>Ethics shouldn't be as hard as rocket science.

That is true. Ethics should be much, much, much harder than rocket science. Ethics should be harder than quantum mechanics. Morality should be the hardest thing the human brain ever has the opportunity to consider, and if you aren't working that hard, you aren't being moral.

The esteemed professor of philosophy from Duke demonstrates the paucity of his approach in his final sentence, which hinges on the word "might". "Might" is not sufficient for any moral claims, one way or the other. As in so much philosophy, resigning yourself to conclusions which rely on 'maybe' or 'could' or "might" is pointless flum flummery. What we need is "is", and "does", or at least a conscientiously moralizing "should".

His central example exacerbates the problem: honor killings. His analysis leaves no possibility of any ethics other than 'cultural norms'. There is a seed of a worthwhile approach in his premise, that focusing on "the act" is problematic, but immediately grabs the stick by the wrong end by suggesting we should focus on how 'we' respond to the act, hopelessly leaving morality to founder as, again, 'cultural norms'. The problem with the traditional approach to ethics is that it seaks to be physics, and when simplistic logic is insufficient for considering moral claims, there is no recourse but to reject the notion that morality exists in any way.

It is not the act which determines if something is moral, but the reason for the act. Most notably, but not necessarily entirely, whether that cause is honestly and accurately elucidated responsibly. Honor killing is always wrong, and would be even more wrong, not less, if the purported functional reason cited, to restore honor to someone other than the victim, is true. Is all killing wrong? No. Is all murder wrong? That depends on how it is justified, and, yes, includes "cultural norms" to some degree. In our culture we couch this in gedanken of low hanging fruit to determine whether a particular intentional killing is legally murder or "justifiable homicide" or "self-defense", and suffer from this approximation of morality. Is honor wrong? No, but this demands an honest and limited (but not necessarily "well defined"/mechanistic) understanding of what "honor" is. Is honor killing wrong? Yes, always, in each and every case.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.