Values or just preferences?
EthicsComments
How are you defining the difference between a public brand and a social contract that facilitates cooperation among strangers?
legal systems have this too, like how perjury laws sometimes treat family testimony differently.
Looking at it this way suggests that our capacity for deep, preferential love is actually a core value in itself. It means we prioritize the well-being of specific individuals over abstract rules, which is a very human way of caring.
You claim that shifting ethics based on the person means you have no code. However, many ethical frameworks specifically build in a hierarchy of duties, where the obligation to a spouse or child outweighs the obligation to a stranger.
The real kicker is that the code is just a performance for the public. We aren't actually choosing between values and preferences; we are choosing between our public brand and our private desires.
This touches on moral particularism, the idea that moral judgment does not rely on universal rules. In modern psychology, we see this as context-dependent morality, where the relationship itself provides the primary data for the decision.
I am not sure the context-dependent view holds up if the value is supposed to be a universal truth. If honesty is a value, it should be a value regardless of the person, otherwise it is just a tool for convenience.
This is just a variation of the Loyalty Ceiling discussion we had last week. We already established that loyalty usually hits a wall where it requires lying to yourself, which supports the idea that values are often just placeholders until they become inconvenient.