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Darius then pressed some Indians-who ate their dead-what it would take for them to burn the deceased? They reacted with horror at the very mention of the idea. SUGGESTED READING Kierkegaard against the herd By Alastair HannayWhat then are we supposed to think about the differences in moral views? When Kierkegaard encountered the chapter in Herodotus in which the historian describes the scene in which the Persian king Darius asked some Greeks-who burned their dead-what it would take for them to eat their dead fathers, the Greeks recoiled and answered nothing could persuade them. Kierkegaard was a master at describing what we are up against in ourselves when we try to walk our talk about the likes of justice, equality, and love. It could in fact be argued that it would not be fair if moral knowledge were not equally accessible to all, because then the highly intelligent and educated would have a moral advantage over the masses. Kierkegaard also believed our knowledge of right and wrong is universally distributed in the form of conscience. Kant, the sage of Konigsberg, was even open to the possibility of aliens possessing the rational capacity to be subjects of the moral law, sadly enough, however, he was dubious about the rational status of people with a different hue of complexion. Kant, with whom Kierkegaard is often in deep dialogue, believed all reasonable beings can discover the moral law within themselves and in that sense, he believed that moral knowledge is universally distributed. Kierkegaard did not offer anything approaching a systematic ethics nevertheless, the Danish firebrand was, a matchless moral phenomenologist, a master at describing what we are up against in ourselves when we try to walk our talk about the likes of justice, equality, and love. And so, we deceive ourselves, claim our conscience is merely the voice of our own bias and choose the easy way out instead, writes Gordon Marino. But doing the right thing is often synonymous with doing the difficult thing. Our conscience screams out to us and demands we make the ethical choice. We don’t need ethics experts to tell us what the right thing to do is.