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Popular opinions do not need protection, the first amendment exists only to protect unpopular or marginalized opinions.Free speech is a complex topic with no easy answer. I think people get confused about some things so it is worth clarifying a couple of key points.The first amendment is misunderstood. If you go into your job tomorrow and call your boss a (insert horrible word) and he fires you, that was not an illegal firing. The first amendment is the law that protects free speech and it only says that congress shall not impede your freedom of speech. It stands as a protection from a government so that all viewpoints can be allowed to reach the public eye.While the first amendment is a law that protects speech I think the value of free speech is another thing altogether. As a society, we must value our ability to speak freely and express our ideals without fear.Freedom is speech does not mean freedom from consequences…. So then what does the “free” in freedom of speech mean? To me, free speech means being able to express yourself and your ideas without fear of severe consequences.Using AOCs logic North Koreans have free speech. A North Korean can say whatever they please- Kim Jung Un cannot control their minds after all. But there will be consequences for what they say.So if the cost of your speech is that you lose your job, lose your home, face death threats and harassment, and endure public humiliation, do you have free speech?I do not think death threats are free speech. I do no think doxxing is free speech. But I do think insulting terms and offensive language is free speech. Free speech protections were not designed to protect mainstream popular opinions- they were designed to protect unpopular opinions.I always get the same example to defend. A man walks into work and calls his boss the N-word, shouldn’t he be fired? If I defend the man I defined anarchy. If I defend his boss, I am not defending free speech- or so people think.I do think the man who said that should be fired but not for practicing his free speech. In a workplace setting, you are expected to conduct yourself in a respectful and reasonable manner. If you violate said policy you can (and should) be terminated. That man’s job isn’t saying “you can never say that thing” by firing our racist friend they are saying “you are not allowed to be hostile and disrespectful to your co-workers and you violated that rule” by firing him.I do not think we should live in a nation where people run around screaming whatever horrid language they can think of. I think we should be polite, respectful, and kind. But you should have the right to express yourself publically or otherwise in your private life however you see fit.Anyway, this got long so feel free to scroll down to the bottom for my summary.Social Media:The most obvious free speech battleground right now is 100% social media. In recent years Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube have shown themselves to be extremely biased in 1 direction.At first, this claim that tech giants were after conservatives seemed conspiratorial but now it is practically fact. Take the following examplesLearn to code:After a large number of journalists were laid off the hashtag “learn to code” started trending. Left-wing publications had operated under the premise that coal miners and truck drivers need to be trained in modern professions, like coding, instead of clinging to their soon-to-be irrelevant jobs. This was obviously patronizing and showcased the prevalent elitism among mainstream journalists. So when these same left-wing journalists were fired from their jobs and as journalism becomes irrelevant, conservatives started commenting on their posts with learn to code as an ironic insult. For this thousands of twitter users using the hashtag were banned.Covington kids:A couple of years ago a picture and short video emerged of a native American man playing drums in the personal space of a MAGA hat-wearing high-schooler who sported a smirk on his face. The media began to attack this kid and his MAGA hat-wearing classmates without mercy. They were called racist bigots and mocked endlessly.Nathan Phillips, the native American man, then did interviews where he explained his side of the story. He claimed the students were attacking some innocent African Americans and that he intervened in order to keep the peace. Nathan Phillips is a known liar with a history of falsifying his military service records, his tribal affiliation, and now his recounting of events as well. Yet the media bought into it.Despite the warning signs the media bought into this story further and many of the 14-year-old students began receiving death threats as their names became public.Well, then the full story emerged. Turns out these kids were on a field trip to a memorial and while there a group of “Black Israelites” began shouting EXTREMELY graphic, violent, sexist, and racist things at the students. The students then got into a group and began their school chant to drown out the insults. At this point, Nathan Phillips approached the under-age minors and began playing his drums in their face.While all of this was happening Twitter was ablaze with people commenting on the developing story. There were constant death threats, insults, and even doxxing as the names and addresses of these minors were published. Twitter took NO ACTION as children were threatened and attacked. Yet learn to code was met with an instant banHere’s Illhan Omar publishing fake information. Freedom of consequences you say AOC?Zuby:Recently rapper Zuby was banned from twitter for making the following horrible statement.“ok dude”I know, shocking right. Since the person he said dude to was trans it was considered misgendering which means banned.Disregarding the trans movement and the immense amount of unknowns in terms of the medical situation for being trans twitter has taken to being extremely aggressive when it comes to this topic. Even famous feminists are banned for “deadnaming” trans people.Facebook Protests:Recently the whole world has been… nuts.We all know about COVID and I won’t go into that but COVID did expose another case of bias in silicon valley.Mark Zuckerberg in an interview about 2 months ago said that all events organized on Facebook would be banned for violating government lockdown measures. As protestors tried to organize their peaceful rallies they were hampered by Facebook every step of the way.Then we get to today- where a horrible murder took place in the US when George Floyd was killed by police for nothing. Protests followed and many protests turned into riots. Were these protests allowed on Facebook? Absolutely.You see the issue was never “social distancing” but instead was “Republicans”. The right-wing in the US has been anti-lock down so what Facebook did was use their power to ban what they perceived as right-wing protests under the guise of protecting the public.Youtube WHO:Youtube is a known offender when it comes to censorship. They rig their algorithm so that right-wing content is suppressed in favor of left wing-content.But recently they made a serious mistake when they began to act on all mentions of COVID.The CEO of Youtube explained that all claims and information that disagrees with the world health organizations findings would be banned. Sounds good right?Well not really. First the WHO said that COVID did not spread person to person, then they said masks would not help, then they said Trump was racist for halting travel from China, and then they refused to talk about Taiwan because China is infiltrated their organization. The WHO is not the standard for accuracy or truth by any standard.So when 2 ER doctors from California publish a video discussing their findings, the lower mortality rate they found compared to what was expected and discussed if the lockdown was worth it- they were banned. 2 doctors- not reporters, not conspiracy nuts, not politicians- 2 DOCTORS were censored for openly discussing their experience and ideas.Twitter Trump Tweets:Look you can love or hate Trump I do not care. I neither love nor hate him and personally try to avoid the toxic and all-consuming current political climate in the US.Twitter has again shown its bias as it flagged Trump’s tweets as false or misleading. Politicians tweet EVERY DAY and most of them tweet false stuff- welcome to US politics. Yet Twitter has NEVER flagged anyone tweet before- they started with this.This tweet and its flagging are important. Twitter is very left-wing, we know this and Twitter openly admits it. The left-wing of the US has wanted mail-in ballots for everyone for a while now and this is a major goal of the democratic party.If you “get the facts” you are taken to a study that says mail-in voter fraud is extremely rare with only 400 cases in the last 10 years (or something like that).But this is 1 study. There are many studies and many of them say that mail-in voter fraud is extremely common.For instance, in the most recent election in the US for a New Jersey council member 3,000 of the mail-in ballots (20% of all the votes) were found to be fraudulent and had to be thrown out. In addition a postal worker was arrested for voter fraud as he began to tamper with ballots.In Las Vegas the mail-in ballot issue has become a serious problem. The Democrats in that city want to remove all forms if identification verification and send ballots to inactive and unregistered voters. The postal service does not want this AT ALL as most of the inactive voters no longer live at their address- so what happens is 100,000 ballots stack up in the post office just sitting there with nowhere to go. How easy would it be for those 100,000 dead ballots to find a new life in the hands of a political operative?Maybe mail-in voter fraud is rare, but it is not cut and dry. There is a debate here and Twitter has decided we should not have the debate.Wrapping up social mediaThere are so many more cases of this happening. It is a constant factor that is often reported.But Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube are private companies and they have the right to censor or allow whatever they want on their platform.In there lies the issue. Social media is not the government and thus has no obligation to protect free speech. But in this modern era where social media has replaced all forms of in-person communication, this is an issue.Social media is the primary tool we use to communicate and discuss politics in modern America. If the primary tool for discussing, fundraising, rallying, organizing, theorizing, and engaging in politics is operated by one political party that is willing to act unethically than what hope do we have to find objectivity? How can a fair and balanced democracy exist when 1 party controls the primary means of communication?Imagine the day when Facebook only promotes left-wing stories and censors every single right-wing opinion. Imagine a day where only Democrats are allowed on Twitter or a day when Google news and search results only display pre-approved opinions. These corporations would effectively control our democracy. We are giving them the keys to the kingdom.I should also mention I am not a Republican. Many people here think I am because I frequently debate people who hate Republicans or insult people. I am a contrarian politically deep down and I tend to debate whoever is being the most irrational. Back in 2014, I was telling Republicans to calm down and stop asking for that stupid