Morality always has been different for every culture. People are almost always prone to take offense to the moral customs of foreign cultures. The illusion of progress brings people to believe that we have reached an absolute peak in human thought that has never been excelled before. Every civilization in all history is guilty of this. But progress is not linear, if it even exists. What is progress anyway?
In ancient civilizations there were several practices considered morally good that we now would consider barbaric, but that is the same type of nationalism that people in those other cultures would feel if they knew of our own moral codes. In Ancient Greece, infanticide was considered the norm, and people commonly left unwanted babies outside of the temple to die. In the early Roman Republic, all men were allowed to kill their wife and children at any time regardless of reason. In Ancient Egypt, incest was encouraged as a sign of status. In Babylon, it was a requirement upon hitting puberty that all girls consent to have sex with any man who solicits her. Pedophilia and rape were condemned in some places and celebrated in others. These laws and many others might shock and disgust us, but they were considered moral at the time. But can we truly call these civilizations immoral, primitive, or ignorant? How do we know if our morals are any better? What is morality and what does it seek to achieve? We need to get a little deeper than the human nature argument if we are going to discuss morality. If it's just a feeling, then we cannot condemn anyone for breaching our own personal codes of morals. If this were the case we might as well ditch morality and just do what we want.
Outside of appeal to emotion, one common argument is that morality exists for the society more than the individual, to keep society thriving a long time. If this were true, then all of the ancient civilizations I named must have good codes of morals because they lasted hundreds if not thousands of years (in the case of Egypt) with these same laws. There is also the utilitarian argument of maximizing happiness, but we have to consider that Roman and Babylonian citizens were in all likelihood much happier than we are.
We must remember that the morals we have right now are descended from two sources, neither of which most of us currently hold in high esteem; our ancestor's culture and religion teaching. We must approach the subject as if we know nothing, and start again from scratch. Maybe we don't need morality. We might be taking this whole civilization thing a bit too seriously. Or morality could be serving a different purpose that we don't need to value as much. If morality exists, how can we justify ourselves to Rome, Egypt, Babylon, or Greece? How can we argue in support of our own morals without claiming cultural superiority? Why do we as a culture find murder, mutilation, misogyny, slavery, rape, incest, and pedophilia so repulsive while other cultures would laugh at us for thinking that? How can we justify our morals to anyone?
