  In science quantities are measured with some sort of scale. Science tries to use an absolute scale whenever possible. An absolute scale doesn’t change depending on where the measurement is taken or who is taking the measurement. Temperature is measured with an absolute scale. 0 degrees Fahrenheit is cold and 110 degrees Fahrenheit is pretty hot by human standards. 0 degrees Fahrenheit is the same temperature in Ulan Bataar as it is in Boston.
Additionally, the size of one degree Fahrenheit is the same everywhere so the difference between 68 degrees and 69 degrees is the same everywhere because the size of the degree doesn’t change. Distance is another absolute scale of measurement. One mile equals one mile everywhere you go. Some scales are relative. Currency is a relative scale. As temperature is a measure of the amount of heat in a substance, currency is a measure of the amount of stuff you can buy.
Currency is relative because one unit of currency is not the same where you go and it is dependent on what unit of currency you use. Five U.S. dollars aren’t worth a whole lot in the U.S. That will buy you a decent snack. If you take that same five dollars to Peru it will buy you an excellent lunch probably with a beer and a cup of coffee. On the other hand five Sols (Peruvian currency) will buy you a fair lunch in Peru but almost nothing in the U.S. Some scales use more than one unit of measurement to arrive at a value. Velocity and acceleration are measured using combinations of distance and time units.
Momentum is measured using a combination of mass, distance, and time units. Morality is also measured in some way. It can be done according to an absolute scale or to a relative scale. It is a combination of units. It isn’t possible to assign a number, but people still have a means of applying a measurement to morality and the units we generally use are magnitude and intent. In an earlier post I used a thieving bread man as an example to illustrate these two units.
Theft is a moral infraction, but we tend to agree that in some forms it is palatable while in others it is despicable. If we return to the bread man and think about the situation as observers, we can see how the process works. The bread man has a couple of hungry kids. Out of desperation he steals bread to feed the kids. He gets caught. How will he be judged when the truth of his story is verified?
We, as observers, first think that stealing is wrong. He didn’t earn the bread; it is wrong of him to take it. Of course, it was only a loaf of bread, and he was only doing it out of desperation. It was right of him to do what he could to take care of the kids. So, the wrongness of his theft is minimized because the magnitude of his theft was small and the intent of his theft was for an understandable reason. We give a value to the intent and the magnitude of his moral infraction and arrive at an amount of wrongness.
In science scales usually have an underlying physical principle that makes them absolute regardless of what we might wish for them to be. Time is measured using the oscillations of a certain Cesium isotope. The oscillations of this particular isotope is true for every other instance of this isotope existing in the universe (as far as we know) and is true no matter where in the universe any instance of this isotope is taken. The frequency will not change if we measure it in San Francisco or while orbiting Alpha Centauri. Distance is measured as the distance traveled by a beam of light in a vacuum over a certain period of time. It too is the same no matter what beam of light you use or where in the vacuum it is measured.
Mass is a different story. We haven’t found a reliable means of defining an amount of mass. The best science has come up with so far is to arbitrarily pick a chunk of metal (a Platinum Iridium alloy) and say this is how much a kilogram is. The problem with this is that no two masses are identical. They are close enough that we can’t easily discern a difference but the fact remains. No two masses are identical to each other or to the standard chunk.
Measuring morality is like mass because no two people have identical moral scales and our only external standard is largely arbitrary. People have tried to create an external moral standard. I think this is a big part of where religion comes from. Religious texts spend a lot of time making distinctions between desirable behavior and undesirable behavior, but we have a whole lot of these texts and most of them disagree. Christians and Jews use the Holy Bible (I know the Jews don’t necessarily believe in the New Testament but the foundation is the same for both). Muslims refer to the Koran.
Buddhists refer to the teachings of Buddha and to animistic beliefs. Hindis ascribe to Vedas and other things. Enter moral relativity. The argument goes that if our respective moral guides are completely arbitrary, who is to say that one is better than another? Technically, we can’t fairly say that one is better than another. The extension of this idea is to then hold members of a moral school accountable to their respective scales.
