In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground. You have to say, imagine you were in Iran, and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong. How would you feel about that? And if someone of the older generation says, well, our government takes care of us, and it's up to their government to take care of them, they're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped, and he feels he's honor-bound to kill her. Well, he's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited, and they're unmovable in any way by logic. They're just inherited mores. Today we would say something like, well, imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized. Would you deserve to be killed? And he would say, well that's not in the Koran. That's not one of the principles I've got. Well you, today, universalize your principles. You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them. If you have a principle such as, people shouldn't suffer unless they're guilty of something, then to exclude black people you've got to make exceptions, don't you? You have to say, well, blackness of skin, you couldn't suffer just for that. It must be that blacks are somehow tainted. And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear, can't we, and say, well how can you consider all blacks tainted when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black. And you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic.