This piece is based 99% on a dark fantasy of its author. The one supposed fact in support of his demonization of the somewhat flawed Donald Trump is that he "has been found guilty of sexual abuse in a civil trial" -- which is a distortion of the truth that he was found _liable_ by a preponderance of the evidence. The author's subsequent claim that this (presumably) makes Trump a rapist is contradicted by the fact that the civil jury declined to hold trump liable for rape. Also the case is not closed since the verdict has been appealed. On the so-called "guilty" verdict see: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/05/09/trump-liable-sexual-abuse/
The rest of the "facts" supporting the demonization of Trump are a litany of the indictments initiated by his political opponents, none of which have resulted in a conviction so far. As for the conclusions the author draws from these facts, suffice it to say that when the accused is the Prince of Darkness himself, no further proof of his evil is required. Once a political disrupter like Trump is fingered by the ruling class, his goose is cooked. As Beria bragged, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
How's the weather up there on the moral high ground?
He has literally called for the termination of the Constitution. His only play to get out of being convicted in multiple criminal trials (and probably going to jail) is to become President and nullify the legal system. The main theme of his campaign is revenge. He has argued in court that, if re-elected, the only legal mechanism barring him from assassinating all of his political enemies would be an impeachment and conviction by Congress. I take the man at his word. Interviews with his supporters frequently reveal that they believe in untrue and, frankly, insane things about the world and how it works.
Maybe all of this appeals to you. There seems to be a steady portion of every population who wants to live under a repressive, authoritarian government. But you should own that, rather use euphemisms like calling him a "disruptor" or making tendentious excuses for the obvious facts of his behavior. Embrace that he's a rapist and a fraud and a criminal and will direct violence at anyone who opposes him if given half a chance. Accept the darkness that will come if he wins in the general election. Prepare to be judged, morally, by those of us who want to live in a modern society and find value in small-l liberalism. Apparently, this is your kind of person, and if you support him, in a spiritual sense, his fate is your fate.
One thing you can never say. That you haven't been told.
Thank you for your reply. And thanks for supplementing your article's one negative fact about Trump with a second one.
Trump did indeed say that in case of a massive election fraud, rules in the Constitution may be terminated. He said so in a manner so sloppy that it's obvious both that he never studied constitutional law and that he is prone to say the first thing that pops into his head. (Biden is obviously prone to having nothing pop into his head.) Since Trump later denied wanting to terminate the Constitution, but without admitting that he blundered with his earlier remark, we have to add that to his list of character flaws. I can only wish that when Biden criticized Trump's "termination" post that he also strengthened his own resolve to abide by the constitutional requirement he "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."
I need to correct your assumption that I criticized your article because I support Trump. I guess once you've found one witch, you have to look for others. I criticized your article because it was long on assumptions, projections, and moral outrage and short on verifiable facts. I think it's safe to say that even without your two facts, a huge swath of the ruling class, sometimes labeled the administrative state or the deep state, would still be horrified of a Trump reelection. They don't like the idea that a president might actually insist on setting policy to carry out the laws of the nation for the entire executive branch as the Constitution directs. This did not and will not happen with Biden, who is run by his subordinates. Where Trump is their devil in this scenario, Biden is their guardian angel.
No, I don't want to live under a repressive, authoritarian government. Can you imagine having a protest at the Capitol and then having Trump's Justice Department scouring every photo, video, credit card record, cell phone record, flight manifest, and social media post looking for a way to charge every protester with insurrection? Also, he might use intelligence agencies to monitor U.S. citizens on false pretexts. Trump might even try find a way to have Big Tech suppress the political opposition! I will be looking at Independent RFK Jr., the No Labels, Green, and of course Libertarian candidates for president when they are nominated. Thanks for the warning from the moral high ground. I found it comforting.
Trump's many misdeeds and crimes have been extensively documented, and the purpose of my article was not to re-hash or "prove" this voluminous reporting. It would have been inappropriate for this venue, and unnecessary, frankly, in context. Rather my goal was to run through, conceptually, how these basic components of social life relate to one another in order to make sense of the Trump phenomenon and what it means for the choices facing us. There's a lot of material here that has nothing to do with Trump because I'm actually much more interested in how the industrialization has generated profoundly civilizational changes that we don't understand well, even while living in the middle of them. If the concepts that underlie your sense-making prevent you from reading about or believing or acknowledging the turpitude of Trump's character, I can't help you.
