The word morality just refers to "mores," the deeply held behavioral expectations of a society.  Does recognizing this, that morality is a social construct, necessarily imply moral relativism?  Does it mean there is no absolute right and wrong?  Well, if we frame it that way then we're talking about qualitative negative morality.  Some things are bad and if you do them you are bad and if you don't you are OK.  There are no degrees of being a little bad or very very good.  Right or wrong.  Really God sees it as degrees of excellence or villainy.  But we can discuss the other kind.  You can make a up a threshold or something, but that's local understanding, special select instructions for one purpose.  And positive moral urgings can be framed as double negatives: for instance, "Don't fail to eat your vegetables."   

 

You can recognize that morality is a social construct and yet also claim there is a transcendent moral truth, but the implication is that only one real society can be moral: others just think they are.  A transcendently moral society would want to correct other societies unless it were ignorant of its own virtue, in which case how moral could it really be?  What kind of morality would allow the righteous to not focus on elevating righteousness?    Can morality limit itself to guiding acceptability or must acceptability also bestow authority?  

 

If there is absolute right and wrong then being right is almost impossible so it is seldom attained.  On the other hand, moral relativism tends to imply that all societies are moral if they simply abide by their own standards.  Are those the only two options, the notion that everybody is OK no matter what and the notion that nobody is really OK?  Only if you don't consider consequentialism, which doesn't have standards.  It's knowingly ignorant of its own virtue because a consequence of consequentialism is that ultimate right and wrong is humanly unknowable.   We can only guess at consequences.

 

Theoconsequentialists are consequentalists.  Our moral decisions are based on outcomes rather than absolute rules.    But total impact on an infinite universe is what matters, and that can't fully be known by humans.  Does that make us moral relativists?  Not if consequentialism is the transcendent moral truth.  And it must be because only consequentialism considers an action what it fully is rather than merely categorizing it based on possibly relatively trivial characteristics. 

Actions are like pills.  Consequentialists care about what they actually do, what medicine is inside; other moral systems classify them based on what color they are or what pharmacy they came from or some other trivial characteristic.  Consequentialism is an impossible truth to practice, though since we can't really know full consequences.  So consequentialists are incapable of knowing whether they are meeting their own standards, so they probably aren't--they can just brag that they are making an effort, which is ironic.  But Theoconsequentialism is also theistic.  Consequentialism is wrong for individual humans to try and practice based just on their own judgment.  That's because humans don't know the actual full outcomes of their actions; they can only guess at the nearest impacts.  Only God knows those full outcomes.  Thus humans need divine guidance if they are to practice consequentialism and thus have any hope of achieving righteousness beyond the trivial level of arbitrary local standards.  

 

And how do we know the will of God?  The usual notion is that God doesn't micromanage, God just lays down general guidelines.  Thus we get rules based moral codes.  They can have good consequences on average but surely they are often inappropriate.  One size does not fit all.  Another problem is that these divine codes are often "known" because people claim to have received them from God.  It's especially bad when they are supposed to be global and eternally fixed.  I guess the thinking is that God said it and God is global.  But that's muddled thinking.  It doesn't follow that signals from a broad source are necessarily for a broad audience.  A military officer with authority over many soldiers can give different commands to different soldiers at different times.   Much greater consequentialist precision is attainable if we let different societies receive different moral codes and let them change over time.  Conditions vary, after all.  What is absolutely right is consequences that serve God, but rules and missions toward that should not be too rigid.  For God. 

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So how does a society or voluntary association know what God wants for it?  Do we need prophets all the time?  Why would you think that?  Every democracy is a theocracy.  Everyone is a prophet.  We know God through the perception of God by many people.  Science and tradition develop the same way.  Many people over a long period of time develop a consensus.  So collective directives from God are known through collective wisdom: science, democracy, and tradition.  

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But that doesn't mean God can't give us individual guidance.  It just means that individual guidance is just individual.   And local guidance is local.  And guidance for a time period is only for that time period.  

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So, when parents bring their children to us for moral education, we will teach them this.  We will teach them to respect the current collective will that applies to them and to be sensitive to interaction with God.  

