Can we perhaps compare a man who works hard, is scrupulously honest, a wonderful father and husband, to a man who gets drunk every day, lies constantly, borrow money he never pays back, has a fondness for 12 year old boys, who beats prostitutes, and–to add something genuinely objectionable–calls Obama “that nigger”.
If we cannot call one a better person than the other, then moral order is impossible.
My entire system is oriented around approximate orders, general orders, ones both subject to change, and recognized as in constant motion.
But the human mind works by creating distinctions. If we do not create coherent ones, it will create incoherent ones. Communists, for example, reject “bourgeois” morality, but substitute instead a morality based upon purely abstract and generally non-existent class distinctions. Within their system, the latter man above would be vastly superior to the first man, if the drunk were labeled Proletarian, and the honest man bourgeois or Capitalist. And in practice, many good people had their heads chopped off in the inauguration of the Communist era, the French Revolution, and many evil people made fortunes.
Ponder the smallness of the division now between those who commit microaggressions and those whose lives seemingly orient around punishing them. This is an anti-morality, whose whole goal is to prevent honest speech, honest communication, honest CONNECTION between differing human beings. No gap is bridged with histrionic shouting. Nothing is negotiated. No empathic skills are actually learned. No emotional intelligence is cultivated.
Ultimately, the core of morality is understanding. It is not external behavior, but what motivates that behavior. This cannot be seen or reliably diagnosed. Our drunk, above, may have secret virtues, and our saint may have secret lusts and angers and vices. These are both possibilities. It is not appropriate to judge people as people. But it is absolutely necessary to have ideals, and to recognize who is moving toward them and who away. Some systems in motion are in fact inherently superior to others. This must be admitted in principle, even if we choose not to spend time labeling people.