Devil’s advocate: Humanity is in a malthusian trap where those mothers that prefer their child to five strangers are more able to pass on their genes, so that’s the sort of behavior that ends up universal. That mechanism of course produced all our preferences, but without the sanctity of it we are at least in a situation where mothers everywhere can have a debate on preserving our preferences versus saving more people, and Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.
Devil’s advocate: Humanity is in a malthusian trap where those mothers that prefer their child to five strangers are more able to pass on their genes, so that’s the sort of behavior that ends up universal. That mechanism of course produced all our preferences, but without the sanctity of it we are at least in a situation where mothers everywhere can have a debate on preserving our preferences versus saving more people, and Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.
Ok, sure. But this does not answer the question of why we should change morals.
So that our morals become invariant under change of context, in this case, which person’s mother you happen to be.
… and why should that matter at all?
It seems we’ve now reduced to a value that is both abstract and arbitrary.