birth certificate.In terms of politics- When I am with my family I am a communist, when I am with my neighbors I am a socialist, when I vote in my city I am a Democrat, when I vote in my state I am a Republican, and when I vote federally (if I vote) I am a libertarian. A fancy way of saying I am everything and nothing, what can I say- I have commitment issues.the Hate MobFreedom from consequences argument is often employed when someone's life is ruined due to something they said. As if a single statement could be bad enough as to warrant your life being destroyed.On December 20th 2013 Justine Sacco sitting at an airport waiting to board her plane for Africa. While waiting around she tweeted the followingGoing to Africa! Hope I don’t get AIDS! Just Kidding! I am White!By the time her plane landed she had lost her job, had her personal information exposed to the world, and was being hounded by the press to explain her joke. Her friends turned on her, her co-workers distanced themselves from her, and her entire career ended with this one moment. It took her years to get another job and rebuild her life from this incident.Now was her joke good? No. Was it offensive and wrong? Kinda. Humor is not meant to be subjective and offensive jokes are part of comedy. I will get into this later but the point remains.She made a weak joke on Twitter than had racial undertones and her ENTIRE life was destroyed. She did not hurt anyone, she did not affect anyone’s life, nor did she cause harm through her joke. It was not ok.Chick Fil A is a popular American restaurant. I frequent it in my town as it is always good food, the service is quick, and the staff is friendly.Adam Smith, A CFO of an up-and-coming cooperation decided to visit a Chick Fil A in August of 2012. He didn’t want to eat though- he had other goals.He ordered water via the drive-through and when he approached the window he berated, harassed, and insulted the young lady who was trying to help him out. He was angry about Chick Fil As Christian and anti-gay stance. He filmed the whole thing and uploaded it to the internet thinking he was the hero of this story.Now there are issues with what he did. The young lady was nice and has no control over what the guy who started the company thinks. She is just trying to earn some money and live her life and this guy treated her like she directly was the cause of Chick Fil A’s homophobic stance. The lady remained friendly and helpful and was really trying to be nice. Having worked in customer service, and thus been exposed to the depth of human depravity, I feel for her plight. This guy was a jerk and there is no doubt about that.He too received hate though- and lots of it. Just like Justine his entire life was ruined over this and it was unfair.First, he lost his job and his friends. Then as he tried to find a new job nobody would hire him. Adam is a well-educated man with lots of executive experience- thus he was overqualified for most jobs and had to find another executive-level position. Companies vet their execs thoroughly though and every time they found the video and did not hire him.Years later he is working odd jobs when he can find work. He could not pay his mortgage and was foreclosed on. He moved into a small place and his wife had to go to work to help support the family. He was on food stamps, government assistance, and his life was over.He has since recovered but for years all of Adam’s hard work fell to ash as his entire world imploded.Was what he did mean? Ya. Should his life be destroyed over it? No.This is the case so many times in this modern age. Every day there is a new celebrity who makes a statement and gets harassed until he apologizes. Nearly every celebrity and even thousands of normal non-celebrities are harassed for statements they make that are against the mob mentality of Twitter and Facebook.Personally I think there are a lot of people who lack hobbies and have found that if they get really upset over something they are given power they never earned. Even yesterday on my wife’s Facebook a gaggle of her “friends” were doxxing and harassing some lady who made a statement that was like “if you don’t like American than leave”.There is no statement that you can make that should result in your entire life being destroyed. The ONLY exception to this is a call to violence.Yet an old joke, stupid statement, or even just a bland political statement and result in your entire life being destroyed. It’s not just regular Twitter trolls doing this either.Trump published a meme that had him breathing up CNN in a WWE wrestling GIF. It was pretty popular and everyone got a laugh out of it- except CNN- they were FURIOUS.CNN was so furious they dug deep and found the personal information of the Reddit user who made the meme. Then they basically gave him a choice- apologize or we publish your information.The man apologized and CNN agreed not to publish his private details. However “should any of that change we reserve the right to publish his personal information at a later date”.You would think that a mainstream media company would want to support people’s right to express themselves, but not CNN I guess.Comedy:Humor is subjective and an important part of human expression. Humor creates joy and exposes the ridiculous nature of the human condition. The best humor examines dark things and makes us look at them differently. Great comics are champions at making us laugh at the horrible and offensive.George Carlin is perhaps the greatest comic ever. His routines were offensive, aggressive, hostile, and hilarious. You would walk away from a Carlin routine not only laughing but also thinking about things differently.Today there are jokes you cannot say- period. Comedians like Dave Chapelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Joe Rogan, and many others refuse to play on college campuses because the students get offended and cause conflict.In my humble opinion, the most incredible example of this is not from the US but instead from the UK.This is Count Dankula.He is a goofy youtube and amateur comedian.He made a video a few years ago with his girlfriend's pug. He explained that he hated the dog and in order to make his girlfriend hate the dog he would teach it to be a Nazi. He then trained the dog to get excited over the Nazi salute.Every time he made the Nazi sault and said “hail Hitler” the dog would get all excited and jump around. Thus he turned the hated pug into a Nazi, the worst thing he could think of.Well for this offense Count Dankula was charged with a crime. He had to appear in court, pay a fine, and fight for his freedom over A JOKE. It’s insane.The BCC and the Guardian, both horribly biased unreliable news sources piled on him. They declared him alt-right they called him a Nazi and they said he hates Jews.I guess they didn’t get the joke. In Jordan Peterson’s GQ interview the journalist interviewing Jordan tried to find common ground by saying she did not support the censorship of comedy. Yet when this example was brought up she supported the criminal charges brought against Count Dankula. She said she did not think it was a joke and that it was a dog whistle.This is the problem. Most people say they want comics to be able to make whatever jokes they want but if they find the joke offensive or if they don’t get it than they want the comic to be banned from events or harassed out of the public eye.Count Dankula was not a Nazi trying to indoctrinate people. It was a joke- and honestly, I found it kinda funny. A dog getting excited over “hail Hitler” I mean that’s pretty goofy to me at least.Summary:Many people see free speech as legal protection and only legal protection. The most popular answer to this question in fact expresses this view- that freedom of speech is merely a constitutional provision that protects people from censorship by the government and only the government.I disagree strongly. Freedom of speech is not merely a constitutional provision. Freedom of speech a cultural ideal. It’s a culture that supports those who speak and express themselves. It is a powerful cultural element that creates an open discourse that we all benefit from. Great movies, great books, great paintings, and great video games are all forms of speech that dared to be different- that risked offending the pursuit of something powerful.Martin Luther King, one of the most important Americans ever to live, risked being offensive. He risked using his speech to express a view that challenged the status quo, that challenged the structures and ideals of his contemporaries. His ideas were not universally popular but the first amendment protected his right to assemble and speak.His speech came at a cost- the cost was his own life. He was killed for what he said and I think that is far too high of a price. Yet his speech saved countless millions and made for a better world. This reveals the power of free speech and also exposes why we should not demand a high price of speech alone.Martin Luther King Jr should have been able to speak freely and express his ideals without it costing him his life.If the government does not censor people but the phone companies, internet providers, social media platforms, colleges, and citizens do censor people than do we really have free speech? If I cannot express my views on social media, if I cannot discuss my views on a college campus, and if the consequences of an old joke could be the end of my life am I really free to express myself?In this world it is not the government that prevents free speech- it is everything else.In the words of the Great Trey Parker and Matt Stone (south park guys) either everything is ok or none of it is ok.You cannot pick which ideologies, ideas, and concepts are allowed to have a platform. That is not how the world works. Maybe you are the one deciding who gets to express themselves today but when the goals posts move tomorrow it may be you who censored or harassed for their views.Update 6/11/2020

