Morals don't scale

This is likely one of those times when I'm not going to make sense, but here goes.

Morals are trained into you before the age of reason, aren't very tractable via reason, and are particular to your specifically; the circumstances of your upbringing, the specific biases of your caregivers, and the norms of your culture.

Because all that has to get copies of itself into the future, it will inevitably include some kind of "this is the best way to be"; people label that "good" and try to be that.

This... is a problem.

It's a problem in a bunch of ways.

For individuals, there's nothing about the whole process that requires good-as-morally-defined to be *possible*, or beneficial to you, or even not harmful to you.  Trying to be good can leave people with no way to imagine that they're allowed to exist because being good is impossible and they have to be good.  ("good people fix all the things", well, ok.  Where do the good people get consent to do the fixing?  Where do good people get the power to do the fixing, in all the possible sense of power?  See?  That awkward metaphorical clanging noise is the limits of the possible proving impermeable to an imagination of responsibility.)

For any kind of collective social interaction, there's no way to resolve a moral difference between distinct moral traditions.  This leads to coercion, violence, and efforts at extermination that people are just plain convinced are correct.  (Which inside the moral system they're using, *are* correct.  Nobody uses morals that haven't got passed down for generations, and that introduces a strong bias in favour of resorting to force.)

For public policy, morals are feels.  You can't make effective policy with feels because you're dealing with large numbers -- of people, things, and places -- and intuition fails at those scales.  Effective policy involves facts, whether or not one likes the facts.

Now, if you're in a stable situation -- you belong to a deme in a polity that's been there and been like that for generations -- morals can work effectively.  There are no new problems to solve, there are workarounds to the more awkward or expensive bits, and so on.  The difficult work of achieving agreement on new things isn't required and does not happen.  You're getting group cohesion for relatively cheap, and group cohesion is way, way more important than personal happiness in terms of copies-into-the-future and always has been.  Moral systems that make everyone in them miserable can persist indefinitely if the result is lots of group cohesion and successfully maintaining control of resources.

That "group cohesion" thing?  Pretty much all moral systems everywhere have an axiom that you can't change them; they're permanent, inviolable, and immutable.  Giving up your moral axioms is the worst possible thing you can ever do.

We're in the early stages of a comprehensive historical disjunction, against which the fall of the western Roman empire is as a minor change in tax regime.  We -- as a species, we -- very likely don't have the margin to get through this in the usual "someone wins" sort of way.  Switching off of agriculture isn't going to happen successfully at local scale.

Anybody who is any good at humaning care to suggest a fix for this?  I keep coming up with "militant tolerance" and going "I can imagine that, but it would never stay both".