I'm glad to hear you're not a Trump supporter. If you don't like Biden, I may disagree with you, but this is the nature of democracy. However, Trump and his supporters don't believe in democracy, and this is the problem I'm trying to explain and draw attention to. Unfortunately, in our two party system, none of these other candidates stand a chance to win the general election, and so if you're in a swing state, they'll only play the role of spoiler. Voting for RFK Jr. or whomever may be better than voting for Trump, but (assuming Haley doesn't miraculously beat him in the primaries), it's a complete fantasy that you'll get your preferred outcome (i.e., neither candidate) with this choice. This is also the nature of democracy: one frequently has to compromise and do the thing that yields one's least-bad outcome. The fantasy won't relieve you of the moral obligations inherent to the choices you make when voting.
Very interesting read. Good writing style. I think your basing morality on values is weak. I recommend "Common Morality" by Bernard Gert. The moral rules are the only rules that are publicly known, apply to everyone and entail punishment if they are broken. Moral rules are obligatory. Ethics corresponds more to "moral ideals", ways of life that may lead to good and that we can choose how much or how little we need to follow. Hence they are not obligatory, and not following ethical ideals does not entail punishment. Moral rules we feel, whereas ethical ideals we understand intellectually. There are religious rules that masquerade as moral rules: such as requiring women to wear headscarves and prohibiting abortion, and observing the sabbath. But these rules are not necessarily known by non-adherents so they do not apply to everyone and are not therefore moral rules. Fascists like Trump and Putin encourage violence and the destruction of impartiality and the rule of law in political and social institutions because moral rules are an impediment to their goals of attaining absolute power. By encouraging their followers to break moral rules and use violence they are flattening the moral landscape for everyone else. Example: Krystallnact, widespread immorality against a lower status group that was witnessed and involved almost the entire population of Germany. After that episode of lawlessness and destruction it became that much easier for the Nazi State to steal Jewish property and send Jews to the Concentration Camps and the gas chambers.
In your view, what is the predicate for a moral rule? You appear to be saying that a moral rule has to be "known" (but "felt") and it has to be articulated by an authority as an obligation. But this would mean that moral rules arise arbitrarily and are enforced arbitrarily, despite the connection to feeling, and any explanation from a historical or natural process would be entirely ad hoc.
We have lots of evidence for widely varying moral frameworks historically, and so any theory that can't account for these variations is not a great theory. What *motivates* moral feeling? My framing explains these variations and their motivation: a moral injunction is the negative image of a value; value systems, in turn, depend on articulating a prime preference, which then imposes constraints, on a natural basis, on everything downstream. Values don't even have to be known: they can be psychologically unconscious, and this better explains the connection to feeling.
In this essay, then, I'm proposing that industrial forms of civilization create some natural value-preferences which carry non-arbitrary moral imperatives, and that authoritarians seek to undermine these values by forcing us to make moral choices we might otherwise defer. We don't have a viable alternative civilizational model which supports 8+ billion people on earth, so moral failure in this case means catastrophe.
I don't disagree with your conclusions at all. My point is that morality is based on concrete situations, moral prohibitions are to do with lessening real existing harms. I'm saying you can't build a moral system from abstractions like values or potential goods, it comes from a small set of publicly known concrete rules prohibiting specific harmful actions, such as don't injure, kill, or restrict another's freedom, don't deceive, as well as general admissions to keep your promises and obey the law. The authority for moral obligation comes from our growing up in a human society and accepting and internalizing these moral rules. Once human society grew past the level of foraging groups to cities and states then morality had to be scaled up by creating religions, and legal systems. But the basic system: of publicly known rules that apply to everyone and for which violation implies punishment, starts with our universal participation via social norms and social emotions.
