A truly sophisticated thinker realizes that family, tradition and neurotic needs for revenge or certainty aside, you cannot get morality from a Book or from an authority figure. The “good” is idiosyncratically subtle, having to do with healthy feeling and the emotional meaning of an act. The good becomes a dull ax when societal consensus intervenes, so society must “tread lightly” (as Walter White, Breaking Bad, said). Despite all of Barrett’s legal knowledge and critical thinking, she remains a dull-ax moralizer. We don’t need that ruling over us.
Families are, of course, natural units. Societies are less so or not so. We make them as a compromise of individual freedom. Unlike individuals and families, existentially, societies come later, not first, in the order of cause or nature. The individual exists first and lives a psychological life not a “moral” one. To believe morality is embedded in the human organism is just sloppy, wishful or pseudo-scientific (like Sam Harris’s) thinking.
Your child is within an hour of dying of starvation and you steal a slice of bread and a cup of milk for him. Are you good or bad? You kill a psychopath who has lunged at you with a clenched fist. Are you good or bad? You kill a 75-year-old known child rapist as he’s leading your 16-year-old daughter away by the hand. Good or bad? You’ve spied on a woman having sex in the privacy of her home, and as she proceeds to do something apparently intrusive with her genitals, you break in and arrest her. Good or bad? You tell your son that all Democrats are defective people. This leads to his ending good friendships, or to a character of prejudice or to a permanent loss of respect for his parents, to an adult life of rage and career and social myopia, to psychosomatic illness. Are you good or bad?
People who believe morality and justice are simple are – simple, whether they have read four-thousand law books and one bible, or four-thousand bibles* and one law book, have a PhD or JD or MDiv. We don’t need these people, such as Amy Coney Barrett, “strictly” construing the meaning of the Constitution and deciding our lives, because they are not able.
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* https://www.theregister.com/2006/10/06/the_odd_body_religion/. There are over 4,000 religions.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.