*definitely* not someone you want to trust. View quoted note →

Morality exists in the same way "rights" exist. as an arbitrary social construct that has widespread agreement.

Neither is someone making up their own

Rationalizations are learned through socialization but the seeds of morality are embedded in the brains of humans sense of fairness, self preservation, and disgust, etc. The variance here is the variance in the brains themselves, you don’t get 100% alignment with anything biological, but you get a higher alignment than you would if things were arbitrary. Some brains are wired wrong for some reason science and medicine hasn’t figured out and hasn’t cured, and thus are aliens among us from a morality perspective. Others have the same modules but they differ in strength to our own, so we arrive at different judgements. And the societal based rationalization is layered on both. A collection of wetware modules, created or evolved for life among a small intimate group of fellow humans is now split open and applied across a number and situations it wasn’t built for so that inconsistencies in the modules show up. Most of philosophy to date has been exploring these inconsistencies like the “trolley problem” or in one philosophers description of “the good” vs another. But it’s real within and among humans. Roughly when you can see yourself making a same decision as another your moral judgement is positive and if you fail to see yourself making the same decision your moral judgement is negative. If the wetware is too far apart you can’t put yourself in their shoes and you judge it negatively, if the gap is small enough you can rationalize it and you judge it morally positive. Rationalization is motivated reasoning so humans give more grace to their tribes than competing tribes because you depend on your tribe for survival. Anyways thanks for giving me the space to share my theories.

I don't know if I buy buy the explanation that " it exists in the wetware somewhere" But it could be. There are certainly consistent themes among human beings across time and place.