What is a "harm"? There is a huge variety of how different societies conceptualize "good" and "bad" in different social behaviors. In Ethiopia, for example, there are some tribal areas where the courtship ritual is this: a gang of men abduct a woman from a neighboring tribe; the groom rapes her; and then his kinsmen keep the couple away from the men of the other tribe until everyone agrees that they're "married." As a tender 21st century American, this sounds pretty "harmful" to me, but I don't think that the people living in those societies would see it that way.
These conventions you're describing can't be explained as developing or as having some kind of natural basis if they're merely conventions. Which is all that a "publicly known rule" can be if you have no other means of describing it or connecting it to something else.
I'm arguing here that modernity highlights this difficulty, and puts it front and center in the political process. What rules are the right rules? Why is abduction and rape, for example, not an acceptable courtship ritual? We have all of human history to reference now in a way that was never the case in the past, and so how these answers are derived really really matters. Your framing of morality provides no way to work through this problem intellectually.
I've proposed an elegant solution. We decide, collectively, what we want to value as a priority, and this choice, then, creates constraints on other possible values because of the intrinsic tension among them. "Moral rules" are about accepting these constraints. For a specific historical moment, we can look at how such values have evolved, how they relate to environmental and other external conditions and how they are ordered in the "natural" sense that I described in the essay. The moral prerogatives of the same moment follow directly from this characterization.
You're making it too complicated. Everyone agrees that you shouldn't deceive or threaten people with violence. Why do Trump supporters not agree? Because they see Trump as threatening and deceiving their enemies. They see Democrats and liberals in general as outside the moral pale, and therefore game for dirty tactics. What do they base this moral difference on? They are guided by political operatives who have weaponized a "Christian" position on abortion that does not even feature in the Bible. The fact that even mainstream liberal Christians as well as Jews, Buddhists, etc. don't see abortion as a necessarily moral issue, shows that it is not a moral issue. It's definitely not the basis for distinguishing moral people from immoral people. It's more a hot button issue to motivate Conservative Christians to spread lies about their perceived enemies. The fact that Trump and his followers are willing to destroy democratic institutions and abandon the rule of law shows how Trump is flattening morality in order to get rid of all the constraints that would impede his path to power. People are immoral for a reason. They are trying to get their way by stepping on other people. We don't need a new justification for morality to see this. The moral system is there already, the problem for morality is scaling it up to include multi-cultural societies. It's easy for Fascists to create a fake morality based on "blood and soil" and then target a low-status group like refugees as outside the pale. It's important for us to realize that everyone is a moral citizen, that morality is egalitarian, in that it applies to everyone, and that in general all competent adults in society follow the moral rules. Those who don't follow the moral rules, or who do so at their own convenience are usually psychopaths, and need to be locked up for their crimes.
What you're saying makes sense from *your* moral point of view. But that's just *you* and your particular moral prerogatives aren't a technical theory of morality. Intellectualizing doesn't invalidate your moral feelings, but it doesn't demand some detachment from them.
Historically, threats or acts of political violence have been absolutely commonplace, and might only be "immoral" if a low-status person or an outsider were threatening or harming a high-status person. Slavery was commonplace before the end of the 18th century. Morality has traditionally *not* been egalitarian: different rules applied to different classes of people in different contexts. TRUMP VOTERS SEE THEMSELVES AS MORAL ACTORS. And in an another cultural frame, maybe they'd be right. Why should we conclude that they're wrong now? Why should our world be any different than it has been in epochs previous?
It's not enough to just notice that some people think X and others think Y, and then argue for whatever concurs with your feelings. An intellectual theory has to *explain* where these ideas come from and how the facts of many different societies can be accounted for. There is far more variety in human cultures historically and geographically than you are allowing.
