Morality is universal in the formal sense that everywhere we find rules of conduct prescribing what is to be done or not to be done, or some conception of a good going beyond what is desired at the moment, in the light of which immediate impulse or desire is controlled. Behind this similarity of form there is considerable diversity of content. I would suggest that the variations may be provisionally grouped as follows:

1. Variations in the range of persons to whom moral rules are held to be applicable.


2. Variations arising from differences of opinion or knowledge regarding the non-moral qualities of acts or their consequences.


3. Variations due to the different moral import of the ‘same’ acts in different social situations and institutional contexts.


4. Variations due to difference in emphasis or balance of the different elements in the moral life.


5. Variations arising from the possibility of alternative ways of satisfying primary needs.


6. Variations due to differences of moral insight and general level of development, moral and intellectual…

Morris Ginsberg On the Diversity of Morals Heinemann 1956, pp: 101-2, 124.

“…the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone now listen to him? It was and is to this question that both utilitarianism and analytical moral philosophy must be understood as attempting to give cogent answers; and if my argument is correct, it is precisely this question which both fail to answer cogently…
Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and standpoint in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in his own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.”

Alistair McIntyre After Virtue a study in moral theory Duckworth 1981, pp:65-6.

I was in the municipal park just now. The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface…And then, all of sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost its harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff of things, that root was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder – naked, with a frightening, obscene nakedness….
We were a heap of existents inconvenienced, embarrassed by ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason for being there, any of us, each existent, embarrassed, vaguely ill at ease, felt superfluous in relation to the others. Superfluous: that was the only connexion I could establish between those trees, those gates, those pebbles. It was in vain that I tried to count the chestnut trees, to situate them in relation to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped from the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, overflowed. I was aware of the arbitrary nature of these relationships, which I insisted on maintaining in order to delay the collapse of the human world of measures, of quantities, of bearings; they no longer had any grip on things.

Jean Paul Sartre Nausea (1938, Penguin 1965:182-4)

THE Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy:
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates;
Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.
Socrates taught what Meletus
Loath’d as a nation’s bitterest curse,
And Caiaphas was in his own mind
A benefactor to mankind.
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.

Extract from William Blake’s The Everlasting Gospel (c 1818)

Most individuals in primitive and archaic societies lived in social institutions (such as tribe, clan or even polis) that embraced just about all the significant relationships they had with other people. The modern individual exists in a plurality of worlds, migrating back and forth between competing and often contradictory plausibility structures, each of which is weakened by the simple fact of its involuntary coexistence with other plausibility structures. In addition to the reality-confirming significant others, there are always and everywhere ‘those others’, annoying disconfirmers, disbelievers – perhaps the modern nuisance par excellence.

Peter Berger A Rumour of Angels Penguin 1970, p 61