Comment by cfiggers

There was a time when ethicists were optimistic about all the different, competing moral voices in the world steadily converging on a synthesis of all of them that satisfied most or all of the principles people proposed. The thought was, we could just continue cataloging ethical instincts—micro-standards as we talked about before—and over time the plurality of ethical inputs would result in a convergence toward the deeper ethics underlying them all.

Problem with that at this point is, if we think of ethics as a distribution, it appears to be multi-modal. There are strange attractors in the field that create local pockets of consensus, but nothing approaching a universal shared recognition of what right and wrong are or what sorts of values or concerns ought to motivate the assessment.

It turns out that ethics, conceived of now as a higher-dimensional space, is enormously varied. You can do the equivalent of Principal Component Analysis in order to very broadly cluster similar voices together, but there is not and seems like there will never be an all-satisfying synthesis of all or even most human ethical impulses. So even if you can construct a couple of rough clusterings... How do you adjudicate between them? Especially once you realize that you, the observer, are inculcated unevenly in them, find some more and others less accessable or relatable, more or less obvious, not based on a first-principles analysis but based on your own rearing and development context?

There are case studies that have near-universal answers (fewer and fewer the more broadly you survey, but nevertheless). But. Different people arrive at their answers to moral questions differently, and there is no universal moral standard that has widespread acceptance.