Originally, before the neolithic period, when humans were foragers and lived in small groups morality was egalitarian. Once it was scaled up through the development of cities and states and their legal systems the potential was there again for equality through the impartial administration of legal procedures, we like to call "rule of law" but for much of modern history there has been moral anarchy between warring nations, with one group trying to dominate or eliminate the other. Class systems, which have only existed for twelve thousand years, are by definition,, not egalitarian, but common morality, as it was originally was egalitarian. Morality is a self organized form of behaviour regulation that protects human groups from predation from within the group by involving everyone in following and enforcing the moral rules. This form of behavior regulation corresponds to small scale common pool resource management, where the stakeholders of a group of fields, a water reservoir, or a small scale fishery agree to conserve the resource by following rules and enforcing rules that protect and maintain the resource. In the case of the moral system we grow up to internalize the moral rules and we are " involved" in enforcement in the sense that we still have the moral passions, and are still highly motivated to share relevant info about moral behaviour with others about others. But nowadays because of the huge scale and complexity of the societies we live in, we've, in effect, outsourced a lot of the most important jobs of morality to our legal systems. Legal systems are moral systems writ large. They use the same terms as moral systems: guilt, innocence, responsibility, obligation, rights, harm, and punishment because they originate from morality. But, unlike morality legal systems are not self-organizing, they require highly specialized roles and procedures for ascertaining guilt and responsibility and meting out punishments. The ability to maintain our societies by practising morality is what differentiates humans from animals. Morality makes the more complex forms of human cooperation possible by preventing and excluding rule-breakers who would overpower others within the group in order to take their resources. The management of a common pool resource prevents depletion of the resource by universalizing it's enforcement. Common morality does exactly the same thing to prevent the depletion of human cooperation. Most of the history of philosophy, especially Greek philosophy, is about ethics, not morality. That is until Hobbes and Kant. Morality is part of human nature. It isn't an option. The search for the good life is ethics not morality.
Just to add to what I said, it would help if morality was distinguished from ethics. Morality is one system that all human society has adopted. It's basic form is publicly known prohibitions that apply to everyone and that entail punishment if they are broken. The degree of punishment may vary, etc. etc., the content of the rules may gradually vary over generations, but they are basically unquestioned. Ethical codes of conduct, and ethical theories like Stoicism vary largely by time and place, they are formulations of ideal ways of life, and as such they form no obligation nor does violating their precepts lead to punishment. All moral systems have rules like: do not kill, do not steal, and do not deceive. They only vary in how they conceive of punishments, and whether they include religious rules as obligatory.
This piece is based 99% on a dark fantasy of its author. The one supposed fact in support of his demonization of the somewhat flawed Donald Trump is that he "has been found guilty of sexual abuse in a civil trial" -- which is a distortion of the truth that he was found _liable_ by a preponderance of the evidence. The author's subsequent claim that this (presumably) makes Trump a rapist is contradicted by the fact that the civil jury declined to hold trump liable for rape. Also the case is not closed since the verdict has been appealed. On the so-called "guilty" verdict see: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/05/09/trump-liable-sexual-abuse/
The rest of the "facts" supporting the demonization of Trump are a litany of the indictments initiated by his political opponents, none of which have resulted in a conviction so far. As for the conclusions the author draws from these facts, suffice it to say that when the accused is the Prince of Darkness himself, no further proof of his evil is required. Once a political disrupter like Trump is fingered by the ruling class, his goose is cooked. As Beria bragged, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
How's the weather up there on the moral high ground?
He has literally called for the termination of the Constitution. His only play to get out of being convicted in multiple criminal trials (and probably going to jail) is to become President and nullify the legal system. The main theme of his campaign is revenge. He has argued in court that, if re-elected, the only legal mechanism barring him from assassinating all of his political enemies would be an impeachment and conviction by Congress. I take the man at his word. Interviews with his supporters frequently reveal that they believe in untrue and, frankly, insane things about the world and how it works.
Maybe all of this appeals to you. There seems to be a steady portion of every population who wants to live under a repressive, authoritarian government. But you should own that, rather use euphemisms like calling him a "disruptor" or making tendentious excuses for the obvious facts of his behavior. Embrace that he's a rapist and a fraud and a criminal and will direct violence at anyone who opposes him if given half a chance. Accept the darkness that will come if he wins in the general election. Prepare to be judged, morally, by those of us who want to live in a modern society and find value in small-l liberalism. Apparently, this is your kind of person, and if you support him, in a spiritual sense, his fate is your fate.
One thing you can never say. That you haven't been told.
Thank you for your reply. And thanks for supplementing your article's one negative fact about Trump with a second one.