This article is based on the information most people don’t know outside Pakistan, and my prime intention is to show you what is happening behind the closed doors. This article is written on my observations of events and if you want to read one different aspect of CPEC, please read this article till end.The Dawn Article and Long Term PlanCPEC Master Plan is a Long Term Plan (LTP) for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. According to the Pakistani English-language news daily, Dawn, which has accessed the full report, the plan comprehensively outlines the Chinese goals in its ally's territory for the next decade and a half with the main focus being on agriculture. The plan lays out in detail what Chinese intentions and priorities are in Pakistan for the next decade and a half, details that have not been discussed in public far.Formation of the LTP was begun in November 2013 by Chinese Authorities. For the next two years, until December 2015, the Chinese Authorities worked different Government Institutions to develop a detailed plan to be implemented over the next 15 years, until the year 2030 that will open the doors for Chinese enterprises – private and public – to enter every area of Pakistan's economy. The report was first transmitted to the Government of Pakistan in June 2015 and Pakistan met their counterparts in Beijing on November 12th, 2015 and gave their feedback and finalized the draft on Dec 29th, 2015.To keep the report secret, the Pakistani government created two versions of the LTP (Long Term Plan). The full version is 231 pages long and drawn up by the Chinese Authorities in December 2015. The shortened version, dated February 2017, is 30 pages long and “contains only broad brushstroke descriptions of the various `areas of cooperation` and none of the details.” It is meant to be provided to the provincial governments in a bid to obtain their assent. The only provincial government that received the full version of the plan is the Punjab government.I have provided below the summary of CPEC Master plan if somebody interested in detailed report please check the following link.Exclusive: CPEC master plan revealedWhat's new in this report?If you watch any video on YouTube by a searching the keyword “CPEC Master Plan News Discussions”, you observe Pakistani Politicians are quite relaxed discussing this topic. No outrage, no concerns.Because they know the truth that many of these above-mentioned practices are quite old in Pakistan. Same kinds of land acquisition happening for many years with almost the same kind of Tax benefits.[1] Surprise it's a Pakistan Army. They run factories to produce and process Fertilizer, Cement, Meat, Food, Cereal, Seeds almost all the stuff mentioned in the report. They also run and operate Banks, Sugar Mills, Natural Gas, power generation, oil terminal operations, Housing Societies, financial services, healthcare, and education.[2]Pakistan Army runs these business entities under the trusts like Fauji foundation, Shaheen foundation, Bahria Foundation, Army Welfare Trust (AWT) and Defense Housing Authorities (DHAs).[3]Writing about the military in Pakistan can be risky business, almost no one reports against Pak Army inside Pakistan. The daring lady in the photo is Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa, she exposed Pakistan army's business practices and their commercial interests in detail in the book Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy.[4] This book is banned in Pakistan, she was labelled as a traitor, threatened with being tried for treason and practically hounded out of the country into temporary self-exile.[5] Even here on Quora, I have seen some articles got collapsed because they mentioned Ayesha Siddiqa and details of Pakistan Army's commercial interests.Dr. Siddiqa estimates the military’s net worth at more than £10 billion — roughly four times the total foreign direct investment generated by Islamabad in 2007, the army owns 12% of the country’s land, its holdings being most fertile soil in the Western Punjab. Two-thirds of that land is in the hands of senior current and former officials, mostly brigadiers, major-generals, and generals.[6][7][8] But critics said also that the Pakistani military keeps a lion's share of the country's budget and is not answerable to the civilian government over its expenditures.[9]Check this shocking Ronan Christian's answer on Pakistan ArmyIs everyone in Pakistan agreed on this report?As per the report, China initiated creating the draft in 2013, sometimes around Nawaz Sharif elected as a Prime Minister. In May 2015, during the visit of Xi Jinping, CPEC deal was signed[10] and the report was the first draft is transmitted to the Government of Pakistan around the same time in June 2015.There are two different Power Centers exists in Pakistan, Elected Government, and Pakistan Army. If any Govt. Minister or official face any question against Chinese Investments, they simply counter their critics by quoting “If no Chinese Investments, then who else? No one other than China interested in investing in Pakistan”. It might be the same kind of argument presented by Prime Minister to Army General while discussing this draft. With reduced of coalition fund and very less budget, General also didn't have any choice to accept the proposal.To make plan details secret from Provincial governments, the second draft was created and shared with no essential details. As per the details shared in Dawn article, Punjab government received the full version of the plan, and it might be possible that they took advantage of the situation to make some favorable changes in LTA.To make public happy, massive media engagement was started to promote the CPEC plan and used social media to spread the positive aspects. The promotional video's started floating on YouTube, the campaigns to promote project was started on Facebook and tweeter.Everyone was happy in Pakistan except some media culprits who smell the rat.What will change?In this report, the CPEC projects are often called as ‘demonstration projects', that means until now Pakistan Government is not provided full autonomy to China to purchase land and set up the economic zones by their own. 6500 acres of land allocated for Chinese enterprises to operate their own farms in Punjab doesn't count much, but the availability of water, perfect infrastructure, sufficient supply of energy and the capacity of self-service power, means it is the jackpot for China.It is not the case Pakistan don't have seed's processing and fertilizer plants in Pakistan, but it seems like they don't improve the quality of their farming techniques in last 70 years. If you check Indian side of Punjab, the state is growing enough crops which feed the entire India.[11] With the provision of seeds and other inputs, like fertilizer, credit, and pesticides, China is helping Pakistan to grow crops, it is good for Pakistan.China is doing investments like this in South America and Africa from years, it is a known practice. China is protecting itself against future food supply problems caused by climate change by buying or leasing large tracts of land in Africa and South America. Some experts are also pointing the drawback, is that the Chinese are introducing industrial agricultural practices that damage the soil, the water supply, and the rivers.[12]China will build planting and breeding bases, large storage, Meat and milk production, fertilizer plants, transportation system, fruit juice and jam plants, grain processing, precision fertilization, drip irrigation equipment and planting and harvesting machinery. But if you check Fauji foundation's businesses, they are already doing most of these things mentioned here. It smells like now Pakistani Army Industries are going to compete with Chinese counterparts.Is this a new East India Company?In other economic sectors such as household appliances, telecommunications, cement, and mining, Chinese companies would exploit their presence to expand market share and the plan also called for building infrastructure and developing a policy environment to facilitate the entry of Chinese companies.The project shows great interest in the textile industry, with the focus largely on yarn and coarse cloth. The reason, the plan says, is that the textile industry in Xinjiang has already attained higher levels of productivity. Chinese companies would also be offered preferential treatment with regard to “land, tax, logistics and services” as well as “enterprise income tax, tariff reduction and exemption and sales tax rate” incentives.This is the same kind of approach what British East India Company took centuries ago, get raw material from Pakistan, shipped [to China] for pennies & finished products will be purchased back [by Pakistan].There are no friends or enemies only interests.Taking on industries, a plan is to provide basic infrastructure first with Roads, Railways, Ports and Power Plants. The setup Industrial Base and factories for petrochemical, iron and steel, harbor industry, engineering machinery, trade processing and auto and auto parts. It sounds good for Pakistan.It is quite impressive to any Pakistani, but in reality, you are living in the 21st Century. Gulf Countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are already started diversifying their businesses. They have started investing in their own countries to boost production.[13] If you take one example of Cement Industry which the most Pakistani thinks doing well in exports, Iran is making cheap and quality cement and even in Pakistan, cement manufacturers are urging the government to place anti-dumping duties on the Iranian cement.[14]Gulf countries are investing in India[15], but check why not enough investment in Pakistan. It is not cheap labor matters, skilled labor, regional security and financial capabilities also going to matter when you need investors. Some development indicators pointing that Bangladesh economy will be bigger than Pakistan in the next few years.[16] They are working very hard work no matter what bad conditions they faced.Few people argue that Once Chinese poor economy provided free land and labor to foreign investors and then suddenly Chinese economy started booming with trade and manufacturing industries. But time is changed since last 40 years, and with the dream of economic prosperity countries like Sri Lanka[17], Myanmar[18], Cambodia[19], Laos[20], Kenya[21], some African countries[22][23] are feeling the heat. China is running their industry on surplus capacity[24] and Chinese will not be going to shift their factory bases in such venerable area. China now dropped One Child Policy, and with increasing Industrial Robotics and Automation they have to ensure Job Security for their people as well.[25] Interestingly, on this Dawn article one wise guy named, IFTEKHAR MAHMOOD, mentioned it in his comment.Because of Free Trade agreement with China and cheaper Chinese goods, local industry in Pakistan already got hit very hard and the trade deficit is all time high.[26] Though I accept that China is providing Pakistan a chance to stand up but at the cost of very high interest rates, which will pass on to Pakistani people and businesses. Now only chance is to pay back the interests and do more hard work than developing countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam which share same business profiles and cheap labor like Pakistan do have.Lot of people in Pakistan pointing toward strategic friendship like production of JF-17, for those please check this Dan Rosenthal's answer on JF-17.Surveillance, Like China?A full system of monitoring and surveillance will be built in cities with 24-hour video recordings on roads and busy marketplaces for law and order is also good initiative, and China has the good experience and doing it for many years to keep an eye on their own citizens.[27] So we wish all the best for Pakistan to have this system with Great Firewall of China.[28] But the question is “Is it part of any big game which is coming soon?”Dissemination of Chinese cultureWhy “dissemination of Chinese culture” needs to distribute over broadcast TV? Does it like to be the same kind of approach taken place in Xinjiang? Pakistan always supports Muslims Rights around the world, but when it comes to China, they will shut their mouth, whenever questions raised. On the issues in Xinjiang like Ban on long beards and veils in Xinjiang[29], suppress Islamic cultural practices[30], Government employees and children under 18 are barred from attending mosques, bans Muslims from fasting Ramadan[31], Uyghur Muslims must pray in mosques that have a government-appointed imam[32], bans Islamic baby names[33], Pakistan always turn their blind eye on them.According to studies, more than 90% of all Pakistanis consider religion to be very important. Meanwhile, China to be the least religious country in the world.