Platonic ethics

We need to distinguish real ethics from what culture says.  Morality is right and wrong, and cultures often get it wrong.  People generally make that mistake -- they think that if the culture condones something, it must be ethically right, and vice-versa, but we can easily see from history that this is very often not the case.

Ethics (right and wrong) and aesthetics (beautiful and ugly) and value (valuable and junk) and knowledge (true and false) are concepts that make us human, and a full life involves a good deal of agonizing over them.  They all seem to be cultural constructs, but they really exist in a Platonic sort of realm of their own that we can only discover through rational thought.