Trump did indeed say that in case of a massive election fraud, rules in the Constitution may be terminated. He said so in a manner so sloppy that it's obvious both that he never studied constitutional law and that he is prone to say the first thing that pops into his head. (Biden is obviously prone to having nothing pop into his head.) Since Trump later denied wanting to terminate the Constitution, but without admitting that he blundered with his earlier remark, we have to add that to his list of character flaws. I can only wish that when Biden criticized Trump's "termination" post that he also strengthened his own resolve to abide by the constitutional requirement he "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."
I need to correct your assumption that I criticized your article because I support Trump. I guess once you've found one witch, you have to look for others. I criticized your article because it was long on assumptions, projections, and moral outrage and short on verifiable facts. I think it's safe to say that even without your two facts, a huge swath of the ruling class, sometimes labeled the administrative state or the deep state, would still be horrified of a Trump reelection. They don't like the idea that a president might actually insist on setting policy to carry out the laws of the nation for the entire executive branch as the Constitution directs. This did not and will not happen with Biden, who is run by his subordinates. Where Trump is their devil in this scenario, Biden is their guardian angel.
No, I don't want to live under a repressive, authoritarian government. Can you imagine having a protest at the Capitol and then having Trump's Justice Department scouring every photo, video, credit card record, cell phone record, flight manifest, and social media post looking for a way to charge every protester with insurrection? Also, he might use intelligence agencies to monitor U.S. citizens on false pretexts. Trump might even try find a way to have Big Tech suppress the political opposition! I will be looking at Independent RFK Jr., the No Labels, Green, and of course Libertarian candidates for president when they are nominated. Thanks for the warning from the moral high ground. I found it comforting.
Trump's many misdeeds and crimes have been extensively documented, and the purpose of my article was not to re-hash or "prove" this voluminous reporting. It would have been inappropriate for this venue, and unnecessary, frankly, in context. Rather my goal was to run through, conceptually, how these basic components of social life relate to one another in order to make sense of the Trump phenomenon and what it means for the choices facing us. There's a lot of material here that has nothing to do with Trump because I'm actually much more interested in how the industrialization has generated profoundly civilizational changes that we don't understand well, even while living in the middle of them. If the concepts that underlie your sense-making prevent you from reading about or believing or acknowledging the turpitude of Trump's character, I can't help you.
I'm glad to hear you're not a Trump supporter. If you don't like Biden, I may disagree with you, but this is the nature of democracy. However, Trump and his supporters don't believe in democracy, and this is the problem I'm trying to explain and draw attention to. Unfortunately, in our two party system, none of these other candidates stand a chance to win the general election, and so if you're in a swing state, they'll only play the role of spoiler. Voting for RFK Jr. or whomever may be better than voting for Trump, but (assuming Haley doesn't miraculously beat him in the primaries), it's a complete fantasy that you'll get your preferred outcome (i.e., neither candidate) with this choice. This is also the nature of democracy: one frequently has to compromise and do the thing that yields one's least-bad outcome. The fantasy won't relieve you of the moral obligations inherent to the choices you make when voting.
I enjoyed this very much. Is it okay to share a link to it on Post?
Yes, sure. Thanks!
Very interesting read. Good writing style. I think your basing morality on values is weak. I recommend "Common Morality" by Bernard Gert. The moral rules are the only rules that are publicly known, apply to everyone and entail punishment if they are broken. Moral rules are obligatory. Ethics corresponds more to "moral ideals", ways of life that may lead to good and that we can choose how much or how little we need to follow. Hence they are not obligatory, and not following ethical ideals does not entail punishment. Moral rules we feel, whereas ethical ideals we understand intellectually. There are religious rules that masquerade as moral rules: such as requiring women to wear headscarves and prohibiting abortion, and observing the sabbath. But these rules are not necessarily known by non-adherents so they do not apply to everyone and are not therefore moral rules. Fascists like Trump and Putin encourage violence and the destruction of impartiality and the rule of law in political and social institutions because moral rules are an impediment to their goals of attaining absolute power. By encouraging their followers to break moral rules and use violence they are flattening the moral landscape for everyone else. Example: Krystallnact, widespread immorality against a lower status group that was witnessed and involved almost the entire population of Germany. After that episode of lawlessness and destruction it became that much easier for the Nazi State to steal Jewish property and send Jews to the Concentration Camps and the gas chambers.
