PROPOSITIONAL ETHICS

Propositional Ethics: Authority, Judgment, and the Conditions of Moral Obligation

Every age speaks confidently about right and wrong. Moral language saturates public life-justice, harm, rights, dignity, responsibility-yet one question is persistently avoided:

By what authority do moral claims bind at all?

Propositional Ethics does not offer another ethical theory competing for attention alongside utilitarianism, deontology, or virtue ethics. It asks a more fundamental question-one that those theories quietly presuppose but rarely examine. Before ethics can judge actions, persons, or societies, ethics itself must be judged.

This book argues that moral judgment is not optional, expressive, or merely social. It is irreducibly normative, binding, and inescapable. But binding judgment requires more than sentiment, consensus, reason, or outcomes. It requires authority-authority with the right to judge, not merely the power to enforce.

Through a rigorous, proposition-driven analysis, Propositional Ethics shows:

• Why moral judgment cannot be reduced to preference, culture, or strategy
• Why normativity entails obligation-and obligation entails authority
• Why authority must be jurisdictional to be legitimate
• Why no immanent source (reason, outcomes, consensus, or tradition) can bear ultimate moral authority
• Why moral claims function as truth-claims requiring propositional clarity
• Why accountability forces the question of ultimacy
• Why ethics collapses into power when authority is denied or concealed
• Why judgment cannot be suspended without contradiction