Great article. I wonder if this double standard could be thought of as the grey area of moral intuitions.

While we might say intuitions are synonymous with emotions, I think there is a distinction. People generally do employ reason about their moral beliefs and the strong emotions are based on how confident they are of that reasoning (whether that reasoning is actually sound is a separate issue).

But most of us rely only on intuitions, with varying amounts of input from "informed" ethical reasoning. Which means anything that falls between the obviously immoral and obviously moral, is less certain for most people. So they move to tolerance, or relativism because there is no clear cut answer.

And notice this shift to tolerance doesn’t happen if someone is discussing a particular normative theory and taking it to it’s logical conclusion. Because the method of reasoning is more analytical. Intuitions are intellectually hazy.