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In a world where moral status is defined by height, I would certainly not expect it to be rude to point out that people have different heights.
In the world today, it is not rude to point out that people have different moral statures. If I say in public today "some people are morally better than other people", nobody will dispute that at all. As far as the obvious allegory goes, if I say in public today "some people are smarter than other people", nobody disputes that either.
If I lived in a world where height was thought to be either identical with or strongly correlative with moral virtue, if there were actually a guide to individual moral goodness that straightforward, I'd expect people to just say it. That's the hypothetical you've presented.
It seems to me that in the real world, the common, folk understanding is that morality and intelligence are different things, and that people differ on both scales, and that both moral goodness and intelligence are desirable qualities to possess. But I'd argue that pop culture is full of examples of very intelligent people who are evil, which seems to show that people distinguish these two axes. 'Evil genius' is a cliché! Lex Luthor is both extraordinarily intelligent and a complete monster. The likely fact that Lex has a higher IQ than Clark Kent has not made people conclude that Lex is really the good guy. Really, just as much as the evil genius is a cliché, the virtuous simpleton is just as much of a cliché. Over twenty years ago I remember Abigail Nussbaum complaining about this. Intelligence or education (which are admittedly not the same, but often correlated) make somebody effete and morally depraved, absent the simple, common-sense goodness of the less intelligent salt-of-the-earth types who built their world. The quarterback is more idolised than the nerd. Thor is morally better than Loki, his cleverer brother. Conan the barbarian is not an idiot, but he is portrayed as more vital, more morally whole, than all the necromancers and dark wizards he fights. Thulsa Doom would probably beat Conan in an IQ test; but we know who the good guy is.
I think the Freddie deBoer argument, in The Cult of Smart, that there is a strong tendency to moralise intelligence is true in certain quarters, but it's just clearly not the case that we live in a world where moral status is defined by a person's intelligence.
IME this get an immediate retort of "yes, for example people making such claims are morally inferior".
The best you can hope for is that people will "agree", but their idea of who's better and who's not will be completely out of whack. Hell, when I brought up Rotherham et al on reddit, I got people saying to me that the real problem in the UK is billionaires. If people can't bring themselves to condemn unrepentant serial rapists, and would rather use them as a prop to tear into their Favored Enemy, you can have no hope of establishing any consensus morality.
Just use an example coded in the opposite direction. Is MLK Jr. morally better than Donald Trump?
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