> Trying to pin down a universal moral code is a fool's errand.

Yeah, it is a complex subject. Philosophers talked about it for thousands of years, and I think they have not came to a definite conclusion yet.

But on the topic of non absolute morality I like to compare it with a language. Lets for example take English. There are billions people who know English. Even I claim I know English, though I'm sure I'll fail any formal exam. Native speakers are better at exams then me, but do they all follow the formal grammar? Or maybe they all follow some informal rules of English? Can we say that all of them will agree about the meaning of any English sentence?

Of course not. Each person has their own understanding of English, each has their own style of using English. There is no such thing as an "absolute English". The most closest attempt to define it is the English grammar, but it doesn't explain all the ways English is used.

We come to an important question: how we can talk about such thing as "English" if there is no living example of English such that anyone will unconditionally agree with their authority?

My answer is the very notion of "English" is an abstraction, that kinda work in some cases, but fails spectacularly in others. People tend to invent such notions just for a convenience, but reality is more complex, the boundaries of languages are fuzzy, and moreover there is no middle ground, no average[1]. You can deal with it somehow, choosing just the right method for your goals, but what to do with it is a different question, the point is the very notion of a language as of something monolithic is contradicts to the reality.

Another example one can find in biology: what is a species? How to define them? Really there are no species, there are just DNA strands, some of them compatible and could be used to create a fertile offspring, and some are not compatible. Biologists define species relying on an assumption that you can split all the different genotypes into classes, so that all genotypes in any class are compatible, and any two genotypes from different classes are not compatible. But it doesn't work in reality. It mostly works, but not in 100% of cases. Should we say "species doesn't exist"?

It is the same with morality. There are no absolute morality, but it doesn't mean that morality doesn't exists, it just means that we cannot grasp the wonderfully complex reality with out inferior brains and therefore we use some simplifying assumptions. One of them is an existence of the absolute morality. And it works in most cases. Some people thinks it is moral to eat their grandfather, but we live in a bubble of "absolute morality" where eating other people is amoral. Is it bad? How often in your life did you faced situations where this assumption was wrong and somehow impeded your thought process. I personally never was in exactly such a situation (with eating grandparents) but I faced some other cultural incompatibilities and I easily dealt with them making ad hoc amendments to "absolute moral" just for that case. I never faced incompatibilities that I couldn't overcome this way, though I think they are not impossible.

So, I totally agree that universal moral code will not work for everyone, but it is not a good enough excuse to reject moral reasoning.

> Often, "morality" is merely trying to protect your own advantages over others. But then again, advantage is what drives us. We're all for making things "fair", until it destroys our own perks.

To make things fair, is a very primitive approach to morality. I personally prefer Kant's categorical imperative[2], but in general I believe fairness is too narrow to be the goal of morality. Moral shapes the society, and it must enable society to thrive. I consciously leave here an uncertainty over what does it mean for a society to thrive, different people could understand it differently. But the surprising thing they all mostly come to the same conclusions, like "do not kill", "do not steal" and so on.

But I came to talk here, because I do not like the attitude of claiming that anything lawful or "good for the motherland" is a moral thing to do. No, sometimes what is good for the motherland is amoral. Sometimes lawful things a amoral. Sometimes bad things for the motherland or unlawful things are highly moral. I would say nothing, if you told that necessities of a country demand industrial spying or if you said that industrial spying is good for long term prospects of the humanity. But you said it is moral, and I do not agree categorically. The world is a difficult place to live and to think about, don't spoil this wonderful complexity by trivialization.

[1] https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/18291/