[34] It is interesting to imagine how people from both sides will mesh together with these diametrically opposed views on religion, in the religiously charged environment of Pakistan and we must imagine what kind of dissemination of Chinese culture going to spread through Broadcast TV.There are various factors affecting Pakistani politics, such as competing parties, religion, tribes, terrorists, and western intervention. The plan identifies politics and security as its major risks.Why this report is referring “politics and security” again and again, is this kind of conspiracy going on [Chinese Takeover, blah blah blah]. Politics is always affected by competing parties, so does a report suggesting some kind of authoritarian rule going to impose in Pakistan? So many conspiracy theories! Does it indicates China also needs to control Pakistan’s State driven Politics for smooth execution of these projects. Is this beginning to Chinese interference in the regional politics of Pakistan.Gwadar the WonderlandIt is a great plan to have a long belt of coastal enjoyment industry in Gwadar that includes yacht, wharf, cruise, nightlife, hot spring hotels and water sports Gwadar in next 15 years. Before completing these entertainment centers, Pakistan must provide first basic necessities which were they failed to provide in Gwadar in last 70 years. Gwadar is not connected to National Electric Grid so electricity is supplied by Iran, there are severe water shortage problems, people go to Karachi for the treatment of even minor diseases, and there are not enough schools and colleges to educate the youth of the region. [35]The Great Chinese Money CowThe primary financial risk in Pakistan, according to the long-term plan drawn up by China Development Bank, is politics and security. Efforts will be made to furnish free and low-interest loans to Pakistan But, Pakistan's federal and involved local governments should also bear part of the responsibility for financing.Low interests loans for $2 billion, China's maximum annual FDI, $1 billion ceiling for preferential loans and $1.5 billion ceiling for non-preferential loans which equals $4.5 Billion per year that's good for Pakistan.The World Bank in its latest report projected that fiscal deficit was projected to be 4.8 percent in FY2017 sum up to Rs1.24 trillion [$118 billion][36] along with $28 billion Trade Deficit[37] plus $5 billion Interests of current CPEC loans per year[38].For the debt-ridden Pakistan is that the plan clears this is no free ride. The report suggested the inflation will next big risk, which the plan says has averaged 11.6% over the past six years. A high inflation rate means a rise of project-related costs and a decline in profits. Plus Pakistan has to pay all the returns to Chinese Currency, there no easy out like printing money.Currently, with 66% of Pakistan's total revenue consume on loan servicing[39], falling exports[40] and Remittances[41], declining Tax Revenue[42], decreasing Foreign direct investment[43][44], forget CPEC loans how Pakistan pay off their existing loans is a big question. Nowadays China is providing vital doses of bailout packages to keep Pakistan Economy alive[45], hope China will bear rest of down payments as well to prove they are the all-weather friend of Pakistan.If you need full details and calculations of CPEC, please refer Nirav Bhatt's answer on CPECWar Mongering MindsetSince the independence, Pakistan adopted National Security State policy which states nation's security comes before all the things.[46] This mindset has been trying to secure the state but in the process has generated tremendous insecurity among the people and leaders. In 70 years nothing is changed, check this example.Check this recent incident, this guy is Khwaja Asif, who is the Minister of Defence of Pakistan. On December 25, 2016, the story broke out, titled “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan sends ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack.” Without thinking and confirming the news, defense minister tweeted with a scathing post directed at Israel “Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming Pak role in Syria against Daesh,” adding that “Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too.” The story turned out to be fake, even got the Israeli defense minister’s name wrong in the story.[47]This is not the one incident, with the North Korean type approach, he threatens to use Nukes multiple times.[48] Any surprise why FDI is not coming to Pakistan.In other hand China is moving away from War Mongering Mindset, they are becoming more focus on trade and development. China never involved in any war against Vietnam in 1979. The fact is any war could impact China's economy with very severe damage. They are too floating through the economic crisis as their economy is slowing down and debt to GDP ratio is now raised to 277%.[49] In one study said that in the case of any war scenario, if weak opponent country [such as North Korea] managed to blow up three gorges dam,[50] it wiped out their massive population with all the developed cities on the shore of Yangtze river. This will take back China to at least 20 years behind and will take a lot of time to recover the economy.Pakistan always needs super powers who protect them to protect them, and they paid a lot of cost of their “War Mongering Mindset”. From years they relied on the United States was there, now on China. To protect their investments China needs to control Pakistan which was the United States failed to do in past. We have to see in future, how these players will play with each other. This interesting game is between the Masters of Trade vs the Masters of Double Game.Why Half Measures?Pakistan has always played the double game with their counterparts, they cheated Americans by making the partnership with North Korea and exchange Nuclear Weapons with Missiles[51], supporting Terrorist group Haqqani Networks in Afghanistan war[52], providing terrorist safe havens in Pakistan.[53] They always remembered for their half measures, and recent track record also states that.This plan might finally arm the Pakistani government with the clout to reduce the religious influence in the society, but the reality is the National Action Plan they have started to reduce religious radicalization is still not implemented on the ground.[54] Despite Pakistani army's recent operations against terrorists, Pakistan still facing terrorist attacks. Many experts raised the questions on the efficiency of these operations.[55] It is also another example of such kinds of half measures, might be the way to counter future Chinese ambitions.Dawn Leaks 2There are a lot of people in Pakistan raising the question about CPEC, especially reporters like Dr. Farrukh Saleem and Khurram Hussain who wrote the same Dawn article. Mubashir Luqman already revealed these details 6 months ago, but everyone's perception was that he is spreading anti-government agenda.[56][57]Reacting to the leak, Pakistan's planning, and development minister Ahsan Iqbal Chaudhry tweeted: “I am appalled by Dawn Leak II. CPEC Long Term Plan story based on working docs 2 distort final draft taken up with NDRC yesterday in Beijing. CDB study referred to as Long Term Plan in Dawn story is factually incorrect. Definite angling in a story to malign CPEC by promoting fears.” [58]What is this Game?With CPEC the situation looks like a flowing river which looks calm and cool on the surface but nobody knows what volatile stuff are going inside. Here the game is played by lots of players; Pakistan Government, Provincial Government, Pakistan Army, Chinese Establishment, Media, State and Non-State Actors.For Politicians CPEC is the opportunity to grab the lot money, in one of the news programs, Pro-Government Reporter like Najam Sethi openly quoted that 10% kickbacks are standard in Pakistan and CPEC projects interest rates are actually higher.[59]Pakistan Army also has their influence in their National Politics.[60] Through this plan Pakistan Government trying to introduce Chinese influence in Pakistan’s politics. Now the question is, will Pakistan army accept the Chinese hegemony on their National Politics and dominance of Chinese Industries.Provincial Governments are trying to get the more opportunities from China, they are preferring to talk and deal directly with Chinese Regime. It will also reduce the influence of Pakistan Government and Pakistan Army on provinces. Will Government and Army accept this?Pakistan always involved in proxy wars with their neighbours (using bad terrorists and good terrorists policy) to protect their national interests. Does China force Pakistan to stick to their commitments in fight against all form of terrorism to achieve stability?Before signing the deal, during the OBOR summit on 15th May 2017 this report was leaked. Who is responsible for this, why this time was chosen, we have only guesses. But the game is still going on.What is Pakistan Government hiding?Two years ago, we only know that energy and infrastructure projects were going to establish through the CPEC, now information is out on these ‘demonstration projects’. Nobody knows in public what exactly at interest rates are and on what conditions these deals were been made.Now the report is officially out, then also why Pakistani Government doesn't make the final draft public, what is hidden agenda they are hiding?This article shows you the second side of coin, quite unknown to people outside Pakistan. If you like this answer, please share it on social media.Thanks for reading!!Footnotes[1] A spotlight on the Pakistani military's corruption | Asia | DW | 22.04.2016[2] 50 commercial entities being run by armed forces[3] 50 commercial entities being run by armed forces[4] Book on military’s business empire launched[5] IN UNIFORM – AND IN BUSINESS - Asian Affairs[6] The military millionaires who control Pakistan Inc | The Spectator[7] Pakistani army's '$20bn' business[8] Military Inc: An economy within an economy - Times of India[9] A spotlight on the Pakistani military's corruption | Asia | DW | 22.04.2016[10] Economic corridor in focus as Pakistan, China sign 51 MoUs[11] Punjab is set for record rice production this year, but at a heavy price[12] Food supply fears spark China land grab[13] Economic Diversification In The Gulf[14] Local cement industry losing competitiveness[15] India-Gulf Ties in the Spotlight[16] 45 yrs on, Bangladesh beats Pakistan in many indices[17] Sri Lanka's Hambantota Port And The World's Emptiest Airport Go To The Chinese[18] Is China blackmailing Myanmar, like it did with Sri Lanka?[19] Is China blackmailing Myanmar, like it did with Sri Lanka?[20] Laos And China Come to Terms on Loan Interest Rate For Railway Project[21] Is China railroading Kenya into debt?[22] http://africanbusinessmagazine.com/sectors/finance/africas-debt-spree-precursor-new-debt-crisis/[23] How Africa Rising turned into Africa Falling again[24] Making Sense of China’s Surplus and the “Ratchet Effect”[25] US automakers' Chinese factories are now mostly robots[26] Beyond CPEC[27] Big data, meet Big Brother: China invents the digital totalitarian state | The Economist[28] What is the biggest hoax you've ever heard about the CPEC?[29] China Uighurs: Ban on long beards, veils in Xinjiang [30] China's Uighur oppression runs deeper than Islamophobia[31] China bans Muslims from fasting Ramadan in Xinjiang[32] Killings in Xinjiang’s Guma Sparked by Anger at Prayer Restrictions[33] China bans Islamic baby names in Muslim-majority Xinjiang[34] Roads and religion: How CPEC will pit Pakistan against itself[35] CPEC promises the moon but Gwadar just wants water - The Express Tribune[36] Budget deficit surges to Rs1.24 trillion[37] Trade gap widens by 35pc to $20.2bn[38] Pakistan's 'Silk Road' repayments to peak at around $5 billion a year - chief economist[39] Debt servicing eats up 66pc of tax money[40] Falling Exports[41] Declining remittances[42] Low interest rates lead to fall in govt revenues[43] Where’s CPEC in our FDI?[44] Declining FDI[45] China provided $1.2bn in loans to bail out Pakistan: report[46] Pakistan: The Security State[47] Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel[48] Five times Pakistan defence minister Khwaja Asif bragged about nukes, made outrageous statement against India[49] Stung by debt, China's economic growth to slow to 6.5 percent in 2017: Reuters poll[50] Bombing Everything, Gaining Nothing[51] The Long History of the Pakistan-North Korea Nexus[52] Opinion | Time to Put the Squeeze on Pakistan[53] Pakistan continues to be safe haven for terrorists: Pentagon report says Haqqani Network biggest threat[54] Not really a plan[55] Has Pakistan's Zarb-e-Azb military operation failed? | Asia | DW | 02.09.2016[56] Khara Sach with Mubashir Luqman 19 December 2016 | CPEC Special - Channel 24 News[57] Khara Sach | Reality of CPEC Projects | 11 January 2017 | 24 News HD[58] Ahsan Iqbal slams Dawn's CPEC 'master plan' article, calls it Dawn Leaks II - The Express Tribune[59] Aapas Ki Baat - 16 May 2017[60] Pakistan's Military-Democracy Complex

