>Moral codes have changed wildly over the years (and by place in any year). Slavery was “fine”, until it wasn’t. The death penalty is a thing in some places tod

>Moral codes have changed wildly over the years (and by place in any year). Slavery was “fine”, until it wasn’t. The death penalty is a thing in some places today, but seen as repugnant in other Cultures have had varying definitions of all kinds of things, above and beyond morality. Energy, death, malaise, sun, blood, calx, gravity, atom, motion, heat, mind, vacuum, malaria. But we tend to say it makes more sense that those are real things, and they are not just the cultural beliefs about those things, or that the varying cultural beliefs prove that there is no underlying real thing. There's a common and unfortunate conflation between (a) whatever societies happen to believe and (b) what morality actually is (if anything), in a normative sense. Sometimes it's referred to as the normative/descriptive divide. Saying "well gee, societies had different beliefs about right and wrong" doesn't necessarily establish anything about morality itself, it's just a descriptive approach to morality, which is one thing. It may just be that morality is normative, and our investigation of morality, our understanding of the natural world, and our societal willingness to face up to certain moral challenges (such as treating races equally or caring about animals) is something that changes over time, while morality stays the same.