A couple of days ago a discussion took place on Twitter about whether one can differentiate amongst absolute moral wrongs, such that one might judge some of them worse than others. One view was that one can't: if two wrongs are both absolute there's no possibility of a quantitative gradation (better and worse) between them. The other, which I support, is that one can differentiate. Torture is absolutely wrong but one case of torture can obviously be worse than another. Genocide is worse than a single murder, though both are absolutely wrong.
Now, this looks like being a simple definitional difference, a difference over the meanings of 'absolute' here. If an absolute wrong is one that is as wrong as can be, then it would make no sense to see one absolute wrong as worse than another. However, if 'absolute wrong' is construed - as I contend it should be - as meaning wrong in all circumstances, or wrong unconditionally, then a gradation is possible between several absolute wrongs: these are wrong wherever and whenever they are committed but a ranking of evils can be made between them. The first meaning is, maybe, like absolute zero. (I say 'maybe' because I'm not sure about my grasp of that concept.) It's a point beneath which one cannot descend morally. The second meaning allows, as I think it has to unfortunately, that there are acts bad enough that we want to regard them as wrong in every circumstance, and yet not the worst that we can think of.
Just by the way, this disagreement shows that differences over meaning can be important, even though they're about words. Some meanings give a clearer view of the world - in the present case, the moral world - than others do.
