So, assuming that people are well-intentioned and aren't purely virtue signaling for social capital, what's the measure of a "virtue" like this? Most people try to hand wave it as "the smaller car does approximately X less damage to 'the environment'", but that's all but completely unmeasurable. How do you quantify damage to the environment? How do you weight that against needing to get the kids to school? I'm not convinced there's any meaningful way to do it since it's a global measure for a local action. It seems to me that absent any universal morality, then, a better measure of a virtue is against itself: what an individual is willing to give up to uphold their virtue. "I drive the smaller car into the ground over 20 years, forgoing the luxuries of heated seats in newer models" or "I don't shop on Amazon, preferring instead to take extra time to acquire items locally" sort of a thing. It's still far from a reliable, quantifiable measure, and any of these things can be weaponized in any number of directions against unfavorable people or ideas, but I think it at least scopes the idea of "more and less moral" a little better/more locally.
In the words of John Oliver's character in Community, "the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."
There are degrees of evil and lines that shouldn’t be crossed, but for the most part, if you’re doing anything in this world, you’re going to be interacting with evil in some capacity.
I’m writing this on my Foxconn iPhone as I’m making ethically sourced coffee— but is the coffee really ethically sourced? It produced a lot of carbon being shipped to me and being roasted. I’m about to go write some software that I know is being used to teach things that I consider reprehensible and evil.
I’ve personally chosen to focus on one or two changes where I can make a difference, and for the most part, I’m letting the rest go.