Chaos

The fly in the soup of many a good moral philosophy is that we humans aren't perfect enough for things to all work out. Of those I haven't yet really discussed, Libertarianism fails because some people are crafty and selfish. Utilitarianism breaks apart because people cannot know the full future impact of their actions. Rawls' Theory of Justice doesn't work because people aren't completely risk-averse. In essence, every time a new psychological insight is realized, another theory of morals comes crashing down. One wonders, then, if there even exists a moral system that humans are capable of following.

However, as countless tragedies have proved, torture can remove any illusion of rationality that we possess. If there is always a choice between a morally right thing to do and a morally wrong one, we can always be coerced into choosing the wrong one. Similarly, we can be forced to choose between two (apparently) morally wrong options; if there are infinitely many scenarios which are morally wrong, then in most cases, a consistent moral system must be infinitely large in order to describe the right thing to do when forced to choose between two sets of otherwise morally wrong scenarios.

The reason why these are not pathological objections is that the world is not perfect either. It is perfectly capable of starving, sickening, drowning, biting, burning, and crushing us in the most hideous ways. It forces mothers to give food to only one child when there isn't enough. It casually murders a hundred thousand people in Indonesia just by shrugging its shoulders. By random accidents, we are regularly forced to choose between bad outcomes, which is why we look to moral systems for easy answers to hard questions.

Unfortunate as it is, a practical moral system cannot hope to deal with every situation thrown its way. To put it less verbosely, there are no practical moral systems. None at all, simply because we are incapable of holding onto any given logical structure in every conceivable situation.

This will come as a shock to most people. However, you have to ask yourself: is there anything which you would not do under any circumstance purely because it is morally wrong? For instance, most people consider killing children to be one of the most horrible offenses in existence. Except most people would have to qualify that statement with the condition that the child should be innocent and not about to destroy the world (as in the Hitler's Office Dilemma). Be that way if you must, but consider the following scenario (stolen from the Arabian Nights):

The Sultan of Persia marries his childhood sweetheart, but finds out after five years that she's been sleeping with another man for the duration of their marriage. Enraged, he has her beheaded, and declares that as a reminder to all faithless women, he will marry a new wife every day and have her beheaded in the morning. You are upset and terrified about his declaration; sure enough, a letter arrives by courier telling you that the Sultan has taken a fancy to your daughter. If you allow him to have her, he'll give you a thousand talents of gold. If you don't let her go, he'll order his guards to kill you and everyone else of adult age in a ten-mile radius from your house. Furthermore, he'll shut your daughter in a tiny cell in his darkest, moldiest dungeon, and put trace amounts of strychnine in her food, so that she'll spend the rest of her days with only painful spasms to keep her company.

Now, if you have any morals at all, it shouldn't be a hard choice. You simply consign your daughter to a life of suffering, allow the Sultan to kill you and all of your friends, and leave your entire village orphaned, right? Well, perhaps not. But then, perhaps what you call "morals" are actually riddled with so many exceptions that they are actually nothing of the kind.

That's something to think about.