In your view, what is the predicate for a moral rule? You appear to be saying that a moral rule has to be "known" (but "felt") and it has to be articulated by an authority as an obligation. But this would mean that moral rules arise arbitrarily and are enforced arbitrarily, despite the connection to feeling, and any explanation from a historical or natural process would be entirely ad hoc.
We have lots of evidence for widely varying moral frameworks historically, and so any theory that can't account for these variations is not a great theory. What *motivates* moral feeling? My framing explains these variations and their motivation: a moral injunction is the negative image of a value; value systems, in turn, depend on articulating a prime preference, which then imposes constraints, on a natural basis, on everything downstream. Values don't even have to be known: they can be psychologically unconscious, and this better explains the connection to feeling.
In this essay, then, I'm proposing that industrial forms of civilization create some natural value-preferences which carry non-arbitrary moral imperatives, and that authoritarians seek to undermine these values by forcing us to make moral choices we might otherwise defer. We don't have a viable alternative civilizational model which supports 8+ billion people on earth, so moral failure in this case means catastrophe.
I don't disagree with your conclusions at all. My point is that morality is based on concrete situations, moral prohibitions are to do with lessening real existing harms. I'm saying you can't build a moral system from abstractions like values or potential goods, it comes from a small set of publicly known concrete rules prohibiting specific harmful actions, such as don't injure, kill, or restrict another's freedom, don't deceive, as well as general admissions to keep your promises and obey the law. The authority for moral obligation comes from our growing up in a human society and accepting and internalizing these moral rules. Once human society grew past the level of foraging groups to cities and states then morality had to be scaled up by creating religions, and legal systems. But the basic system: of publicly known rules that apply to everyone and for which violation implies punishment, starts with our universal participation via social norms and social emotions.
What is a "harm"? There is a huge variety of how different societies conceptualize "good" and "bad" in different social behaviors. In Ethiopia, for example, there are some tribal areas where the courtship ritual is this: a gang of men abduct a woman from a neighboring tribe; the groom rapes her; and then his kinsmen keep the couple away from the men of the other tribe until everyone agrees that they're "married." As a tender 21st century American, this sounds pretty "harmful" to me, but I don't think that the people living in those societies would see it that way.
These conventions you're describing can't be explained as developing or as having some kind of natural basis if they're merely conventions. Which is all that a "publicly known rule" can be if you have no other means of describing it or connecting it to something else.
I'm arguing here that modernity highlights this difficulty, and puts it front and center in the political process. What rules are the right rules? Why is abduction and rape, for example, not an acceptable courtship ritual? We have all of human history to reference now in a way that was never the case in the past, and so how these answers are derived really really matters. Your framing of morality provides no way to work through this problem intellectually.
I've proposed an elegant solution. We decide, collectively, what we want to value as a priority, and this choice, then, creates constraints on other possible values because of the intrinsic tension among them. "Moral rules" are about accepting these constraints. For a specific historical moment, we can look at how such values have evolved, how they relate to environmental and other external conditions and how they are ordered in the "natural" sense that I described in the essay. The moral prerogatives of the same moment follow directly from this characterization.
You're making it too complicated. Everyone agrees that you shouldn't deceive or threaten people with violence. Why do Trump supporters not agree? Because they see Trump as threatening and deceiving their enemies. They see Democrats and liberals in general as outside the moral pale, and therefore game for dirty tactics. What do they base this moral difference on? They are guided by political operatives who have weaponized a "Christian" position on abortion that does not even feature in the Bible. The fact that even mainstream liberal Christians as well as Jews, Buddhists, etc. don't see abortion as a necessarily moral issue, shows that it is not a moral issue. It's definitely not the basis for distinguishing moral people from immoral people. It's more a hot button issue to motivate Conservative Christians to spread lies about their perceived enemies. The fact that Trump and his followers are willing to destroy democratic institutions and abandon the rule of law shows how Trump is flattening morality in order to get rid of all the constraints that would impede his path to power. People are immoral for a reason. They are trying to get their way by stepping on other people. We don't need a new justification for morality to see this. The moral system is there already, the problem for morality is scaling it up to include multi-cultural societies. It's easy for Fascists to create a fake morality based on "blood and soil" and then target a low-status group like refugees as outside the pale. It's important for us to realize that everyone is a moral citizen, that morality is egalitarian, in that it applies to everyone, and that in general all competent adults in society follow the moral rules. Those who don't follow the moral rules, or who do so at their own convenience are usually psychopaths, and need to be locked up for their crimes.
