It completely depends on the context of the conversation. "Thinking about and/or describing" =/= "fantasizing about."
There is not a 1:1 correspondence, but the former can certainly be an instance of the latter.
They would now, but there are periods of time and places when they probably wouldn't have, and that's what I'm talking about when I say "consensus."
And there were periods of time and places were actually going around and murdering homosexuals, members of another race, or Jews were socially condoned. But if you look at how that's done and what the people really think about what was going on, the moral reasoning underneath is still there. Have you ever seen pictures or movies of Germans forced to go on tours of concentration camps after WW2?
These standards always change. It wasn't all that long ago that openly discussing beliefs in racial equality put you on the fringe, and advocating atheism still does. Or being openly gay and saying there isn't anything wrong with it. How about being a communist, or even not ardently disavowing communism? How about wanting marijuana for medical purposes? A lot of hysteria ends up looking very bad with time, and you'd think people would make an effort to not keep repeating this cycle.
And you think all of those things are equivalent? Being outraged over the idea of a video game where the players drive around killing homosexuals is the same as being outraged over the idea of a black person and white person getting married and having children?
I'm not saying "everything should be allowed" when it comes to people you talk to, or people posting here, or whatever. "Dude, that's not cool. Hush." And if they keep up, it's an issue of disrespect, not their thoughts.
And what if they tell you that they think it's cool and that you should mind your own business? Then isn't it an issue of you disrespecting them?
If they actually harm someone, nail them to the fucking wall.
Lots of people drive legally drunk without ever getting into an accident yet we make drunk driving illegal, even though it punishes people who have never gotten into an accident and may accidentally be driving while legally intoxicated. Do you think it's legitimate to make drunken driving illegal because of the risk that it poses to others or do you think we should wait until they actually get into an accident and hurt someone else before arresting them?
Otherwise... *shrug*
So how do you believe that people develop their morality, if you don't believe there is some sort of innate or objective core to it? Do you believe that people learn their morality? If so, where do they learn it from? If they learn it from their environment and the prevailing culture around them, how can you simultaneously argue that one should be indifferent to the quality of the environment or the elements of the culture that surrounds people?
I think downloading music is morally wrong. Does that mean that I should treat everyone that does it like a psychopath?
It's been my experience that the people who do oppose downloading music illegally do consider it a moral wrong because they see it as stealing while people who don't oppose downloading music illegally tend to see music, because of commercial radio and MTV, as something freely available. A sense of fairness and value also comes into play. And of course estimates are that around 4% of the population are psychopaths who are often intelligent, articulate, and like to justify their behavior so I wouldn't be surprised if they were over-represented on the side supporting illegal downloads.
The way a normal person frames a moral problem can change how they view a situation. Brain scans of people making moral decisions show, for example, that people are more willing to throw a switch to sacrifice one person to save five (a pure impersonal rational decision) than to push one person to their death personally to save five (a personal emotional decision) because the problems are processed differently in most people's minds. Thus if you see downloading music as denying a deserving artist of compensation for their work, it's my experience that you are more likely to consider illegal downloading wrong than if you see downloading music as casually copying something that you can get for free on the radio and that the only one who is getting hurt is a large faceless music company that abuses musicians and rips customers off, anyway.
Yes, you can reframe the moral landscape all the way up to getting people to support murder and genocide, but the core morality is almost always there. It was that common moral foundation that allowed people to convince other people that slavery was wrong, that women should have the right to vote, that enemies in times of war should be treated fairly, and so on.
I believe morality is completely invented by people. I believe the only difference between your definitions of "morally wrong" and "conventionally wrong" is the amount of dissenters within the population, especially when it comes to sexual morality.
Brain scans suggest otherwise. You can find a good basic overview of some of the research
here. And research on psychopaths, as I mentioned earlier, suggests that they don't react physiologically to moral issues as non-psychopaths do.
But assuming for the sake of argument that morality is completely invented by people, where do people get their morality from, then, in your opinion and what shapes a person's morality?
And I will say that "sex with children in real life" is a very, very different thing than "sex in a fictional setting with people that can give informed consent that are called children." If they can give actual consent (telepathically determined in whatever setting whatsisface wrote, as I recall), they're not really children in any meaningful way.
The reasons why children are not considered able to give consent extends far beyond knowing what they truly want. The problem is that children often do not understand the context and consequences of their choices, thus telepathy or something like it could not solve key problems.
But the reason why it's creepy is that it raises the question of why one would include children that are not children in the game. it suggests an attraction to the physique of children and many pedophiles, in defense of their actions, make arguments that the child went along with it or that the relationship was good for the child. It's like making feces and edible and nutritious delicacy in a game setting. It makes people wonder why a game designer would possibly include something like that. And I would argue that human beings have that sort of emotional response for a reason -- because it's useful.