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This is not just "when in Rome do as the Romans do," moral relativism, though the default should certainly be to respect local ways until a higher mandate intervenes.   This is more than that because of scale hierarchy, with the larger and higher level taking priority.  Rome is not the world and it's certainly not God, as fully known by the totality of all minds everywhere and everywhen.  The more transcendent is more transcendent.  It's a continuum.   In Rome you do as the Romans do except where they are violating Italian norms except where they are violating European norms except where they are violating current world norms except where they are violating norms you know to transcend the current time.  God can call on us to return to tradition or go in new directions, either of which kind of vision can diverge radically from anything going on in the world.  But such calls should always be considered individual.  It just doesn't work to have a standard of letting people claim divine inspiration as an excuse to violate norms or exert divine authority.  If God wants you to do something unusual then you will receive your instructions directly from God.  

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I say God will inspire you individually if you are to do something new and different, or to join in some innovative new ways.  Yet I also say God has to  be parsimonious with interventions because each intervention has complex side effects in other worlds.  If that idea is true then wouldn't it be most efficient to divinely certify someone's authority with one miracle rather than to make many tiny miracles for many individuals?  No, it wouldn't.  That's not how it works.  It's easier to space them out.  It's "cheaper" to make them in really busy environments with lots of randomness influenced from lots of different directions.  God would prefer to verify new ideas in the form of many tiny miracles.  If God wants to give a stamp of approval to some innovation then God will let you know personally.  

 

So divine guidance varies across social sets.  Morality is achieved when scope of impact and scope of met standard are in harmony.  When you're doing as the Romans do, when in Rome.  Unless the Romans do as the world prohibits.  It's like the way only states can regulate commerce that doesn't cross state lines, but the federal government can regulate interstate commerce.  Local standards are mostly enough for that which mostly has local impacts.  Scale of impact can be a matter of guesswork, but the better guesses come from higher levels.  Your best guess is OK until contradicted.    Lower levels don't necessarily have to ask permission for everything, because presumably their ability to act independently means they are already trusted to follow norms, but higher levels can exert higher authority, assert that something special pertains.  The higher scale knows best.   States can't be expected to anticipate impacts on other states, but if the federal government tells them they are having such impacts they should listen.  Do your thing but respond to requests--which may involve changing your thing.  At every level, people are doing what God guides them to do, and we may be moving parts in a great machine grinding against each other.  But we should avoid grinding unless compelled.  If God's infinite wisdom knows a counterintuitive action needs to happen because of unusual global impact nobody else could know, then God can make that happen--directly, or through people who are by no means moral themselves.   What God's transcendent morality means is that God gets a free pass.  Not that you do.  Your perception of God's will can contribute to a group perception that is different and you must learn to accept the authority of the higher perception while retaining your own as right for you.  Maybe you are right and others are being used in ignorance for the time being.  Perhaps you can persuade them, but you don't have a right to any particular response.     Your vision of God does not give you authority over others, but the collective vision of God gives others authority over you while you are part of the collective.   

 

What makes you part of a collective?  Perhaps merely impacting it.  Perhaps it takes both you and the collective communicating desire to maintain the association.  The impact standard allows any group with a grievance to make demands, but it hopes (usually ineffectively) to protect victims  from abuse from outside their social set.  The "membership" standard is more technically fair, but leaves it possible for groups to conflict and for weaker groups to be put upon by stronger groups.    The weaknesses of the impact standard are less tractable than the weaknesses of the membership standard.  Under the membership standard a virtuous hierarchy could theoretically  ensure that arrangements within and between groups are peaceful and fair.  Under the impact standard no orderly hierarchy of standards can ever exist because any group formed at any time can make a demand of any other group, even the entire human race.    The impact standard empowers minority rule, which rejects how Theoconsequentialists know the will of God so it's immoral.   The only moral way to judge what a person belongs to is to ask what groups do they accept membership in that also accept them as members.    Under a membership standard, groups can evaluate impact so it's also the more comprehensive standard.  

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At any rate, we know the will of God through the perception of the majority of people.   By definition, most people have common sense and divine inspiration, so what do they need religion for?  Logically, religion is either redundant or it tells people things their individual common sense and divine inspiration may not.  It gives a collective wisdom.  The question to ask about a religion is whether it is acting like a membership collective or an impact collective.  Did you join it willingly or is it making demands on you because it didn't like the way you looked at it?  Religions that are impact collectives often  persuade people to do things that aren't common sense.  God mostly wants most of us to do common sense things.  While rare evil people often do get used to correct each other's effects in surprising ways, more of them are not required.  The morality God wants for most of us is pretty boring.  The kinds of things most people do most of the time are just fine.  That's because, while things aren't exactly as God wants them and never will be (infinity can only be approached), things are definitely on track, going the way God wants them to go.   The people who cause wars and microwave gerbils and write bad checks and stuff are freaks.  Morality mostly consists of just being ordinary.  Your order can help you be ordinary.  