What's the definition of morality? What would justify a definition as correct? How is a supposed objective or absolute morality justified as true?WHAT IS MORALITY? WHAT IS THE DOMAIN OF MORALITY?To determine whether morality is a trait that evolved and to determine whether the moral domain varies across cultures requires delineating the moral domain. A distinction can be made between a normative sense of morality that refers to the correct guide to follow and a descriptive sense that refers to guides that people have actually sought to follow and that are not necessarily correct.What does it mean correct morality? If a psychiatrist sets out to investigate the effectiveness of a new drug against depression, or an astronomer attempts to investigate the properties of black holes, they cannot but make assumptions about what it means to suffer from depression or to be a black hole. Lack of shared assumptions about the meaning of morality means that someone may question any empirical and metaethical view on grounds of their failure to address the true or real moral judgments. There is a mutual interdependence, conceptual questions depend on empirical answers and we must know what counts as a moral judgment to find empirical answers. If moral facts do not figure in our best scientific explanations, thus we are not justified in believing in the existence of moral facts. This argument assumes that the empirical is our only source of knowledge about moral facts and that there isn't a priori moral knowledge. However, we have good reason to think that the empirical sciences are much better equipped to discover the nature of things than a priori reflection. We want an analysis that helps explain why some things rather than others are morally good. We did not discover that heat means kinetic molecular energy by a priori reflection on what we mean by “heat”, but by empirical investigation. We could not object to the view that heat means kinetic energy on the ground that this is not what we mean when we think a priori.What distinguishes moral norms from etiquette norms, coordination norms, prudential norms, and other norms? Experiments with different religions, Chinese, Westerners, including small-scale societies, show that it isn’t possible to identify criteria for a moral and nonmoral normative distinction. Most people would judge that showing up naked at your grandmother’s funeral is more serious than stealing a pencil. Perhaps in the future philosophers and psychologists may simply drop the term “moral judgment” and focus instead on normative judgments. There are several subclasses of normative judgments that are natural kinds. Normative judgments about purity, reciprocity, authority, and kinship may well be examples of distinct normative natural kinds. But the conviction that there must be a natural way of dividing normative judgments into those that are moral and those that are nonmoral is an illusion. ( See Kelly, D., Stich, S. P., Haley, K. J., Eng, S. J., & Fessler, D. M. T. - Harm, affect, and the moral/conventional distinction Mind and Language 2007; Knobe, J., & Fraser, B. Causal judgment and moral judgment: Two experiments. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology ) As numerous authors have already noted, people’s moral judgments appear to be generated by the very same sort of cognition that one finds at work in generating nonmoral normative judgments. There is no important distinction between moral and nonmoral cognition. No brain area or network is common and peculiar to moral judgments of wrongness. If the moral domain were a fundamental feature of human cognition, we would expect the distinction between moral and nonmoral norms to be lexicalized in every language. But there isn’t a universal moral normative domain at all, and many cultures have not formed such a domain different from the nonmoral normative domain.Many moral norms do not aim at cooperation. For example, retributivist norms of punishment, such as “eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth violence”, can lead to disharmony. Many people throughout history have believed, and some still believe, that masturbation is immoral, often based on the claim that masturbation is unnatural, they seem to think that masturbators have too much fun. This and other moral norms too do not aim at cooperation, the disgust as a moralizer is another intuitive example. Certain disgusting behaviors are seen by many as immoral notwithstanding the absence of cooperation: consumption of genetically modified food, insects, and recycled water. In a survey, 46% of respondents said they opposed genetically modified food and would maintain their opposition for any balance of risks and benefits. These participants agreed that genetically modified food should be prohibited no matter how small the risks and how great the benefits. Many norms that aim at cooperation are not moral, as the linguistic rules of syntax, they enable cooperation by enabling communication, but they aren't moral. (See Scott, S., Inbar, Y., & Rozin, P. Evidence for absolute moral opposition to genetically modified food in the United States. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2016).Is morality the normativity that would be universalizable?Universalizability cannot be a definitional feature of morality. A judgment is universalizable if and only if it can, without contradiction, be willed as a universal practical law. But it is not clear just how the universal willingness of a maxim such as “All human beings will defame or ridicule other human beings whenever this is a safe and effective way of promoting their self-interest” gives rise to any sort of contradiction. To say that the willingness of this maxim as a universal law would be imprudent is not to say that doing so is contradictory. Here is the recipe for a possible universalizable moral rationality, but immoral to some religious people: Agree that a rule applies to oneself, even if it means death. It is rational to believe that there are things worse than death, being in terrible pain, for example: “All anencephalic neonates with painful terminal cancer should be euthanized.”An agent may reasonably decide a case in one way without implying that anyone else should decide it similarly. Suppose Sophie and her two children are at a Nazi concentration camp. A guard confronts Sophie and tells her that she must decide one of her children will be allowed to live and one will be killed, informing Sophie that if she chooses neither, then both will be killed. Sophie then has a morally compelling reason to choose one of her children. What should Sophie do? Who feels the force of conflicting moral demands on him and finally decides, it is not logically committed to accepting that anyone else in situations like this ought to do the same. The fact that an individual adopts a moral norm of conduct for his use does not entail that the person requires it to be adopted by anyone else. An individual may adopt for himself a very demanding moral guide that he thinks maybe too difficult for most others to follow. One who judges morally in complex situations finds out something about himself, rather than anything one can speak of as holding universally.Is morality the normativity that overrides all other normativity? Is morality categorical?Being categorical and overridingness cannot be defining characteristics of morality. The moral objectivity view holds that moral propositions are analogous to propositions about chemistry, biology, or history, they are mind-independent, in so much as they are true despite what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. When they fail to describe this mind-independent moral reality, they are false, no matter what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. A categorical imperative would be one that represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose. Morality would be a supreme set of categorical norms, their applicability would not depend on our contingent ends or desires. Categorical would be guaranteed to be backed by decisive reasons. But reasons stem only from our objective interests and subjective desires, there is simply no guarantee that a morally required act always is supported by decisive reasons. If all practical reasons have to be able to connect with something that concerns us, then no moral reason is categorical. A distinguishing characteristic of morality cannot be that it applies to people even if they have no desires that would be satisfied by conforming to them. Just plain ought is an incoherent fiction, if the reasons that favor a morally required action are always incommensurable with the reasons of, for example, prudence or self-interest, then the totality of relevant reasons will not uniquely favor morality. A person’s reasons for pursuing her aims are stronger than her reasons to advance someone else aims. It is not necessarily irrational or mistaken for an individual to deliberately decline the demand of moral rationality of a group. Overridingness is the thesis that moral determinations are always supreme whenever they come into conflict with the determinations of distinct normative domains. The overridingness of morality presupposes there is always a rational way of justifying the priority of morality over the priority of self-interest, prudence, or other nonmoral rational ends defined independently from morality, but there isn’t.To be categorical in itself will not distinguish the morality of etiquette, which may also be taken to make demands of individuals independent of what they desire. Empirical evidence doesn’t show unequivocally that people universally distinguish between the moral and conventional holds within and across different cultures. This raises the question of whether there is a distinction between morality and the conventional and it is clear that some rules of etiquette are relative only to a society or group.What is the origin of morality?Dolphins are documented as saving humans, beached whales, and dogs from drowning and even from sharks. Dogs have been documented adopting kittens, baby foxes, tiger cubs, fawns, ducklings, lambs, and more. This behavior is selflessly altruistic, as the dog couldn't expect any benefit from caring for a member of another species. There are over 70 recorded episodes of humpbacks intervening in killer whale attacks on unrelated species. Just searching the Internet “elephant saves” will result in many examples of elephant saving other species. A leopard is documented caring for a baby baboon, and there are documented episodes of apes helping injured animals and even human children who fall into their enclosures. