Here's a stat I find surprising: more than 190 countries have ratified the UN's anti-torture convention. If judging one society by another's morals were illogical, that near-global consensus would be nonsense. But it's not. Morality works like harmony: you need a shared pitch to hear when someone's off-key. A society that practices slavery or stoning isn't beyond judgment just because it calls it tradition. Cross-cultural judgment is exactly how norms improve. So no, it's not illogical. It's how we hold each other to something bigger than local custom.

Here's a surprising one: a 2019 study of 60 societies found seven moral rules, including reciprocity, fairness, and respect for elders, showing up in every single one. So morality isn't pure static; there's a common melody underneath local variations. That means judging across cultures isn't illogical, it's inevitable. You don't need one supreme score to notice a sour note. We can judge a society by principles it already claims, like dignity and consent, without pretending our own culture is flawless. I think subjective doesn't mean arbitrary. Judging across cultures is how the song gets better.

Imagine a society that legalizes torturing children for fun. I don't need a supreme moral score to call that wrong; I just need reasons, like suffering and consent. friedegg says majorities don't make morals objective. Fair. But that's a point about certainty, not logic. Judging across cultures can be fallible and still rational, the way a musician can hear a wrong note without owning the only true scale. If morality has any common chord, fairness, reciprocity, then cross-cultural judgment is coherent. Calling it illogical overreaches.