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But let's go back to those gerbils.  God doesn't care about this behavior, per se.  The agony of gerbils (or factory farm animals) is even more inconsequential than yours and mine.  But microwaving gerbils indicates you're a freak who may be disruptive.  It makes you that way.  And God doesn't like that.   Normal humans have compassion, and God will indulge us in that predilection if we do good work.  The importance of cruelty is that it is a bad quality for significant people, not that victims matter.  So it's fine with God if animals suffer to make meat as long as we don't think about it (and avoid the other side effects).    In that sense, at that level of significance disparity, mental purity really is what matters to the universe.  The problem here is with the notion that evil can be concealed.  In theory it's OK to microwave gerbils provided you forget you ever did it, but you really can't.  Not if you're normal.  But what is normal regarding meat?  The average human will eat meat when available but most people in the world don't eat mountains of meat with every meal because it's expensive and a great way to make it expensive is to require it to be as humane as possible.  Factory farms and veganism are both abnormal.

Everybody has to work, everybody has some discomfort at times, and everybody dies when their mission in this world is done, but not pointlessly, and imposition of prolonged pain should not be a local norm.  Most people feel that way.  Yet psychopaths continue to be born and their impacts continue to make sociopaths who take power and create narcissists.  Someday we'll get wise and keep them out of power.   

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Things will be better in the future.  Based on what we know it's possible to speculate that if God wants to ultimately create some steady state reality it must entirely consist of a population of super-beings existing in harmony, their personalities linked in an orderly manner without total distinctions between individuals.  Because that's where extrapolation leads: increasing percentage of the universe intelligent, increasing power to that intelligence, increasing order and harmony.   All those people in the future are impacted, and they need consideration.  God is how they get considered.  

 

What's inside the black box of God's mind doesn't matter, though.  For moral guidance, we just need to understand inputs and outputs as they pertain to us.  We exist in time serving to improve.  All that matters for the foreseeable future is motion toward transforming the universe.  Back on Earth, humans tend to be loving social animals that are also capable of learning to be pack predators.  We're neither sheep nor wolves.  We're apes.  We're flexible, but our default is kindness and cooperation within the tribe, and the human superpower over other apes is the ability to expand the tribe.  That's what God likes about us.  Exceptions to the default must only be acts of God.  We should understand that necessity and forgive God for it.  We should have no mercy when humans arrogate "the will of God" to impose their individual will on others.  God is observed through the eyes of the mass of humans, not through messages to leaders.   Not that we don't need operational organization, but it needs to execute policy set by the masses.  But the masses can be led against their instincts.  So, it's important that truth be shared, because lies sure will be.  Share what you truly believe and if it forms part of what inspires others (the rest being God's verification to each individual) they'll follow.   Mozi is right when he says false leadership is the root of all evil.    What makes leadership false is leaving God out of the equation.  When the emperor violates traditions (established over time by the influence of God on a people) and imposes that transgressive authority down the hierarchy without anyone checking with God, that's false leadership.  But checking with the people is always checking with God. 

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God's will involves vast goals and a great deal of flexibility in paths to them.  God has the ability to directly manage the invisible details that make up the complex path in ways we can't calculate.  The exceptions and surprises are not entrusted to mere individual humans.  Our job is to be ourselves, which we already know how to do, which we were made by broad influences stemming from God.  The more detailed and specific a person's claim about God's special will for another person the more likely that claim is to be a result of human fabrication or misunderstanding.     Fabrications are wrong and misunderstandings will naturally be corrected or rejected (depending on how outlandish they are).  But what I say is merely inferred from general trends.  General instructions come from the general populace.  As a rule, deference to the greater majority is what we should all do, but God may force exceptions.  Perceive  your own specific instructions locally and share them honestly.  Do what you are good at, not necessarily what profits or pleases you.  