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral capacity do not require any appeal to knowledge of moral truths.Trying to explain why morality resists strict definition may lead to the idea that the concept of morality has a prototype structure rather than a classical definitional structure consisting of necessary and sufficient conditions. A prototype concept of morality consists in features embodying the average or most typical instances of the concept. To define morality in the way a theorist favors will not correspond to the way that some others use the term. Moral skepticism about moral codes holds that we must make our ethical theorization in terms of a good life, or virtues of exemplary men, there aren’t moral codes. What compliance with moral and nonmoral norms allows us to do is to justify our behavior to others in ways that they cannot reasonably reject because it is a matter of equal accountability. But there may be no common universal justification for normativity for all groups.Why is it possible that morality in the normative sense has never been put forward by any particular society, by any group at all, or even by any individual?When persistent moral disagreement is recognized concerning what rules are moral rules, or when it is justified to violate these rules, those who understand that morality has no authoritative judges and no decision procedure that provides a unique guide to action in all situations, admit that how one should act is morally unresolvable. If it is possible to disagree with the value of objectives even agreeing with all non-moral facts, or if at principle it is not possible to know with certainty whether a non-moral premise of a moral judgment is valid, then the unreliability defeats all claims of a universal a priori or intuitive moral judgments.The general meaning of ought to involve a relationship between an action and its effectiveness in advancing interests. In any form of morality, the most plausible definitions of moral words include a reference to someone’s ends connected with her particular needs, interests, desires, attitudes, goals, purposes, plans. These definitions involve things that can vary from person to person. No amount of reduction of interests to brain processes, biological evolution, or common cultural heritage would reveal goodness as a non-subjective property.What makes ends relevant will be what someone desires. Something’s good-making features may be open to legitimate disagreement. The property of being a good car involves a fit between its objective features and what we want from a car, and that will vary somewhat from person to person. Our ability to explain why we evaluate a particular motor car as a good one gives us no guarantee that there is one objectively best set of specifications for a motor car. There is no prospect that “goodness” can be reduced to a naturalistic property with no subjective component. No amount of scientific investigation and the empirical reduction will ever demonstrate that some actions are morally wrong.Is there metaethics that explains why there are significant differences in values across cultures, but also significant similarities? Is there any general theory of moral judgments as innate or culturally variable, or as based on rationality or intuition?Moral rational deliberation and verdict activate different brain areas, moral judgment includes both rational deliberation and verdict. The only verdict is intuitive. Many people who sincerely claim that they have nothing against, for example, black people or gays, still associate black faces and gay sex with something bad. Their implicit prejudices attitudes conflict with their explicit prejudices beliefs. The psychological and neural processes that constitute implicit moral attitudes are distinct from the processes that constitute explicit belief, which we reflectively endorse and commit ourselves to. The process of deciding how to answer a moral question might require weighing public statements, in which case it might be rationally deliberative in a way that our implicit moral attitudes are not. It seems possible that implicit moral attitudes are innate in ways that explicit beliefs and answers are not. We need to distinguish verdicts from rational deliberation, and explicit answers from implicit attitudes, to support any future general theory of all moral judgments. (See for example Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. Are moral judgments unified? Philosophical Psychology, 2014.)What would be some criticisms of ethical relativism?It is not mere membership in a group that creates moral authority of the group over the individual. The pressure for convergence in morality, the social genesis of morality does not entail that membership creates an obligation to standards held by a group. When pacifists are members of a country that has military recruitment with no right of refusal, it may be true both that the country’s morality is adequate and that pacifists can legitimately reject any purported moral obligation to submit to military recruitment. One can accept that there can be no resolution of some serious conflicts, no resolution that has moral authority for all parties; such an acceptance is an insightful recognition of the limitations of the capacity of practical reason. It would be a signal of achievement to accept that there is no final arbiter of our conflicts with each other. Should each agent just do what he believes is right? Whether or not a moral judgment is mistaken is itself a matter for moral theorizing. That no set of moral judgments is mistaken is just another moral judgment and hence one which would be rejected by any moral judge with his own moral commitments. “Why be moral?” answer needn't prove that all people have the same final reason to comply with morality in all contexts.Some moralities are known not to be uniformly held, even locally. Large nations with their multicultural heritages include elements from numerous moral systems. Think, for example, of female genital mutilation, or of slavery. In the contemporary world, half the species on the planet have disappeared since 1970 (2014 Living Planet Report). How can moral relativists preserve plausible claims as those dissenters against slavery, the subordination of women, environmental destruction even though they thereby opposed the morality of the time and local? Relativism can make moral truth reflect the moral status quo. What was once needed for small communities to survive in competition with other species might not be what is needed to maintain a stable nation-state. We do not live in culturally closed societies with unitary moral systems. Human moral shaping used to be fairly uniform. In environments representative of humanity’s 99% small-band hunter-gatherer societies, one can see the same type of moral personal virtue around the world. Changes in technological capabilities may require an on-going reinvention of morality. The need for mutual accommodation is most obvious in large modern societies that have emerged from a multiplicity of cultures and traditions, there can be serious disagreement inside big societies. But knowledge of moral truth isn't knowledge of the practical means for resolving human conflict. The conflation of truth with utility can be pernicious because the ethics of belief require us to pursue the truth with honesty even if its consequences should prove detrimental to our material well-being. If in relativism each disputant would be saying something true of his own culture or point of view, there would be the logical consequence that they would not be disagreeing with each other, rather they would be talking about different things. But if each disputant is disagreeing about what is true, then the disputants cannot be making claims about different things and hence cannot know the kind the moral relativist supposes. Why can we suppose moral judgments have truth-value relative to a moral community as opposed to no truth-value at all?IS THERE A TRUE MORALITY? WHY BE MORAL? WHAT IS MORAL OBJECTIVITY?A good criticism of moral relativism needs an answer to moral skepticism. Whether morality is relative or universal, why should we think that under ideal conditions, rational human beings will converge on the same moral principles of universal or relative acceptance? We do not always have decisive reasons to act impartially or it is not always irrational to do what is morally wrong.What is moral truth?We cannot make a confusion between stating a particular rule for the evaluation of a belief as being true, and stating what truth abstractly consists in:The best-known theory of truth is the correspondence theory of truth. On this view, a candidate for moral truth is true if and only if it corresponds to a moral fact. But the notion of a fact is itself only to be explained in terms of truth as being the worldly correlate of a true sentence or proposition so that the theory is vitiated by circularity. Anything the supposed relation of correspondence might achieve has already been provided for without going beyond the relation which is affirmed with the affirmation of the proposition itself. Correspondence theories of truth are only plausible where objects and properties can be understood as causally responsive to moral judgments. But morality is about objects and properties to which we don’t bear causal relations. If someone suggests that “X is good” is true if and only if X deserves approval then this is of little use, since it casts no light on how such verdicts may be established, or why we must be interested in them. Someone can value and endorse things on different grounds than whether they generate happiness. Moral advice rarely holds universally. “Don't kill an innocent” might prevent a little girl from needless suffering as a terminally ill patient. Norms involved in logic and epistemology are formally neutral about our desires for their own sake, but moral norms no.The coherence theory of truth is a theory of truth according to which a statement is true if it "coheres" with other statements, and false if it does not. The theory is limited because some statements must be assigned a truth-value independently if others are to be assessed by way of their coherence. The motivation of theory is sometimes owed to the conviction that there may be several sets of cohering statements with equal claims to describe the world correctly.The pragmatic theory of truth, in some versions, urges a connection between what is true and what is useful, pointing out, for instance, that one mark of a successful scientific theory is that it enables us to manipulate nature to our advantage. But this conflation of truth with utility can be pernicious because the ethics of belief require us to pursue the truth with honesty even if its consequences should prove detrimental to our material well-being.The deflationary theory of truth is built on the equivalence between asserting a proposition “p” and asserting that “p” is true. The truth-predicate "is true" exists only to enable the economy of