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I'm writing a story about a zombie apocalypse. There's a word that keeps slipping my mind, but I can't seem to describe the meaning well enough to find the word online, so I'm gonna post the passage it pertains to here.

Princess sneers down at keith. "Oh come now, you don't find anything you see here impressive?" "I admit," he responds, his expressionless gaze never wavering. "what you've done here is incredible. But not impressive. I'm not all that impressed by evil." Princess doesn't respond right away, looking Keith over thoughtfully. Finally, she laughs, causing Meredith to jump. "Evil? Oh, girls, we have ourselves a (((.....???????.......word????)), isn't that cute?"

Princess in this context isn't amused that Keith doesn't like evil. She's amused that he believes good and evil are actual things that exist, and not man made concepts. The word I'm looking for would describe someone like Keith.

Any fellow writers out there wanna give me a hand? I would greatly appreciate it.

Perhaps I'm grasping at straws, looking for a word that does not exist...but i feel it should be there.

Perhaps it would help if i knew the word for someone who believes good and evil are subjective, or don't actually exist.

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    Welcome to EL&U. We do not usually give out writing advice, but do help with finding appropriate words (after it has first been researched). Right now, you need to make what you are looking for more clear. For example, there are a lot of people who believe that good and evil exist, but that does not make them naive, or a moral objectivist.
    – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 21:33
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    the real word is deontologist, but nobody will get that...
    – dandavis
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 21:54
  • Is there a reason why believer doesn't work for you?
    – 1006a
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 23:31
  • There's a writer's forum here.
    – Lambie
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 23:58

4 Answers 4

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Philosophical questions on whether morality is absolute, relative, or illusory are so broad it would be hard to say.

Really he is a Realist (or moral realist, in the philosophical sense) if he believes two things.

1) things outside of our minds (good, evil) exist.

2) these things are independent of our minds.

That is things like good or evil exist no matter what any given person, law, etc might say - and would exist even if people didn't.

That said he could be a Christian, or a Buddhist or the follower of any other faith or philosophy that has a non-relativistic (i.e. absolute) doctrine of ethics, normative values, prohibitions, etc.

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Moral Objectivist

from...

Moral Objectivism:

"The view that what is right or wrong doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks is right or wrong. That is, the view that the 'moral facts' are like 'physical' facts in that what the facts are does not depend on what anyone thinks they are. Objectivist theories tend to come in two sorts..."

"This includes the obscure refernce fro @davidos to "deonologist..."

(i) Duty Based Theories (or Deontological Theories): Theories that claim that what determines whether an act is morally right or wrong is the kind of act it is.

E.g., Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) thought that all acts should be judged according to a rule he called the Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim [i.e., rule] whereby you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." That is, he thought the only kind of act one should ever commit is one that could be willed to be a universal law.

Pending revision

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From Vocabulary.com:

moralist

A moralist is someone who has very strong opinions about what is right and what is wrong.

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  • moralism can be based on intrinsic value, which is apt above, but also on hedonism, perfectionism, etc, which is counter to above...
    – dandavis
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 21:55
  • @dandavis Hot food can be at 75 degrees, but I can still call a curry hot even if it's almost down to room temperature. Polysemy is a fact of life.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 22:26
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I'm afraid I'm forced to resort to French, and suggest "naïf", or "ingénu", but neither of these are in the right register for "girls, we have ourselves...". The English equivalent would I suppose be "an innocent".

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