Once you realize the socially constructed nature of morality, you get to choose whether or not to
buy into it.
Image from Green Talk.
I venture to guess that most people are moral realists. That is, they think that rules and principles of morality — that stealing and lying are wrong, for instance — actually exist in some form independently of what anybody thinks of them. By contrast moral anti-realists deny the independent reality of moral rules and principles. They say that moral rules are only social conventions. As evidence the anti-realists point to the fact that different cultures have different moral norms.
An extreme example is honor killing.1 In some cultures it is considered morally obligatory to kill a woman who has brought disgrace to her family by having sex outside of marriage. This is so even if she was raped; she should not have put herself in a situation where that could happen to her. People in most western cultures consider honor killing hideously wrong. But there is no objective way to decide which one it is, right or wrong, obligatory or forbidden.
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