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They were in my view, about half right. Enlightenment thinking does have flaws, especially in moral reasoning. It’s almost impossible to find any evil that one cannot find some justification for if given just the right set of circumstances. I can justify the murder of millions if my reason is “good enough”. The relativism and utilitarian principles given by the enlightenment put everything, up to and including genocide, on the table. Marxism doesn’t work any better as it is a product of the enlightenment. It’s not really an alternative source of moral inspiration, it’s just a different flavor. What is needed in my view is an outside, definitive and authoritative source of the ideal of Good, and a framework that imagines that the most important thing is to live by the ideals of The Good and thus you cannot change the ideals just because you have a good excuse.
Can't you always do that anyway? Aside from hypothetical "no-killing-ever-ever" systems, the ones that really exist and are widely adopted always have killing exceptions, and they all revert to some kind of consequentialist decision process in sufficiently unusual circumstances (what is most virtuous? what violates the rules the least?).
I don't know, seems to me that all the talk about ethics is just wankery, that in the end it has to all be broadly isomorph.
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