Question

Hello Rabbi,
You cited Maimonides at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed, where he seems to classify morality as a convention (accepted opinions / “commonly held notions”), and you explained that he probably meant things that are more aesthetic in nature, based on the examples he himself gave.
An additional support for your point can be found at the beginning of the passage. When Maimonides explains the questioner’s approach (which is mistaken), he explicitly writes that the questioner’s claim was that man, at the beginning of his creation before the sin, was “like the other animals, having no intellect and no thought, and not distinguishing between good and evil.”
If so, it is explicit in his words that man in fact did have intellect and did distinguish between good and evil.
The full sentence is…
The questioner said: It appears from the plain sense of Scripture that man’s original intention was to be like the other animals, having no intellect and no thought, and not distinguishing between good and evil; but when he disobeyed, his disobedience brought him this great perfection unique to man, namely, that he should possess this apprehension which we have, which is the noblest of the things found in us, and by which we are made exalted…