Christians will be held to their Judeo/Greek/Christian Scale, Muslims to their Koranic scale, Buddhists to Buddha, and Hindis to their (many many many) scale(s). As far as I can tell this tends to be where a fair portion of the liberal camp stands. The other side of the coin is that somebody does actually say ‘ours is better‘. I’m of this school. I think our Western moral tradition is better. No apologies or regrets.
Conservatives tend to this side of things. It isn’t fair or sensitive, but there you have it. You can point to specific morals from a different group of people that are more fair or beneficial than the Western counterpart but on the whole, ours is superior. Our morality comes from three sources. Judaism, Christianity, and the Greeks. Both Plato and Aristotle did some examination of morality and the like and they influenced our Western perception of morality.
Morality as I said in an earlier post, is a pure form of how we think we as individuals and by extension as a society ought to behave to be ideal as both. However, I think their more important contribution was that they allowed us to consider morality from a more logical perspective. Hollywood often creates extreme situations to examine heady issues like morality. John Q (spoilers ahead) was such a movie. A guy’s kid ends up with some heart disease and needs a transplant. The dad does everything he can but can’t afford the heart so he holds the ER (or maybe the ICU) hostage at gunpoint until his kid gets a heart.
I think the underlying premise of the movie is that somebody must make a choice about who will benefit from our limited supply of hearts. Usually an administrator of some sort decides who gets a heart and who doesn’t. I think it is an inherently moral choice to make. In the movie the administrator who has to make the decision is shown to be a cold bitch who gives hearts to people with money. But, because of the impassioned valiance, and all that jazz, she finds a heart for the boy. Given a situation with an older person with lots of money and a child with little money needs a heart, and we only have one to give, the tendency would be to give it to the kid.
Our sympathy would lie with the child. We can find logical reasons for this though. First, the oldster has fewer years to live anyhow. He would get less use out of the heart. Second, older people are more likely to have incidental conditions that can contribute to less life and they would again get less use out of the heart. Third, the child has greater potential to contribute to the society.
The older person has contributed more of his potential than the child so his loss will likely have less long-term impact than the loss of the child. When colored in this light it sounds cold and calculated, but I believe these considerations are examined, even if not consciously. My examples are intended to show that we make distinctions between moral decisions. Consciously or otherwise, we assign weights to certain factors which in turn lead us to make a moral decision or judgment. When we make moral judgments we use a scale of wrongness. Is stealing a loaf of bread less wrong than stealing ten thousand dollars?
Is giving the heart to the boy less wrong than giving it to the oldster? We make decisions like these every day, some people use a more logical means, some use a more emotional means but we still have a wrongness scale that guides us in making our moral judgments. Westerners tend to believe that we are immoral creatures and that is why I say we use a wrongness scale. We aren’t trying to be moral, we’re trying to be less immoral. We must decide whether it’s less immoral to lie about our friend’s hairdo than to hurt their feelings, we decide that it’s less immoral to steal a loaf of bread than a bag of money, we decide which of our elective candidates is less bad than the others. Our Greek intellectual tradition tells us what we should pursue.
Our Judeo/Christian tradition tells us where we stand in relation to our goal. Morality is always colored in shades of grey. We are seldom faced with situations that are either right or wrong. There are almost always circumstances that might color our perception. So, we use our wrongness scale to tell us how to respond. We don't kill thieves but we do kill murders.
We don't send people to jail for parking in the handicapped space, but we do drunk drivers. All of these things are illegal and immoral, but we weight them differently and assign different values on our wrongness scale. Most of my examples have been both illegal and immoral, but that doesn't need to be the case. We use the wrongness scale all the time. We tease our siblings and make them angry. I don't think it's a very moral thing to do but it is fun.
We eat grapes in the supermarket without paying for them. It's theft but not such that anything will be done. We read newspapers in the bookstore without paying for them. We fail to hold open the door for little old ladies. We do all manner of such things, but generally most people try to behave in such a way that these things are outweighed by the good things we do. In a larger context, most of us measure our selves on a wrongness scale and try to tilt the scale towards the better side of things.
I finished writing this and am posting it because I just finished Life the Universe and Everything. It seems to sum it all up rather nicely. "We apologize for the iconvenience. " 
