It seems as if, in ethics and moral philosophy, there's no such thing as institutional learning. The large literature on this issue raised here goes back (for starters) to Max Weber's distinction between an ethics of principle (Prinzipienethik) and an ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik). Weber himself regarded it as insoluble, and this in itself - this sense of it being an 'objective contradiction' - pushed many philosophers post-1945 into a reconsideration of Kant and Hegel. The 'dialectic' of objectivity and subjectivity was one of the results - leading to today's highly controversial notions on 'identity' as being objective and subjective both at once. (There are other off-shoots.) There's also the huge literature stimulated by Piaget and Kohlberg (not to forget Freud), looking at the way in which children learn to make moral or ethical judgements in the first place. (Or don't learn to make them, as the case may be.) Then there's G.H. Mead and the literature on the historical/evolutionary 'development' (if that's the right term) of ethical and moral systems. (That then ends up in a study of the so-called 'Axial age', in which the 'Adamitic' religions first manifested themselves - if it doesn't end up, this discussion itself, in the entirely unsuitable hands of the Darwinists.) There's something about this RG format that seems to make it impossible - once one has got out of the area of the purely technical or methodological - to ask questions other than at the 'kiddie'-level, as if one is posing this to a class of 10-year-olds. (This is not meant personally - there's something about this medium that forces one into this mode.)

Yes