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christina comments on Questions for Moral Realists - Less Wrong
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By the definitions above, I'm a unitary but not an absolutism theorist. I would describe rationally binding constraints as those that govern prudence, not morality; one can be perfectly prudent without being moral (indeed, if one does not have morality among one's priorities, perfect prudence could require immorality). A brief sketch of my moral theory can be found here.
What would it mean for there to be several? I think morality drops out of personhood. It's possible that other things drop out of personhood, too, or that categories other than persons produce their own special results (although I don't know what any of that might look like), but I wouldn't refer to such things by the same name; that would just be confusing. If there were several moralities it's unclear which would bind actors or how they'd interact. Of course people have all kinds of preferences, but these govern what it's prudent for those actors to do and what axiology is likely to inform their attempts at world-steering, not what is moral.
People. Only people are morally obliged to do or not do things. Only people have rights that makes it particularly moral or immoral to do or not do things with them. (I have a secondary feature to my system that still only constrains people but doesn't refer so specially to acting on them, of which I am less confident; it's a patch for incompleteness, not a grounding principle.) Rights and the obligation to respect them are just a thing that happens when something complicated and persony exists.
Only cosmetically. There could have failed to be any people, or there could be only one person in the world who could find it a practical impossibility to violate their own rights, or such far-flung people that they couldn't interact in any potentially immoral way. But given the existence of people who can interact with each other, I think morality is a necessity.
Only cosmetically. If there were no people - or if everyone's preferences changed so they always waived all their rights - or something, then morality could cease to be an interesting feature of the world, but it would still be there.
Caring is not even morally obligatory (although compliance is), let alone rationally required.
Interesting thoughts. Definitely agree that morality comes from people, and specifically their interactions with each other. Although I would additionally clarify that in my case I consider morality (as opposed to a simple action decided by personal gain or benefit) comes from the interaction between sentients where one or more can act on another based on knowledge not only of their own state but the state of that other. This is because I consider any sentient to have some nonzero moral value to me, but am not sure if I would consider all of them persons. I am comfortable thinking of an ape or a dolphin as a person, but I think I do not give a mouse the same status. Nevertheless, I would feel some amount of moral wrongness involved in causing unnecessary pain to the mouse, since I believe such creatures to be sentient and therefore capable of suffering.
I'm not sure how the rest of my morality compares to yours, though. I don't think there is any one morality, or indeed that moral facts exist at all. Now, this does not mean that I subscribe to multiple moralities, especially those whose actions and consequences directly contradict each other. I simply believe that if one of my highest goals is the protection of sapient life, and someone else's highest goal is the destruction of it, I cannot necessarily expect that I can ever show them, with any facts about the world, that their morality is wrong. I could only say that it was a fact about the world that their morality is in direct contradiction with mine.
Now I don't believe that anything I've said above about morality (which was mostly metaethics anyway) precludes my existence or anyone else's existence as a moral actor. In fact, all people, by their capability to make decisions based on their knowledge of the present state of others, and their ability to extrapolate that state into the future based on their actions, are automatically moral actors in my view of things. I just don't necessarily think they always act in accordance with their own morals or have morals mutually compatible with my morals.
Nevertheless, I think that facts are very useful in discussing morality, because sometimes people are not actually in disagreement with each other's highest moral goals--they simply have a disagreement about facts and if that can be resolved, they can agree on a mutually compatible course of action.