If you think about it really, really hard, there is little substance to the idea that our sense of moral responsibility is "rational and objective". Given the amazing variety of religious ideas that now exist in various societies, we can argue that one is better than another from a human standpoint, but not from some eternal or supernatural truth that we hold and the other side doesn’t.
If you think you have found such truth, Rorty says,
.. your success might lead to you imagine that you have something more to rely on then the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. The democratic community of [John] Dewey’s dreams is a community in which nobody imagines that. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. [i]
The problem we have is that there are many people who think they hold truth in their hands. What makes them think like this? People are a result of their time and place. That’s it. It is more dangerous to think we are more favoured by some entity beyond us. We are not, some of us are just luckier to be born in more favourable circumstances.
People think they have insight, but what it is is a matter of their conditioning.
This is not relativism, which says that all views are as good as any other. There are ideas which are liberal and compassionate, and these are better than ones such that are fundamentalist or jihadist.
[i] Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 1999, p 20
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