Blue Lives Don't Exist

[The Grand Nudger]

We are moral creatures only because it has long been accepted the price of immorality is too high.   All other reasons for being moral creatures are flaky self-justifications that will fall away within a relatively short time, say a few years, A generation at most, if it is convincingly demonstrated the price is not going to Be too high.

I don't think that the murder issue began as a question of cognitive moral assessment or deontology - and would point to prohibitions against murder among our earliest writings as indicative of how we already felt about murder.  Push the dial back 50k years at least and...if you could translate, you would hear recognizable positions on the issue of killing.  Likely further, much...muuuuuuuch further.

We fail to have identical thoughts and hold to identical facts or use identical systems of qualitative assessment and there is still universality to human moral propositions and behavior (whether we believe them to be objective, subjective, or something else).  These, very credibly, are human behaviors and preferences in search of a rationalization.  We don't like murder.  Maybe we don't like it because it's bad, maybe it's bad because we don't like it.  Either way, we're pretty clear on murder.

That we weigh the practical cost of behaviors with moral import and decide against the self described moral behavior is unsurprising.  We're rational (or rationalizing) agents...and also compromised agents.  We can have good reason to be bad just as we can fail to see bad.  What you're observing in the hypothetical above isn't moral discontinuity, but the spiraling behavior of a moral agent -like a human being- as the decision fields presented become more and more and then/or exclusively sub-optimal.  We could skip the middle entirely and propose that in a choice between moral behavior and life a great many people would choose life in any generation.  That doesn't mean that they stopped having moral intuitions about what they're doing, or that their moral intuitions have changed.

There are people who murder - not very many. If we think of it like a scale where we can slide that number up by adding compromising circumstances, we have to wonder whether or even how the police would or could help in those circumstances. I doubt that officer friendly is going to be handing out tickets on fury road. I doubt that -especially- if humans are, as your comments could suggest - morally incompetent. Cops are people too - in a world with more murdery people there would be more murdery cops. Adding more cops to murder world only adds more murderers.