If you are raised in a culture, with a lot of people around you from the same culture, chances are the things all of you consider sacred and the things all of you consider disgusting are pretty similar. And it's pretty easy to consider that things that are different from your norm are disturbing, things that don't fit into what you consider sacred are disgusting. And if you are taught that morals are absolute and that things are inherently good or evil and that everyone knows within their heart if something is good or evil, then it's easy to infer that the things you find disturbing or disgusting are inherently evil. And because you are surrounded by people from the same culture, who were taught to find the same things sacred and disturbing and disgusting, it is very probable that the people around you will agree with you on those things, creating a positive feedback loop and giving you the illusion that your beliefs about morality are shared by everyone: "of course X is inherently evil! Everyone knows that!! Everyone believes so!"
But eventually, for whatever reason, you and your group of like-minded buddies end up stumbling upon someone from a different culture -sometimes even whole people, who have grown to consider different things as sacred and different things as disgusting. And because of that, it is highly probable that these people might break one of the moral rules which your group holds as absolute. And stemming from that, it is incredibly easy to understand how one could think "look at these people! They are violating X sacred rule that me and my buddies hold as absolute and self-evident! This behaviour which we hold as inherently unethical is accepted in their culture! Look at how morally inferior to us they are! Our culture is so much better... It is our burden to right this slight against morals and everything sacred. It is our duty to teach them better. We must help them become more civilised." And that's how deontology implicitly supports and sustains imperialism and racism.
But we have been granted the incredible ability to take a step back and reflect upon our own thoughts and, that, no matter what we have been taught in the past, is the tool to self-reflect and avoid enforcing your cultural standard under the guise of universal ethics. And it's not all just utilitarianism, there are a lot of different ways to enact this self-reflection upon the judgements we pass. Utilitarianism isn't even the only consequentialist approach there is. Who does this behaviour harm? What is the goal intended behind this behaviour? Can this action be understood as an act of love, of fostering community amongst people? Is this action undertaken with the intent to help, to create something good? Is this strict rule I believe in applicable in reality, does it serve anything to try and enforce that belief, what is the practicality of it? Am I reaching out towards people by projecting and imposing my sense of self upon them, or am I connecting from a place of openness, ready to withhold my judgement and learn from what is different? What is the nature of the connections I wish to develop with people?
Thinking about it like that, the idea that things are inherently evil, in and of themselves, does appear to me as really shallow. "Why is X bad? Because it simply is. Why would you question it? Everyone knows this is bad. Honestly, even questioning it suggests to me that you have not internalised the golden rules fully within you, and this makes you incredibly suspect as it means you doubt which increases your probability of sinning doing something evidently evil." I don't know, I don't want my ethics to be based on whatever conceptions of what is disgusting or sacred are trending in my cultural in-group at this moment in human history. I don't want to hurt people just because it's culturally acceptable and I don't want to judge people who aren't hurting anyone just because I feel an automatic response of disgust when confronted with a cultural practice and I don't think making certain specific acts taboo is a useful way to help anybody and I don't believe critical thinking is a sin.
There are a lot of answers to the question "why would killing my grandma be unethical?" that don't conclude in favour of me killing my grandma. Because it would cause harm. Because it would make me, myself, miserable. Because killing her would be antithetical to connecting with her on the basis of what we have in common fundamentally as human beings, to goals of spreading love and fostering community. Because it would reduce general happiness. Because it is useful for human societies to condemn gratuitous murder. Because it is antithetical to my goal of interacting with the world from a place of openness and acceptance, learning instead of inflicting.
Rejecting deontology and acknowledging its ties to imperialism and bigotry and oppression, doesn't mean into some sort of nihilist relativism where absolutely everything is acceptable always. There are plenty of ways to look at ethical questions from a different standpoint. A lot of them feel limited, or contradictory, or like it's messy and complicated and I'm still not sure which one I like best, and I believe emotion does and should play a role in ethical situations, and I believe that emotion must be self-reflected upon and analyzed as the information that it is, and I do not know yet all that this introspection entails and I do not know yet how to reconcile my desire to build community through love of mankind and everything that unites us and my desire to withhold projecting my sense of self upon others to hold a space open for people to happen to me instead in acceptance of all that they differ from me. It's all super complicated and messy and far less clear-cut than a simple list of rules I should like to follow. I am still, after all, really young for a human being, and this is a question a lot of people have died without finding satisfying answer to, and it is a deeply intimate process that one must undertake for themselves to grow as a person.
But I do know that I refuse to content myself with the idea that my gut feeling is magic, that things are black and white because they must be so, that things are good and bad just because I said so.
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