>That is at least what moral practice is like when viewed “from the inside.” By that I mean your moral phenomenology as an engaged participant. This perspective presents the appearance of at least a core of basic objective and universally valid or correct moral standards we are trying to understand and to live by (even as we recognize that we will at best do so imperfectly). This is why we’re prepared to argue, often passionately, in defense of basic moral claims about social justice, for example, in a way we don’t with mere matters of taste; and it’s why we feel compelled to modify our views when someone convinces us that we have a blind spot or other error in our moral outlook.
This is a very misguided view on morality. The author doesn't know what morality is, why it exists and what actually compels us to behave the way we do. Many people who are very intelligent fail to comprehend this.
Morality is biological in origin. You think and behave, debate and contemplate morality because you are evolutionarily predisposed to do so. Morality does not exist outside of this framework.
Morality is simply a set of rules that allow us to form stable societies and biology evolved you to behave within this rule set because if you didn't your society or you would be naturally selected out. That's it.
The problem is, most people don't realize this. When people think about fairness and morality they think they are deploying their logical and conscious mind to decide the meaning of right and wrong. Nothing is further from the truth, and this is 100 percent an illusion. When you are thinking about morality you are deploying the instinctual side of your brain, the same part that triggers hunger, sexual arousal or fear.
It sounds so absurd to say this but believe it or not it can actually be logically proven that this is what the human brain is doing. I can prove to you that your entire logical framework of morality is built off a biological predetermined moral instinct that is absurdly identical to everyone else's concept of morality.
The way this is done is that the moral module in your mind is imperfect. By identifying this imperfection I can illustrate to you that like how evolutionary programming doesn't always converge at the global optimum the same has happened in the moral module of your brain. Of all our brains.
Consider a baby drowning in a pool next to you. You are wearing fashionable clothes that costs thousands of dollars. By jumping in the pool to save the baby you permanently ruin your clothes. What would be the moral thing to do?
The moral thing to do is to save the baby. The life of the baby is more important the your clothes even if it's thousands of dollars. In fact our brains will be disgusted at the person who let's the baby drown just to save thousands of dollars. Essentially the moral precept here is saving a life is worth more than a couple thousand dollars so you should always do the former.
Here is where the flaw comes in. Leave the situation the same but change some of the superficial aesthetics. The baby is no longer drowning but is now a child in Africa who is starving. This child can be saved with a donation of thousands of dollars. Is it reprehensible that you don't save the baby? Most of us reading are aware that poverty exists in Africa and that donations can save them yet most of us haven't donated a dime.
Keep in mind the premise is identical. Save a baby in exchange for sacrificing thousands of dollars. What has changed? Why does the psychopath who refused to save the drowning baby is evil and why is the person who refused to donate money less evil when the basic moral premise is exactly the same?
The answer is easy to identify. Something has changed and that change influences the moral module of our brain in an illogical way that is unresolvable.
The change is superficial... basically the location and sensory stimulus is removed. By making the baby far away in Africa and removing visual stimulus, it is no longer triggering the moral instinct in your brain. Why does this fail to trigger it? Because there is no evolutionary advantage to societies who have morals that are concerned for entities that are far away and unrelated. Your morality is associated with visual stimulus and proximity but your brain does not incorporate these axioms into your reasoning because there was never any evolutionary pressure for your brain to evolve this way. That is the inconsistent flaw. Our moral modules are not designed to correctly apply moral reasoning to subjects outside of a certain physical proximity, so our brain triggers behavior that contradicts our own reasoning.
Thus our instincts do not trigger when a baby in Africa is dying of starvation, only when a baby next to you is dying from drowning. Of course there is a gradient. Starving babies in Africa triggers far less concern then drowning babies next to you even when the cost of saving those babies is completely identical.
If I presented to you these two scenarios separately and asked you to analyze the moral logic behind each, most people would derive separate and valid logic that would condemn the person who let the baby drown and vindicate the person who let the baby in Africa die.
By presenting both scenarios to you at the same time, however, the contradiction becomes apparent and your brain is now most likely trying to contemplate the moral logic and rules that will resolve the contradiction.
My point is to tell you that the resolution and everything your brain is doing to make sense of this moral contradiction is pointless. You are giving in to instinctual behavior. The moral contradiction exists regardless of what you do because morality is an imperfect biological phenomena. There isn't a universal explanation here. These are arbitrary rules applied to arbitrary events and you attempt to resolve it is just you giving in to your biological predisposition. Same as you giving in to eating when you are hungry.
There is no point in making sense of why rocks scattered on the ground is the way that it is any more then it makes sense to resolve this moral contradiction. Like the rocks, morality is simply an arbitrary set of rules... A biological phenemona unique to humanity and not a universal phenomena intrinsic to the universe.
Once you realize this, you will see that all this language, philosophy and structure built around morality is sort of pointless. It exists to help us survive there is no deeper meaning here and any search for something deeper will likely result in you making something up without realizing it (see religion).