Real and Practical Uses of Normative Ethics
When you provide a moral criticism of someone, you are saying that such a person is morally wrong. If you bracket, for a moment, my writings and talks on the subject, then you see that no moral criticisms are possible without using a normative language.
About realizing moral ideals: do you know any way of showing how some or another event in the world is not an ‘imperfect’ realization of the relevant moral ideal? In fact, a reasonably capable intellectual acrobat could show that Nazism or Idi Amin’s Uganda were merely ‘imperfect’ moral realizations of United Nations Declaration of Human Rights or that they did ‘realize’ the moral ideals albeit in an ‘imperfect’ manner. The problem is this: we cannot put limiting conditions on the degrees of imperfection unless one compares. Even that is quite problematic: is the US, with the NSA surveillance of its citizens, less or more ‘imperfect’ than France, which very recently demanded the introduction of fingerprinting (and other biometric identifications ) for EU citizens traveling within the EU countries? With the vast array of CCTV’s monitoring its streets, is UK, previously the home of Locke and Mill, any less or any more the ‘land of freedom’ it was and is alleged to be? Is it an ‘imperfect’ realization or a severe deformation of the relevant moral ideals? The only real and practical use of the normative ethical theories appear to be: justify any immoral behavior as an ‘imperfect’ realization of a noble moral ideal.