What you're saying makes sense from *your* moral point of view. But that's just *you* and your particular moral prerogatives aren't a technical theory of morality. Intellectualizing doesn't invalidate your moral feelings, but it doesn't demand some detachment from them.
Historically, threats or acts of political violence have been absolutely commonplace, and might only be "immoral" if a low-status person or an outsider were threatening or harming a high-status person. Slavery was commonplace before the end of the 18th century. Morality has traditionally *not* been egalitarian: different rules applied to different classes of people in different contexts. TRUMP VOTERS SEE THEMSELVES AS MORAL ACTORS. And in an another cultural frame, maybe they'd be right. Why should we conclude that they're wrong now? Why should our world be any different than it has been in epochs previous?
It's not enough to just notice that some people think X and others think Y, and then argue for whatever concurs with your feelings. An intellectual theory has to *explain* where these ideas come from and how the facts of many different societies can be accounted for. There is far more variety in human cultures historically and geographically than you are allowing.
Originally, before the neolithic period, when humans were foragers and lived in small groups morality was egalitarian. Once it was scaled up through the development of cities and states and their legal systems the potential was there again for equality through the impartial administration of legal procedures, we like to call "rule of law" but for much of modern history there has been moral anarchy between warring nations, with one group trying to dominate or eliminate the other. Class systems, which have only existed for twelve thousand years, are by definition,, not egalitarian, but common morality, as it was originally was egalitarian. Morality is a self organized form of behaviour regulation that protects human groups from predation from within the group by involving everyone in following and enforcing the moral rules. This form of behavior regulation corresponds to small scale common pool resource management, where the stakeholders of a group of fields, a water reservoir, or a small scale fishery agree to conserve the resource by following rules and enforcing rules that protect and maintain the resource. In the case of the moral system we grow up to internalize the moral rules and we are " involved" in enforcement in the sense that we still have the moral passions, and are still highly motivated to share relevant info about moral behaviour with others about others. But nowadays because of the huge scale and complexity of the societies we live in, we've, in effect, outsourced a lot of the most important jobs of morality to our legal systems. Legal systems are moral systems writ large. They use the same terms as moral systems: guilt, innocence, responsibility, obligation, rights, harm, and punishment because they originate from morality. But, unlike morality legal systems are not self-organizing, they require highly specialized roles and procedures for ascertaining guilt and responsibility and meting out punishments. The ability to maintain our societies by practising morality is what differentiates humans from animals. Morality makes the more complex forms of human cooperation possible by preventing and excluding rule-breakers who would overpower others within the group in order to take their resources. The management of a common pool resource prevents depletion of the resource by universalizing it's enforcement. Common morality does exactly the same thing to prevent the depletion of human cooperation. Most of the history of philosophy, especially Greek philosophy, is about ethics, not morality. That is until Hobbes and Kant. Morality is part of human nature. It isn't an option. The search for the good life is ethics not morality.
Just to add to what I said, it would help if morality was distinguished from ethics. Morality is one system that all human society has adopted. It's basic form is publicly known prohibitions that apply to everyone and that entail punishment if they are broken. The degree of punishment may vary, etc. etc., the content of the rules may gradually vary over generations, but they are basically unquestioned. Ethical codes of conduct, and ethical theories like Stoicism vary largely by time and place, they are formulations of ideal ways of life, and as such they form no obligation nor does violating their precepts lead to punishment. All moral systems have rules like: do not kill, do not steal, and do not deceive. They only vary in how they conceive of punishments, and whether they include religious rules as obligatory.