Medieval Christians lacked the categories to rank sins by severity

Evidence

If the most sordid and nastiest explanation was usually preferred, we cannot blame the Christians excessively, since they had neither the training nor the disposition to estimate degrees of abomination among forbidden things. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1487

Categorization

• QUESTION: Modern moral-journalism often has the same flatness — all taboos equalized. Is ‘estimating degrees of abomination’ a skill we’ve actually developed, or just relocated?