Modern Morality vs Game Setting

[Fenral]

Personally my basic rule of interpretation is such: if the characters themselves express opinions that match our present day morality, then it should be safe to assume that in that situation, their morality matches ours.

Is this my chance to shill Star Trek again? No? Pretty please?

From a spec-fic perspective, nobody really writes cultures wildly divergent from modern moralities unless there is some desire to explore that divergence. POV characters will generally stick pretty closely to a modern perspective by virtue of being, say, spacefarers from Earth, a "modern" human" displaced in time, or even just uncommonly well-read. In FFXIV, we have enlightened scholars form Sharlayan (there's an obvious "yikes" there but I'll ignore it). Even back in ARR, Y'shtola was serving really modern takes on colonialism, to a colonial pirate queen.

So yes, it is rather silly to try and defend cultural attitudes that aren't even defended in the setting. Eorzea (and now Etheirys) may be a weird moral mashup of 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century quandaries, but the setting has only ever been used as a way to reflect on how we got where we are today.