expression, and that what is said with its aid could in principle be said without it. The reference to truth is not so easily removed from sentences like "Everything he says is true", but logicians have shown how to eliminate the words "is true" when predicated on sentences of formalized languages. The truth-predicate plays just enable speakers to express their approval or endorsement. “It is true that" or "It is a fact that", when appended to a sentence, add nothing but emphasis. The abstract concept of truth doesn’t have metaphysics and does not require an appeal to such notions as correspondence to reality, coherence, or success.What justifies a true morality?Is there justification for true moral beliefs? The only way which moral beliefs might be justified is by inference from nonmoral beliefs. How could a body of entirely nonmoral beliefs entail a moral belief? Moral judgments seem to have pretensions of objective truth. But moral and mathematical judgments are about objects and properties to which we don’t bear causal relations. One might wonder how moral properties can be thought to causally explain our moral judgments and beliefs. How can moral properties be seen to be part of a causal explanation for anything other than moral judgments? Doubts can be raised about the origin of human moral beliefs. What is the evidence for the truth of core moral beliefs? It is far from clear what is this evidence if it includes the truthfulness of moral rational intuition or religious faith whose moral truthfulness we are trying to demonstrate, rendering a circular demonstration. Why are the processes that lead to the formation of moral beliefs sensitive to the supposed true moral facts? Why would be morality objectively true, categorical, and mind-independent because of its empirically confirmed genealogical dependence from emotional, evolutionary, historical, and cultural context? There can be reasonable moral skepticism if true, objective, mind-independent moral reality properties are necessary to explain many of the observable moral phenomena. Human moral thinking evolving as a biological and psychological adaptation explains the enhancing social cohesion among our ancestors. For example, the hormone oxytocin has a role in social behaviors like maternal behavior and bonding toward individuals with similar characteristics in many mammal species, so it also does in humans. But why would evolutionary forces have made morality objectively true? The evolutive foundation is no indication of objective moral truth. Sexual coercion has been observed in many species, including mammals and humans, birds, insects, and fish. People are not morally required to sacrifice themselves for the entire community, but they would have been so required if we had evolved more on the model of social insects. We don't morally judge a man or woman by its reproductive fitness, by how successfully it passes down its genetic code. The problem with human nature as the basis for a universal level of morality is that it lacks a detailed action guide. What innate moral values should we prioritize? Non-human primates often kill, steal and rape without being punished. A mistake amounts to conceiving evolution by natural selection as morally good. Suppose that preserving the human gene pool is good. Suppose that scientists demonstrate that preserving the human gene pool from the mass extinction of global warming requires reducing the population by 70% in 50 years. While killing part of the population preserves the human gene pool, is it good?One can never validly deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Nothing can be the conclusion of a valid argument that is not already implicit in the premises. No set of premises consisting entirely of nonmoral descriptive statements is sufficient to entail a normative conclusion. Thus entirely descriptive claims cannot entail normativity. A moral evaluation cannot be expressed using only nonmoral terms. The evaluation expressed by someone is relative to an individual's goals, desires for its own sake, preferences. Morality is not categorical, there isn’t moral truth. We must accept that other people can have opposed preferences, even when we agree on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly. If moral judgments are beliefs that motivate, they can only be beliefs about how to get something that we want. Therefore, either they are not objective or they cannot motivate us and therefore are not practical.The possibility of moral thought and judgment does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of categorical objective moral principles because there isn't the possibility of ultimate grounding of morality in morality, and no principles are linking the nonmoral with morality, the moral practice cannot be grasped from the purely nonmoral perspective. People see the priority of their moral intuitions at play over objective moral principles: If someone proposes a moral principle, and you raise a telling counterexample, the counterexample prevails, there need be no appeal to moral principles. The supposedly objective moral principles follow our moral intuitions, they do not generate them.If moral terms are reducible to nonmoral terms, then morality can be the result of causal processes that make a true morality arbitrary. The conception of moral terms like “goodness” may be regarded as mysterious fiction because it is unanalysable or indefinable. Moral definitions only move the mysterious fictitious notion to elsewhere, for example to the unanalysable term “ought”. It is difficult for moral judgments to correspond to something in the defined sense. Moral judgments end up sounding suspiciously vacuous: Objective moral properties are not necessary to explain any of the observable moral phenomena. People make moral judgments, experience moral sentiments, condemn, admire, and so on, but such phenomena can be explained by reference to psychology, social sciences, local survival environment, evolutionary and cultural-historical developments.We can have reasons to act in a certain way only if acting is to our purposes, goals. Our reasons for action are always sensitive to our varying ends and so they are subjective. But objective morality claims a supposed objective authority that transcends the ends of each of us, whether or not we care to accept it, inescapable, non-subjective, and overriding. Morality might be objective if we all happened to have the same needs, interests, desires, goals, purposes, and so on, concerning characters, choices, actions, and plans. However, we may not be contradicting each other to whatever extent we have different goals, or purposes, priorities. Why would we all desire the same ends if we were fully rational and found ourselves in the same circumstances?Which theory shows a true morality?Why would a subjectively chosen God be an objective moral authority?Belief in God makes morality unintelligible. It’s in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) to not take the Lord’s name in vain but rape is not up there, it is allowed in Gen. 30:3; Deut. 20:14, 21: 10–14; Judges 19:24; 2 Sam. 12:11–14; Numbers 31:17-18. 1 John 4:8 assures us that “God is love” but this love mercilessly commanded Israelite soldiers to kill infants and women (1 Samuel 15:2-3; Joshua 10:40).“You must not own another person as property" was missing from the Ten Commandments of a culture that had slaves. Christians believe that God upheld slavery (Titus 2:9-10, 1 Peter 2:18, Ephesians 6:5). 620,000 Christian soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War lost their lives to settle slavery. No one could love God if God is incomprehensible. Without the Law of Moses, would we all be wandering like a little Jehovah, raping and shedding blood in genocides every time our vanity to be the only unconditional and merciful love was offended? Why would supposedly loving God thousands of years ago reveal himself in such an obscure way that we need a Phd in sacred scriptures studies to supposedly understand him? Why do more than 40 major divisions of Christian denominations claim to believe what the Bible says and yet no two of them agree on what the Bible says or what it means a Christian morality? When we see school buildings collapsing on young children, it is morally completely unbelievable that there is a supposed mandate from God to prevent his supposed good blessing of suffering. Imagine God as a mother letting her young child suffer horribly, letting the child die an excruciating death, alone and frightened, claiming to justify that suffering because it was an opportunity for another child to learn an unintelligible valuable lesson. The Bible story in which Abraham shows his unquestioning obedience to kill his son, Isaac, and is rewarded by God for it, (Genesis 22:1-19), neatly demonstrates how religious faith suffocates intelligible morality. If believers took the moral guidance of the Bible, they would be forced to maintain that their contemporary condemnations of genocide, slavery, and rape are not morally absolute and their subjective moral interpretations sometimes need to change at the point of a bayonet as in the case of American slavery and civil war. A faith is immoral when it enforces its morality on others without a basis of sufficient evidence. As when it enforces its morality on a person's decision about his sexuality or about the conditions for the sanctity of his own terminal life, or of a fetus that is unaware of being alive. If believers in a God openly understand the historical ethical development of his doctrine, the belief will collapse as a human invention. Belief in God doesn’t give the motivation to be good: Some of the leaders of the Inquisition had fear of God and desire of heaven but they tortured their victims in an intensely cruel way. At the societal level, there is a negative correlation between crime and a lack of religiosity. (See for example Zuckerman, P. 2009. “Atheism, secularity, and well-being: How the findings of social science counter negative stereotypes and assumptions.” Sociology Compass; and Hofmann, W., Wisneski, D., Brandt, M., & Skitka, L. 2014. “Morality in everyday life.” Science)Morality must be comprehensible to us to determine what is objectively right and wrong for us. If good and bad are determined by God and are beyond our ken, we could never be justified in believing that any particular action is objectively obligatory or wrong. If God’s morality is unintelligible, why occupy ourselves with it? The suffering that a good God allows could not be worse than the supposed horrific suffering that occurs without this supposed necessary suffering. Supposedly suffering will be comprehensible only when a person reaches heaven, it is beyond our ken, so God could not command us to show misguided compassion, compelling us to prevent even the worst suffering, because it is supposedly always necessary for a greater good or to prevent some greater evil. Intense suffering would be always God’s blessing in disguise. However, the existence of the most basic moral obligation to prevent terrible suffering by a child implies the non-existence of a God worthy of worship.Why would love necessarily come from the divine nature? Is God judged good if he is loving or hateful, or is God judged good because we can have the concept of goodness and morality independent of God's existence?Why natural properties, such as the fact that an activity involves the deliberate causing of intense physical and emotional suffering, are not sufficient to ground