The strengths and weaknesses of Buddhist ethics using the Middle Way as a criterion.

How Middle Way ethics can be universal in application.

How the Middle Way involves avoiding both absolutism and relativism.

The distinction between facts and values has influenced our thinking since Hume made it in the eighteenth century. However, there is no justification for this distinction in practice. It is an abstract logical distinction inappropriately applied to practical judgements.

Moral naturalism dominates academic approaches to ethics today. However, in deludedly attempting to merely describe ethics or base it on facts, it fails to acknowledge the unavoidable prescription of conventional values that accompanies the mere analysis of ethics. Instead of trying to reduce ethics to facts, we need to recognise the interdependence of facts and values, and develop an ethics that strikes a balance between being realistic and being challenging.

There is a widespread avoidance of ethics, and substitution of other kinds of judgement (e.g. of law, psychology or professionalism) because of an unnecessary assumption that ethical positions are merely private choices and cannot be justified..

Why is modern science better than the scientific beliefs of the past?

Why there is no distinction between the objectivity of science and that of ethics.

What may seem like confidence when someone is over-assertive may actually be based on the doubt that arises from conflict.

Truth is unattainable and we should not relativise its meaning to make it so. However, truth is still a meaningful concept for us and can be a regulatory idea or an archetype.