A worrisome trend I have been noticing for a couple of years now is the idea that humanity will eventually find a truly universal moral code (or already has).

This worries me since that isn't the first time people have thought that... and those times aren't looked at too fondly. As a simple illustration: Do you think that the definition of morality from the 1950s (in the west) is more to your liking than what we have today? If not, bear in mind that there is a point in time 70 years in our future which might consider itself "more enlightened" than today. Realize that this question is valid for all dates in the past and I am sure that at least one of them sounds unpleasant to you.

Personally, I think that the problem isn't that people don't agree on things or aren't buying into a top-down behavioural edict, but that they don't understand the details of the disagreements they DO have. If we could get better at explaining ourselves, our disagreements would be more precise and more respectful (the old, "I don't have to think you are a monster in order to hope that I prevail over you" shtick).

So, this interest in singular morality concerns me since it immediately becomes an obsession with compliance as opposed to understanding. Of course, it is also complicated as these systems are usually just a sea of special-cases, as opposed to any general principles, and are famously inflexible (when you look at the discourse around morality of interacting with AI, one is quickly thankful that no general AI exists to suffer under our bizarre hang-ups and rigid edicts).

As a secondary aspect of this, I suspect that this may be the idea behind another sentiment I have seen for quite some time: All media must be propaganda. This is what you see when people obsess that media "shows bad acts resulting in bad outcomes" (for some arbitrarily defined "bad") or when people talk about the importance of characters being good "role models" (I hope that people understand things in more nuanced ways than whole-cloth emulation of cartoon characters).

These concepts are complicated and nuanced... just like the universe. Seeking such short-cuts is doomed to fail as either authoritarian propaganda or top-down religious dogma (the original "authoritarian propaganda").

The cynical side of my mind is concerned that this is yet another sign that we are well into a dark age,
...Nights