral value in itself. Rather, things are right and wrong only insofar as people judge them to be so. It is this sense of context-dependent morality, and not the first, with which I disagree.
Best,
Emily
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