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This thought experiment is perhaps "overfitting to a desired conclusion," (and is certainly an unsubtle allegory) but I want to see what other people think. Where else has this comparison been drawn?
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height, what might we expect?
Well one thing is it would be very rude to point out that people have different heights. To minimize cognitive dissonance, we would notice that rulers and yardsticks are banned, or at least tabooed. The taboo of course has justification:
I think they definitely would not go around saying "tall people are morally better." And if you tried to gently tell them "Well you certainly act like they are: tall people make more money and have better life outcomes! And you don't call it unjust!" they will probably get angry and call you evil for suggesting that people have different heights. They will say, the injustice is that life outcomes are inequal among the abled and disabled; between men and women; between supposed racial groups; and so many other axes.
They seem to be making a category error. How can a fact of height differences be evil? So you smuggle a ruler into the room. And you point out that Alice is in fact taller than Bob. "It is just an empirical fact" you say. Of course the reply will be something like, "You think your words are disentangled from context, but the social function of your sentence makes a moral claim." This response is inevitable, even if you bookend your remarks with the notice: "THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THIS CLAIM IS TO POINT OUT EMPIRICAL FACT"
At first you think, well its society's social context that is smuggling in the moral "oughts." The problem is certainly not with reality. But then you realize they are kind of right? The social function of this claim, indeed has moral content. In this society, height simply is the gauge of moral status. Stating otherwise doesn't make it go away, just like saying 2 + 2 = 5 doesn't make it true -- that's reality for you. It's at this point you realize your neck is getting a bit strained, because you're constantly looking up -- everyone else in this room is very, very tall. These arguments evolved in Tall Clubs around the nation and are handed down from the credentialed Tall to the less-credentialed mid-statures.
It makes you wonder why all of their interventions to the low-status involve treating symptoms and correlates, instead of identifying how to change the moral valuation, which is the root cause of it all.
So by now most of you are thoroughly short on patience, having realized immediately that "height = intelligence." But the real point: the academic and intellectual authorities that are loudest about the problem are the ones stringently enforcing the taboo holding it all up! Is that a coincidence?
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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