Evidence That Base Morality Is Universal and Rationalization, Not Genuine Value Difference, Drives Moral Disorder
Executive Summary
The claim that “everyone has different morals” is one of the most widely repeated but empirically unsupported positions in contemporary discourse. When examined rigorously, the evidence from evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, cross-cultural anthropology, moral neuroscience, and clinical psychology converges on a single conclusion: human beings share a deep, biologically grounded moral substrate consistent across individuals, cultures, and epochs.
What appears to be moral diversity is almost always a surface disagreement rooted in differing facts, priorities, or circumstances — not a fundamental divergence in core values. The behavioral and clinical literature further demonstrates that when people invoke the “everyone has different morals” argument, they are frequently activating well-documented psychological mechanisms of rationalization and moral disengagement — cognitive tools the mind uses to justify pre-existing disorders of behavior while bypassing moral standards the individual already knows and accepts.
Part I: The Empirical Case for Universal Moral Foundations
1.1 Cross-Cultural Anthropology — The Seven Cooperative Morals
The most direct empirical test of universal base morality comes from systematic cross-cultural research. A landmark 2019 study by Oliver Scott Curry and colleagues at Oxford University applied the “morality-as-cooperation” framework to the ethnographic records of 60 human societies drawn from every region of the world. The findings were unequivocal: the moral valence of all seven cooperative behaviors — helping kin, reciprocating favors, deferring to authority, demonstrating bravery, and others — was uniformly positive across every society examined. The study concluded these constitute plausible candidates for universal moral rules.
Disagreement over how to apply a shared value is only possible if both parties share the underlying value as a reference point. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on moral disagreement acknowledges this precisely: many apparent moral disagreements stem from factual errors, cognitive biases, or incomplete information rather than from genuinely different foundational values.
1.2 Infant Developmental Psychology — Moral Preferences Before Socialization
If morality were entirely a cultural construction, no preference for prosocial behavior should exist before cultural learning has occurred. In a foundational 2007 study published in Nature, Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom at Yale’s Infant Cognition Center demonstrated that 6- and 10-month-old infants — preverbal and well before meaningful socialization — preferred individuals who helped others over those who hindered them.
A 2025 study from the University of British Columbia pushed this further, demonstrating that infants just five days old can distinguish between prosocial and antisocial interactions. A large-scale replication — the ManyBabies4 project, involving 567 babies across 37 labs on five continents — found the original effect was smaller than initially reported, a legitimate finding that demands intellectual honesty. It does not, however, negate the five-day-old findings or the broader body of developmental and cross-cultural evidence.
1.3 Moral Neuroscience — The Hard-Wired Moral Brain
The neurobiological evidence adds a structural dimension. A review published in CNS Spectrums by Mario F. Mendez (2009) at UCLA concluded that “morality may be innate to the human brain” and identified a “neuromoral network” centered in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). When this network is damaged through stroke, tumor, or trauma, patients show “attenuated emotional reactions to the possibility of harming others” and may perform sociopathic acts as a direct result — strongly supporting that this architecture is a biological endowment, not a cultural one.
A 2026 study in Cell Reports identified the vmPFC as specifically involved in moral inconsistency — the gap between moral judgment and moral behavior. When the vmPFC was artificially stimulated, participants became more morally inconsistent. This demonstrates that moral knowledge and moral behavior are neurologically dissociable: a person can know something is wrong and still do it, not because their morality differs, but because the neurological bridge between judgment and action has been bypassed.
1.4 James Q. Wilson’s Synthesis — Four Universal Moral Pillars
Political scientist James Q. Wilson’s 1993 book The Moral Sense remains one of the most thorough scholarly treatments of this question. Drawing on extensive anthropological, psychological, and evolutionary evidence, Wilson argued that the moral sense is innate — acquired through evolution rather than cultural learning alone. He proposed four foundational pillars shared across cultures: sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty. These map directly onto Jonathan Haidt’s independently derived Moral Foundations Theory — two research traditions, using entirely different methods, converging on the same foundational categories.
Part II: Why “Everyone Has Different Morals” Is a Misreading of the Evidence
2.1 Surface Disagreement vs. Deep Value Convergence
The most common intellectual error is conflating disagreements about the application of moral values with disagreements about the values themselves. These are categorically different things. Two cultures may disagree about whether a specific ritual practice is morally permissible — but if both agree that protecting children from harm is morally obligatory and their disagreement is about whether the practice causes harm, their moral foundations are identical. The disagreement is empirical, not moral.