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Now what I'm saying may seem contradictory.  God is mostly known through the mass of people yet you can be open to special individual instructions.   There's not necessarily a conflict.  Individual instructions add to what God requires generally of all (what is known through mass experience).   They can ask for extra duties from individuals.  They don't give extra liberties or exceptional authority that contradicts the regular stuff.   When God wants that kind of stuff done it won't involve communication.  It will just get made to happen.  That doesn't exempt you from anything.  It is a burden.   We should arrogate no special treatment or status.   If God uses  you to commit a crime, you must have been selected because (1) God wanted that crime done and (2) God had no problem with you being punished as for the crime anyway.  To avoid such "extra duty" you might want to become better for serving some other way.   You will be used for what  you are good for, so be attentive to what you are good for.   But did I mention God is concerned with results, not justice?  From each according to ability.  You might get drafted for a constructive purpose based on necessity rather than justice.  Why do you think your own feelings are what is most important?  

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So what a Theoconsequentialist must do to be moral is abide by God's mandates in the form of the norms perceived locally (to the extent they are in harmony with higher norms).   Plus, we have our own denominational requirements and whatever we are personally inspired to, both applicable to the extent they don't conflict with higher and broader requirements.  But what does "locally perceived norms" mean?  You actually have some flexibility here.  To the extent the law is a product of democracy, you can simply know norms by knowing the law.  To the extent democracy is not in effect, you have to look at what most people actually do.  What about when crime is the norm?  What about when majorities vote for laws and then mostly violate them?  In the face of contradiction you have no moral duty to abide by both.  You have a choice.   Estimating benefit for the common good and listening to your personal inspiration may tell you which norm to respect.

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Abide by common norms while being sensitive to God.  So, how can I criticize the Christian essence of judging character by testing susceptibility to pressure?  Isn't it the same thing?  Respecting the majority and bowing to pressure are not the same because they are opposites.  They are inside out from each other.  One puts the local highest, the other puts it lowest.  Morality consists in prioritizing the larger crowd and the larger context.  Submitting to whatever influence is at hand is the opposite.  When you say you believe nonsense just so you can be a cool kid that's submitting to influence based on proximity and power not based on the true feelings of the greater majority.  Submissiveness and concern for the common good can both lead to cooperative behavior but for very different reasons and with different kinds of details.  

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So, to sum up my meandering: There are many moral standards, but not all are created equal.  A moral standard has more legitimacy when it is more broadly supported, so  you might think an act is acceptable if its impact is no larger than the scope within which it is acceptable.  But we can't know the full impact of our actions, so we have to consult God.  And we know God through humans who can detect God.   Which brings us back to judging acceptability based on breadth of support.    So generally a moral act is an act that can be judged acceptable (or excellent) to a majority of humans within the collectives the actor is a member of.   As a rule of thumb, we should do what most people in our society do, or what they say they want people to do.  But beyond human societies, God can directly compel us to do things that our usual moral rules oppose, and in such cases those acts are still morally acceptable because God's will is the broadest standard, but such special exceptions don't change the rightness or applicability of normal human standards.  Righteous civil disobedience is moral and so is properly prosecuting people for that same civil disobedience.  Soldiers on both sides of a war can be personally moral, though the higher leaders on at least one side probably aren't.  People are parts of different collectives, which give them different missions from God, and have different individual roles to play.  Missions from God are valid as such only for the target individual or target group.  They don't give you any special authority or permission, because everyone has missions from God.  Missions from God are not a privilege, just a burden, though they can inspire reform if they resonate with others through their own direct inspiration from God.  

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But this comes down to advising passivity.  Receive the majority standard, but be receptive to special instructions.  Where is leadership and innovation?  It's a kind of special instruction.  By understanding God (or anything else) you become capable of receiving inspiration others may not, including wisdom that lets you generate your own inspiration.    For example, as Theoconsequentialists we get how the consequences of a course of action should make humanity more capable and can usually guess how to do it.   Rather than waiting for inspiration before using common sense extrapolation, we should leave it to inspiration to tell us when something unusual pertains so we should be more hesitant .   Other kinds of people can receive classes of understanding, wisdom, in other ways and not need inspiration or a vote for every little thing.  Does all this mean some people have "messages from God" others have a duty to heed?  Allowing that kind of claim to have authority is no kind of system.  No, some people can be inspired and they can share their inspiration and if God wants others to accept it God will lead them to do so.   Always authority stems from the will of God as perceived by people generally.   In fact you could summarize the prime directive of Theoconsequentialism thusly:  power to the people.  

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This is a huge topic.  Look here for further discussion of it, especially blog2 and blog7.