The Fragility of Universal Moral Vocabulary

This academic essay by Bry Willis presents a fundamental critique of normative ethics, arguing that its aspiration to establish universally valid moral principles is impossible due to linguistic and conceptual limitations. The author contends that the major Western moral frameworks, including virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and contractualism, all rely on the faulty assumption that core moral vocabulary holds stable, context-independent semantic content. This flaw is systematically explained through the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), which demonstrates that moral concepts are subject to historical contingency, anthropological divergence, and linguistic instability across different communities. The paper provides a diagnostic analysis of how each framework fails to secure universality because it must implicitly legislate the conceptual stability it requires. Willis concludes that normative ethics should therefore be reframed, functioning not as a source of timeless moral laws, but as a set of effective context-bound heuristics grounded in the stability of local practices.👉 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17837774