Hayes IS making a moral argument. The trouble for him philosophically is that the way he formulates norms requires the holder of the proposed norm adopt his world view about how things work.

Sociologists have been gathering cross cultural data on this, and one of the universals that emerge is that there are two sets of offenses:

• Violation of moral norm: The boy pushes the girl off the swing
• Violation of norm of convenstions: The boy refuses to wear his school uniform

Societies oriented to survival focus on group survival. Genetics favors the organisms who are capable of cooperating as a whole because doing so means that some members will survive the threat and the DNA will go on to flourish in less threatening times. Individualist species die off. So for societies under group threat, individualist tendencies are a threat to survival.

The sociological data is that poorer groups of people treat the two types of norms as identical. As soon as they get more affluent, the societies regard more and more of the convention norms as optional, quaintly old fashioned, and somewhat irrational. What is good for the society is no longer automatically what is good for the individual. Society is instead for the individual. Sociocentric cultures are associated with Stalinist or tribal groups where any divergence from norms is equated with violation of moral norms. Freedom from arbitrary conventional norms is as integral to the hippie movement of summer of free love in San Francisco 1968, as it is to libertarian survivalists stacking their heavy weapons in their bunkers. If they are not harming anyone, why should they not be free to violate whatever conventional norm they please?

For these conventional norms, as Hayes noted last week, when they go, they go fast. But not all norms are like that. Moral norms are not simple conventions. As one group of sociologists, there is an identifiable harm done. Note also, this distinction threads through Libertarian and books on ethics by atheists. They need not appeal to any bedrock Truth religious or otherwise. If you harm someone else, that violates this higher order of "moral" norm. And whatever the reason the person holds this norm, in some cases death is preferable to violating the norm. Pick your moral dilemma- a Hutu hands you a machete and tells you that either you kill a neighbor child with the machete or you are killed. The moral norm says you can't kill the other human being. To do so means you are no longer who you are. In either case you are destroyed- the person who is not a murderer would cease to exist. So the person declines to murder. Culture celebrates such existential heroism.

Ok, so the thing is that as a person gets better and constructing models for the intentions of others, people can perform mental reductions which move actions from the set of "moral norms" into the set of convention norms.

A person finds an old American flag in the closet that is partly moth-eaten and they have no more use for. The person in private cuts the flag into pieces and cleans their bathroom and flushes the pieces down the toilet. No one knows except the person. Was this a violation of a conventional norm or a moral norm? In tests, most people have a difficult time explaining why the act is wrong. Or take disgust type norms. A cockroach raised in a germ free environment for laboratory use is killed and autoclaved so that there is no possibility of any germ surviving. The cockroach is dipped into juice and the person offers you 10 dollars to drink the juice. Is the resistance you feel a conventional norm or something else? Rationally, there is no reason to resist. There is no harm, and only benefit to drinking the juice. Most people decline.

This takes on sociopathic dimensions when the person rationalizes that the boy they have developed a crush on also has passion for them, but the boy is unable to reciprocate due to silly conventions. In this kind of possibly Sandusky kind of reasoning, it is only a violation of an optional conventional norm.

There really are biological and sociological dimensions to norms.

The kind of analysis of harm is exactly the tack that Karl Smith performed in his analysis. There were winners and losers. If greater harm was caused by not lying, then it is moral to lie. If lying harmed some players, but benefited others and the net is that no more were harmed than those who benefited, then there is a balanced ledger of harm. The act is evaluated as morally neutral.

See what I mean?