Mithlond
Gondor needs no King!
"The popular moral boundaries according to whom?"
The general 'populace' - hence the term 'popular'
"Even in modern times, there are tribes in Africa and elsewhere that practise female circumcision, when it is generally accepted in the rest of the world that this is immoral.
Not to those who enforce it's practice."
Exactly - hence 'generally accepted in the rest of the world" I don't think the general consensus in the world today would argue with it. Of course, there are always exceptions to every rule.
"Women are subordinates? People who are different are bad?"
Don't remember that in Jesus's sermon on the mount... Unfortunately, organised religions have been used by people with political purposes to achieve their ends...
"Any claim to a transcendent moral authority is utter madness. I can believe Hitler evil - it has no impact on what Hitler is. Belief does not dictate reality."
The only transcendent moral authority is the opinions of the vast majority of people living in a said society at a said time. That is all 'morals' are, hence the fact that opinions are changing towards homosexuality for example where it is not blanket 'immoral' as it once was, and as a society it is not deemed as 'immoral', no matter what individual opinions on it might be.
As for reality/belief, is it not the case that someone's belief defines their reality?
"Two of the greatest acts of terrorism in terms of sheer magnitude - if one takes by definition terrorism to mean the targeting of noncombatants for political purposes - are the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The vast majority of the Western World lives under the delusion that this act was a necessity and for the greater good in order to bring WWII to an end, in order to bring the act within "acceptable morals" of the time and of todays."
War is terror. Thus any form of war or act of war is evil. A notable postscript to the atomic bombings was that prior to 'the bomb' both sides were flattening cities - ie carpet bombing - with thousands of bombs. What the scientists believed 'the bomb' to do was simply to replace those thousands with one single bomb. What separated 'the bomb' from convential bombs, other than strength, were the side effects that the scientists only found out about afterwards - radiation sickness, black rain, people with clothes burned to their skin - and it's almost these side effects of the explosion that make 'the bomb' so terrible. I think once people realised what the bombs could really do, they realised the true evil of them, hence they have never been used since, and hence people have been regretting the dropping of them ever since.
"The majority of people believe Hitler was evil, therefore Hitler was evil.
Argumentum ad populum."
Exactly. That, my friend, is this whole thread summed up in a sentence.