> > I'm curious. How do you reason the ins and outs? Do you use a traditional method, like the natural law or Socrates' systemless philosophy, or a hodgepodge, or something else?
>
> I very deftly avoid it all by copping out and saying I'm still unsure as to the precise nature of said code of ethics. Yeah, I know it's not philosophically sound but I never claimed I was.

Actually that's not a cop-out at all, and in fact I think that's probably the most sound way to hold a view of absolute morals. Once you tell people you believe in an absolute standard of ethics, the next question is, what standard is absolute?

If you are a Christian, you may legitimately say, "I believe the absolute code of ethics is as it is written in the Bible," but no one *completely* understands everything there is to learn from the Bible, and therefore some fine points of that absolute standard will not always be clear to everyone. The same holds for anyone who follows some other documented standard of ethics. Moral quandaries will always abound -- some situation in which it is not clear what is right and what is wrong. But that doesn't mean there *isn't* a right and wrong.

As an agnostic who believes in an absolute standard of ethics, you are even more grounded in claiming that you do not entirely know what that absolute standard of ethics is, nor that you need to know what it is to know that it exists at all.

I get this criticism a lot from moral relativists, or at least when I was in college and regularly conversed with people who, at ripe old ages of 18 and 19, had just discovered everything there is to know about how society, ethics, and the universe work. "Who are you to say you know what is absolutely moral and absolutely immoral?" Ah, but by saying there ARE moral absolutes, I don't mean to claim I know what they all are. Does that lack of knowledge weaken the argument? Nah. It just means I don't claim to be God.