I think I'm cheating a bit, and maybe that's okay. I have a tendency in philosophy to prioritize the a priori rather than the a posteriori. Like, it doesn't matter that there are Eucharistic miracles, or Fatima whatever. That's a posteriori. It doesn't matter that God gave us the Bible. That's a posteriori. What matters are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. Because they're a priori. Or, at least, they are metaphysical, meaning that they involve reason, rather than appealing to some contingent facts in the world. I mean, I guess the cosmological and teleological arguments also rely on contingent facts in the world. Blah blah blah. I favor reason, not details, not facts of the world. Whatever it takes for me to explain what I mean by that. Now, when it comes to morality, something about murder, theft, and rape, just strike me as a priori immoral. Other things, like usury, or drug use, or perhaps porn and masturbation, require some kind of "looking into the world" to determine that they are evil because they, by and large, have deleterious effects. That's sort of a consequentialism right there. For me to say, oh, imagine a drug in the water that undid the deleterious of masturbation... Then you say, blah blah blah psychic harm. Then I say, blah blah blah more drugs in the water that fix that too... ...is kind of like saying, imagine a drug in the water or a genie or a deus ex machine that makes murder okay. Like, instead of someone dying and staying dead, ala naturalism, they are guaranteed heaven with their family, or something. Or, they actually stay alive and get a beach vacation. But wait, that doesn't even resemble murder any more, now does it? Whereas in the drugs in the water example with masturbation, the act of masturbation seems unmodified, whereas in the thought experiment to make murder palatable, it seems to actually undo the act of murder. So I don't know about this move that I want to perform. Of saying, X is bad because of Y things. But if we remove Y things, is X still bad? And then I want to say something like, only X's which are bad a priori are actually bad. X's which are bad on account of Y are not bad. The other thing is about propensity or correlation. Rather than Y always being associated with X until a thought experiment manages to replace the Y while keeping X... We have some real-world thing where X doesn't have to come along with Y, but it often or usually does. So that X is a priori morally permissible, but it by-and-large attracts immoral people. Should we condemn X, then? Or should it remain legal, because it is a priori permissible? I'm thinking of literal examples here, but I don't want to mention them, because you won't be able to focus on the abstraction, and you'll only focus on the details of why the literal examples are wrong. But take for granted that drug use and prostitution are morally permissible. Now, if it is a contingent fact of reality that prostitutes and drug users also tend to be thieves, should we make illegal prostitution and drug use for the purpose of cutting down theft? This seems unfair to the responsible drug users and prostitutes, who want to engage in X without being guilty of the correlated Y. Morality is such a difficult and contentious field. It seems like every problem you encounter is unsolvable. Not like mathematics. So little controversy there, comparatively. @Chiro @KingOfWhiteAmerica