[EnigmaFlare]

I don't really know the state of moral understanding, but I do know people, even intellectuals, can't separate their personal ideologies from their work, so they're not really capable of objectively figuring this stuff out.

I'm sure we can at least make some judgements about whether a set of morals is better or worse than another, but all the obvious cases are already solved and people strongly disagree on the ambiguous ones where they really have no idea.

One big moral concept is individual freedom vs long term survival of the system of social order they belong to. You can't have individual freedom without a society to protect it but you can't sustain that society without restricting people's freedoms (eg. military conscription). It's popular today in the west to value the individual over the future of their society, but a lot of history and the rest of the world is the opposite. People from these two camps seem to be blind to the weaknesses of these underlying assumptions, so they end up with moral ideas that seem totally immoral to each other.

[nathan_compton]

I don't understand how anyone could separate their personal ideology from their work unless they happened to mostly align already. I might disagree with a person's ideology, but I can only agree with a person who believes their ideology ought to inform everything about their life, including their work. What other use is an ideology if it doesn't compel you to change the world or, at the very least, yourself, despite resistance from the world?

> "all the obvious cases are already solved"

This seems highly optimistic.