Absolute rules are a sign of underdeveloped moral thinking

I think a good litmus test for how developed someones understanding of ethics is is to see whether they endorse absolute/unconditional, specific moral rules. A few examples of these rules are

• torture is never permissible
• killing is always wrong
• free speech should never be restricted

The reason why these are fairly insane moral beliefs to hold is that when the tradeoff’s become large enough, the rules clearly no longer match our moral intuitions. e.g:

• Is torturing one culpable person in order to stop 20 people dying okay? No? What about torturing one person for an hour to stop 6 billion people dying? What about one person for an hour to stop everyone being tortured forever for the rest of time?
• Ditto for killing
• What about if there’s a magic phrase that if said ends all life. Should we prevent people from speaking that?

Strict moral rules like this can be good social norms to hold. It may well be good and a more stable equilibrium to have a society where most people believe free speech is an absolute right as opposed to a conditional one that can be taken away. They can also be useful heuristics for choosing the right action in most cases. Still, when someone seems to genuinely believe that these are fundamental moral principles that often means one of a few things

• They don’t think in terms of trade-offs. They don’t understand that we have to make choices between different things we morally value and in some situations the trade ratio is high enough to justify breaking almost any injunction.
• Their moral beliefs aren’t sufficiently grounded. They’re thinking about specific acts being bad rather than about the underlying reason they care about those acts. e.g: Akin to someone who wants to avoid living near a MacDonalds because they understand it correlates with fatness, but does not understand the underlying thing of calories = fat. Ideally you think “suffering is bad” or “intentionally inflicting suffering is extra super bad”
• They’re insane (a.k.a hardcore deontologists)

Anyway, I guess the TLDR in my experience is that someone who would endorse a statement like “torture is always morally wrong in all cases” is probably not good at ethics or in a small subset of cases just has really weird intuitions.