C.S. Lewis made this argument with particular clarity in Mere Christianity: if people genuinely disagreed about fundamental values, they could not argue about morality at all — because argument presupposes a shared standard by which better and worse arguments can be assessed.
2.2 The Self-Refutation of Moral Relativism
The “everyone has different morals” claim, when used to deflect judgment, is logically self-defeating. The structure runs: morality is subjective, therefore your moral judgment of my behavior has no authority over me. But that second step is itself a moral claim. “You should not impose your morality on me” asserts an objective moral obligation that binds the other person regardless of their framework.
If moral relativism is true, “You have no right to judge me” is itself merely a subjective preference with no binding force — which completely undermines the very purpose for which the argument is deployed. A consistent moral relativist cannot assert that moral relativism is a superior position. The position cannot be held coherently.
2.3 Haidt’s Moral Dumbfounding — What It Actually Shows
Jonathan Haidt’s research on “moral dumbfounding” — in which people maintain confident moral judgments even when they cannot articulate reasons for them — is sometimes misread as evidence that morality is arbitrary. This reading is incorrect. Moral dumbfounding shows that moral judgments precede moral reasoning, not that they are baseless. The intuitions themselves are the product of deep evolutionary and developmental processes, remarkably consistent across individuals and cultures — and replicated in Chinese and Indian samples as well as Western ones.
Part III: The Real Function of “Everyone Has Different Morals” — Rationalization and Moral Disengagement
3.1 Albert Bandura’s Moral Disengagement Framework
Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura documented with precision how people who possess moral standards — and know they possess them — selectively neutralize those standards when they conflict with self-interest. Bandura is explicit: “Moral disengagement involves a process of cognitive re-construing or re-framing of destructive behavior as being morally acceptable without changing the behavior or the moral standards.” The standards remain in place. The behavior remains in place. What changes is a set of cognitive re-framings that create the subjective experience of consistency between them. This is not moral diversity. It is moral evasion.
The mechanisms include: Moral Justification (reinterpreting harmful behavior as serving a higher purpose); Displacement of Responsibility (attributing personal harmful actions to external causes); Diffusion of Responsibility (framing harmful behavior as collective); and Dehumanization and Victim Blaming. The claim that “everyone has different morals” functions as a pre-emptive cognitive mechanism that neutralizes anticipated guilt by redefining moral standards as arbitrary.
3.2 Post-Hoc Rationalization as Moral Escalation
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology (2020) experimentally tested whether post-hoc moral rationalizations after an unethical act influence subsequent behavior. Across three studies, generating moral rationalizations for prior immoral acts caused subsequent continuation and escalation of that behavior, particularly among individuals with weaker moral identity. Research by Shalvi and colleagues similarly documented “self-serving justifications” that allow individuals to “do wrong and feel moral.” The invocation of relativism is a textbook pre-violation justification that neutralizes anticipated guilt before the behavior occurs.
3.3 Moral Licensing — When Past Goodness Licenses Present Wrong
A meta-analysis of 91 studies (Blanken et al., 2015) confirmed that after prior acts of moral goodness, people experience reduced guilt about subsequent unethical behavior — as if they have accrued sufficient “moral credit.” When someone argues “I am a good person overall, so my behavior here is not that bad,” or invokes moral relativism to excuse a specific action, they are executing a licensing strategy rather than expressing a coherent moral philosophy.
3.4 Empirical Evidence That Moral Relativism Directly Enables Immoral Behavior
This is among the most striking findings in the literature: exposure to moral relativism itself causally increases immoral behavior. In two studies published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2013), Rai and Holyoak at UCLA demonstrated that participants who read a relativist argument were more likely to cheat in an incentivized raffle than those who read an absolutist argument. The researchers concluded that relativism’s framing of morality as “subjective and culturally-historically contingent… makes individuals more likely to engage in immoral behaviors.” This is a direct, causal, experimentally demonstrated relationship.
