All morality is situational. Either an opportunity for a plus-sum outcome exists, or it doesn’t. If it does, the moral choice is to cooperate. If not, then not.

All of the examples trotted out are unrealistic. Take the matter of lying to save a life. According to the reading of Kant in the linked article, lying to save a life is unacceptable because if everyone did it, no one would ever have the chance to lie to save a life, because no life-saving statement would be believed. And yet Anne Frank happens. Why? Because “lying” per se has nothing to do with it.

Anyone hiding Anne Frank is already committing treason. Therefore, no one is going to admit that they are doing it. Therefore, no SS officer with half a brain is going to ask whether there’s a Jewish girl hiding in the attic. Or, if he does, he is looking for the answer in the body language of the person before him. Thus, the only moral question is whether to risk one’s life to protect Anne Frank. To pull “lying” out of that action completely misses the point.

In the recent Supreme Court case involving sex discrimination against homosexuals, Justices Gorsuch and Alito disagreed about what behavior was being treated differently as between men and women. Justice Gorsuch used “prefers men sexually” as his test behavior. If a man who prefers men is treated worse than a woman who prefers men, then the former is being discriminated against. Justice Alito chose as his test behavior “prefers the same sex as oneself.” Under that rule, men and women who prefer their own sex are treated equally, whether or not justifiably. (FWIW, I think Alito has the better of the argument, but they were engaged in an intramural squabble over what “textualism” requires, whereas I would have preferred a more direct recognition that “sex” includes sexuality. But that’s for another day.)

Point is, framing the maxim that one would make a universal law under Kant is like putting the rabbit in the hat. A clever lawyer can make any rule work by refining it sufficiently. Who are the people in the trolley problem? Do I love or hate any of them? You can hypothesize away all relevant determinants, but then it doesn’t map to a real-world problem, so what good is it?

To me, there is one moral absolute, which derives entirely from my circular definition of “morality” as cooperation in plus-sum games. Under that definition, one must cooperate in plus-sum games. Duh. Thus, what we call substantive moral absolutes are really just recognitions that some plus-sum games are always and everywhere afoot, and cooperating in them just happens always and everywhere to require the same action. But these choices remain logically situational.

My definition does not allow for community morality independent of real pay-offs. A society may adopt a self-destructive (or at least self-limiting) mos. Within that society, a particular act may be seen as “moral,” because that’s how they use the term, but I have no problem saying that their “morality” is immoral, not because it offends my sense of decency, but because it is sub-optimal. Morality evolves, by genes or memes, or genes for making memes. It arises under selective pressure. It must be a winning strategy at the species level, or it will perish from the species. Game theory strikes me as a better window into that phenomenon than the ones philosophers seem to favor. But then, I’m not a philosopher…