Sub-Objective Morality
“Because I said so.” You’ve probably heard it before. The prime phrase used by parents to answer the questions of their children when their probings become too much. The phrase that simultaneously lays down the law, and lets you know the reason behind it: the authority of the parents. For children, their behavior is controlled by the rules of the parents and what they say is right and wrong, but as we get older, our sense of morality stems less and less from the authority of our parents, and it comes more and more from an outside standard. This outside standard is what is known as objective morality: the idea that there is a definite definition of what is right and wrong that is grounded in an unchanging, constant source of absolute truth. But what if you lived in a world where this outside source was not objective or constant at all? What if you lived in a world that didn’t have one sovereign power as its basis and standard for objective morality? This would be a horrible moral syste...