Tacit Conventions

From Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: the Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21^st Century

So how can we reconcile the conviction that certain usages are wrong with the absence of any authority that ever decided what was right?  The key is to recognize that the rules of usage are tacit conventions. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things. There need not be any inherent advantage to which choice is made, but there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Familiar examples include standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, and paper currency.
(pg. 190)

This is from the chapter Telling Right From Wrong: How to Make Sense of the Rule of Correct Grammar, Word Choice, and Punctuation

I’d like to take this in a different direction…than grammatical rules.

Let us substitute just a few terms and see what happens.

So how can we reconcile the conviction that certain acts are wrong with the absence of any authority that ever decided what was right?  The key is to recognize that morality is a tacit convention. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things. There need not be any inherent advantage to which choice is made, but there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Familiar examples include standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, and paper currency.

Further…

So how can we reconcile the conviction that certain acts are wrong with the absence of any authority that ever decided what was right?  The key is to recognize that morality is a tacit convention. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things. There need not be any inherent advantage to which acts are deemed moral or immoral, but there is an advantage to everyone accepting the same  acts as moral or immoral. Familiar examples include standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, and paper currency.

Ask yourself how much you weigh in kilos. You don’t know because you don’t use the metric system (convention). You use pounds (a different convention). One convention isn’t innately superior or correct because if it were, the other wouldn’t exist.

But are you comfortable with this relativity stretching to your acts?

Now some may counter that there is an authority, namely god…but that won’t really get you very far. Which god? How did god communicate the morality…the bible…the translated-by-humans-innumerable-timesbook that condones acts we now deem immoral? And what about the problem of Euthyphro where god is a rubber stamp or where acts can be deemed moral or immoral as flippantly as fashion trends?

So the authority position is a non-starter.

So are we stuck with relativism?

De facto, yes. We can massage it and claim to be moral nihilists or amoralists but we would still end up with ethical conventions that are relative to time and place.

Just as the rules of grammar are not set in stone, neither are your moral/immoral acts.

Take heart, it’s not as bad as it sounds…

Maybe we’re finding The BetterAngels of Our Nature