This may be technically true in a sense, but I disagree with the connotation. If you live in an English-speaking country, there’s a sense in which you “can” “decide” to speak only Swahili instead of English, but it would be more sensible to say that that decision has already been made for you by your society. Likewise for moral rules.
It’s not obvious to me that this is true in any significant way. Specifically, I am skeptical about the “likewise for moral rules” part of your argument; can you expand on that? How, exactly, is it likewise?
After all, if I was born and raised in an English-speaking country, then I learned English effortlessly, having to make no effort in order to do so. Learning Swahili, on the other hand, takes considerable effort, and for some people it may not even be feasible (not everyone’s good at learning foreign languages, especially without immersion). Meanwhile, selecting different moral rules requires nothing remotely approaching that much effort. Furthermore, speaking Swahili to someone who doesn’t understand it (i.e., basically everyone you ever interact with, in an English-speaking country) is tremendously counterproductive and harmful to your interests, whereas following a different set of moral rules… can be harmful, but in practice it’s often totally invisible to most of the people you interact with on a daily basis (if anything, it can be less obtrusive and less detectable by third parties than merely following the moral rules you were raised with, if you do the latter more faithfully than most members of your community!).
But perhaps an even more important point is that even if what you say is true, it’s no less true for rule-consequentialist moral rules than for deontological moral rules or virtue-ethical moral rules. Your objection, even if we accept it, does not make the distinction Dagon raised any more real.
This may be technically true in a sense, but I disagree with the connotation. If you live in an English-speaking country, there’s a sense in which you “can” “decide” to speak only Swahili instead of English, but it would be more sensible to say that that decision has already been made for you by your society. Likewise for moral rules.
It’s not obvious to me that this is true in any significant way. Specifically, I am skeptical about the “likewise for moral rules” part of your argument; can you expand on that? How, exactly, is it likewise?
After all, if I was born and raised in an English-speaking country, then I learned English effortlessly, having to make no effort in order to do so. Learning Swahili, on the other hand, takes considerable effort, and for some people it may not even be feasible (not everyone’s good at learning foreign languages, especially without immersion). Meanwhile, selecting different moral rules requires nothing remotely approaching that much effort. Furthermore, speaking Swahili to someone who doesn’t understand it (i.e., basically everyone you ever interact with, in an English-speaking country) is tremendously counterproductive and harmful to your interests, whereas following a different set of moral rules… can be harmful, but in practice it’s often totally invisible to most of the people you interact with on a daily basis (if anything, it can be less obtrusive and less detectable by third parties than merely following the moral rules you were raised with, if you do the latter more faithfully than most members of your community!).
But perhaps an even more important point is that even if what you say is true, it’s no less true for rule-consequentialist moral rules than for deontological moral rules or virtue-ethical moral rules. Your objection, even if we accept it, does not make the distinction Dagon raised any more real.