Part IV: The Psychopathy Case — Knowing Right From Wrong Without Caring
4.1 What Psychopathy Actually Tells Us
A 2010 study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by Cima, Tonnaer, and Hauser directly tested the assumption that psychopaths are immoral because they lack moral knowledge. The finding: psychopaths make the same moral judgments as healthy individuals. The researchers concluded that “psychopaths understand the distinction between right and wrong, but do not care about such knowledge.” The failure of psychopaths is not a failure of moral understanding. It is a failure of moral motivation. The person who claims “everyone has different morals” to justify harmful behavior is, in most cases, not displaying a genuinely different framework — they know the standard and are choosing not to be bound by it.
4.2 The vmPFC and Moral Inconsistency
The 2026 Cell Reports study demonstrated that decreased vmPFC activity correlates with behaving dishonestly while simultaneously judging the same behavior as immoral in others. This is the neural signature of moral hypocrisy rather than moral difference. The person who claims “my morals are different” and then expresses outrage when the same standard is applied to them is not operating from a genuinely different framework — they are demonstrating that the framework they claim not to have is operative and simply being applied selectively.
Part V: The Distinction Between Moral Knowledge and Moral Order
5.1 Having Morals vs. Ordering Them Properly
A critical distinction in this analysis is between possessing base moral intuitions and ordering them correctly. The research demonstrates that humans universally possess core moral intuitions: care for those who are harmed, concern for fairness, recognition of duty and loyalty, and a sense of sanctity or dignity. What varies across individuals, cultures, and times is not the presence of these intuitions but their weighting and ordering.
A doctoral study from the University of Sheffield on the psychology of moral disagreement concluded that disagreement arises from “differing in the amount of normative weight that they assign to distinct values.” Both parties share the same moral vocabulary. They differ in how they balance competing values when those values conflict. This is fundamentally different from the “everyone has different morals” claim, which implies the moral categories themselves differ. They do not. Crucially, weightings can be evaluated — one can ask whether a given priority ordering produces harm, is self-serving, or is applied consistently.
5.2 Disorder vs. Difference
The language of disorder is precisely appropriate here. A person who consistently prioritizes their own interests over the care and safety of others is not operating from a coherently different moral framework. They are exhibiting a disordered application of a shared framework. Clinical psychology has extensive, well-documented categories for these patterns — narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and various cluster-B patterns all involve systematic distortions of moral regulation, not the absence of moral content, but the dysregulation of its application.
Part VI: What Genuine Moral Disagreement Actually Is
6.1 The Legitimate Forms of Disagreement
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that genuine moral disagreement exists and is not always reducible to rationalization. The philosophical literature distinguishes three types: resolvable (arising from factual errors or biases), persistent (arising from different weightings of shared values), and deep (arising from fundamentally different epistemic frameworks). Deep moral disagreements are real but rare — and even in these cases, the parties typically share a large common ground of basic values.
The hallmark of genuine moral disagreement is that both parties hold their positions consistently, apply them impartially, and engage seriously with counter-arguments. The hallmark of rationalized moral disengagement is that the “moral difference” argument appears selectively — precisely when personal interests are threatened — and disappears when the person is harmed by others.
6.2 Moral Progress Requires Moral Objectivity
The concept of moral progress — including the abolition of slavery and the expansion of rights — is logically incoherent under moral relativism. If morality is merely subjective and culturally determined, there is no basis on which slavery could be declared wrong across cultures and times. The abolition of slavery was not merely a change in moral fashion. It was the recognition of a truth about human dignity that was always real, always binding, and always violated by the institution in question. Progress requires a fixed standard by which movement can be measured. Relativism, by abolishing the standard, abolishes the possibility of progress altogether.
Conclusion
The claim that “everyone has different morals” does not withstand rigorous scrutiny. The empirical record from cross-cultural anthropology, infant developmental psychology, moral neuroscience, and clinical psychology consistently supports the conclusion that human beings share a deep, biologically grounded moral substrate consistent across cultures, developmental stages, and neurological architectures.
What appears to be moral diversity is almost always one of three things: factual disagreement about circumstances applied to shared values; different prioritization of values that both parties hold; or motivated rationalization — the deployment of a philosophical claim in service of avoiding accountability for behavior the individual already recognizes as disordered.
The sophistication required to rationalize wrongdoing is evidence of the moral standard being evaded, not proof that it was absent. The universal moral grammar humanity shares is not undermined by its misuse. It is confirmed by the effort required to evade it.