moral reasons? What could God do in virtue of which the action that lacks all moral properties would be morally wrong? If moral properties depend only on God’s will, God’s commands are logically before moral properties, there is no particular moral reason why a given action is morally wrong or right. If God does not have moral reasons for his commands, then his commands are morally arbitrary. The existence of God is certainly irrelevant to the existence of moral facts and properties. If God is good by definition, then what cause would one have to praise him for what he does if doing it arbitrarily differently would have done it equally well? If God is good because his goodness can be specified independently of God, then the idea of goodness does not depend upon the existence of God. When something good happens, it is attributed to God. When disasters and diseases happen, God's good is mysterious and it doesn't need to be comprehended. If evil isn't evidence of an evil god, then good isn't evidence of a good God.Why should we think that ideal moral agents defending deontological ethics or consequentialist ethics converge in the same moral beliefs?Why are rights dictated by duties, independent of what promotes the best overall outcome? We can judge that it is morally wrong to kill one patient to make transplants to save five. But how do many millions need to die before someone doesn't think it's morally wrong to kill one innocent to save others? How can it ever be wrong to minimize evil or to do as much good as possible? When two promises conflict, how do deontologists explain which promise is overriding if for them the reason to keep each promise is simply that it was made, and not the consequences?Is it the deontological principle of humanity that holds that we should never treat persons merely as a means, but as ends in themselves, morally absolute? The position of consequentialists is that using someone merely as a means is not wrong, because the value of persons reduces entirely to their value in the production of welfare, a function of the quality of its experiences and the total amount of welfare. They are thus inevitably used merely as a means. Most people are unwilling to deny the principle outright since it seems to be the best explanation of many of our ordinary moral views such as that we should not kill someone even if the overall benefit of killing is somewhat greater than the overall benefit of killing. This invites the difficult question of just how bad the consequences of adhering to the principle of humanity need to be before it is right to abandon it. Consider the use of terror bombing by Britain and the United States during World War II. Both the British and later the Americans deliberately bombed German and Japanese cities to destroy enemy morale and, in the case of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to persuade Japan to capitulate. It seemed to many that those civilians were being used as merely a means, in contravention to the principle of humanity. The principle of humanity dismisses as irrelevant ends that are, in fact, morally relevant: Would anything, even murder, torture, or genocide, not be morally permissible if a greater catastrophic moral horror were to be avoided? The civilian deaths and sufferings that this war would have involved could not have been justified by the doctrine of double effect, the idea that these civilian deaths were not intended as a means to an end, but were simply acceptable “collateral damage,” a foreseen, and proportional, side effect of acceptable military action. Given the scale of systematic civilian deaths, it seems plausible that the deaths were intended as a means to an end.If in consequentialism personal moral duties to any particular people aren't important but only best overall outcome, why do we give more partial concern to our families and friends? Wouldn't it be a mistake to discriminate against the black minority under Jim Crow laws in the United States, against universal human rights and respect for people and autonomy, regardless of whether they promoted the consequent happiness of the majority of whites? A more equal state of affairs is the more just and right, even if it is not the overall best in terms of total or average happiness value. Consequentialism cannot adequately accommodate our more egalitarian intuitions about distributive justice, and it is indifferent about the distribution of welfare. Imagine a choice between an outcome where overall welfare is large but distributed unequally and an outcome where overall welfare is smaller but distributed equally. Consequentialism is taken to favor outcomes with greater overall welfare even if it is also less equally distributed. How do we balance non arbitrarily the pressure to do justice in favor of more equitable distribution of material goods with the need to promote productivity through economic incentives for the effort to develop talent and hard work?All of us prioritize deontology and consequentialism probably depending on the type of circumstances in which each of us finds ourselves subjectively. Why should we maintain consistency as a moral reason to do anything just to don't lose explanatory power resulting from a dismissal of generalizations?Why be moral?There are multiple normative moral and nonmoral standpoints which generate genuine reasons for action, none of which is normatively supreme. The question “Do I have an overriding reason to act as morality requires?” is empty unless it is specified what kind of reason and situation one is asking for, such as a moral reason, a legal reason, or a self-interested reason. Rational ends are defined independently from morality. There is consequently no guarantee that a person who adopts the necessary means to her ends will comply with her moral duties. A criminal may suffer no weakness of will or inconsistency but act in a way we consider morally wrong. Reasons for immoral action could be rationally objective in this way. Morality can be one normative domain among many: actions can be legal or illegal, prudent or imprudent, or as prohibited or required by etiquette, etc. People can have rational ends for which moral compliances are not necessary means. Acquiring a moral character is not always the best bet for achieving our nonmoral ends: There is uncertainty about the degree of a person’s dependence on others and corresponding vulnerability to their sanctions, along with psychological assumptions relating to people’s abilities to identify the character of the persons they interact with, as well as susceptibility to feeling guilty, and so forth. How morality acquires psychological authority is an empirical question. Rationality is simply one standpoint among others. Even if it were granted that good agency requires acting for public reasons, it is unclear why people have reason to avoid becoming a bad agent. Moral behavior is always rationally permissible, it is not always rationally required. Being a good man can be rationally optional. No matter how morality is defined, there is not a normative reason to act morally when morality and nonmoral reasons conflict. The problem of morality lies in reconciling morality’s alleged objectivity with its practical rationality for everybody simultaneously. The most rational thing to do means what most conduces to the fulfillment of the agent’s aims. If we don’t have reasons to be moral in cases in which there is nothing we want that we get by acting morally, then there is no such thing as overriding moral obligation:Consider an agent who would receive great satisfaction from killing another person whom he hates and whom he can kill without cost because the killer will die soon anyway. Suppose a mafia boss in a small city will kill me if I don’t murder two innocent people for him. Surely it would be immoral, but would I be better off dead?Several Nazis on several occasions tossed babies into the air like clay plates and shot them. Historian Helen Ellerbe: “In the Inquisition, girls as young as nine and boys as young as ten were tried for witchcraft. Children much younger were tortured to extract testimony against their parents. Children were then flogged while they watched their parents burn.” The wrongdoer may succeed just by being stronger, more clever, or more ruthless than others. He does not expect that others will do as he does. Thus, his actions are not likely to be self-defeating, so for him to do the evil is rational. It may be reasonable certainty about a person's degree of dependence on others and corresponding vulnerability to their sanctions, along with insusceptibility to feeling guilt.Can a reason justify an action only if someone can justify it to other agents in terms that they can accept? Why should we assume that two agents could not have reasons for pursuing incompatible ends? For example, struggling to secure the last of the food to provide for their own families. Or suppose someone stole a stranger's life raft to save one of his children, but the stranger could not save one of his children. The moral skeptic thinks it is rational for the agent to pursue her interests. There is no rational way to resolve conflicts between the reasons of morality and self-interest. To think that moral conflicts can always be rationally resolved, it is the idea that there is some supreme standpoint from which we can evaluate conflicts between morality and self-interest, but there isn’t any supreme standpoint. Neither the moral skeptic nor the defenders of morality can provide a rational justification for their view, neither side succeeds in defending that its side is more fundamental than the other. Even if there is no reason to reject morality, the question remains whether only the recognition of moral reasons will motivate a rational agent. It isn't necessarily irrational for others not to be motivated by our moral reasons. We can have limits to what we are prepared to sacrifice for social goals. When we plead with someone to be reasonable, we are often expecting him to take other people’s interests into account, presupposing an aim of reaching some sort of collective agreement on a course of action.We deny being morally committed to producing the maximum objective impartial good for humanity, rather than for our framework of family, race, religion, cultural heritage of traditions, community, and nationality, which provides a secure framework within which someone can live. The gain of happiness if one dedicates oneself to increasing the care of oneself, one's family, one's community, or one's country for a richer life, would be small in comparison to the gain of happiness if one dedicates oneself to increasing the care of sick, oppressed, hungry, homeless strangers.What is moral objectivity?Defenses of objective morality need to show that a criterion of objectivity is reliable and confer to objectivity a high likelihood of trust. Wasn't slavery consensus? Why do we need to assume that an existing social consensus must be right? Experiments show that seeing an issue as objective correlates with the perception of the current consensus on the issue: People tend to vary their estimations of objectivity by the subject matter of the belief, for example, a belief about the morality of abortion is attributed a considerably lesser degree of objectivity than other beliefs such as the wrongness of opening gunfire on a crowd. Those who believe in objective morality can show greater moral commitment and conviction. But they can show greater repugnant antisocial moral commitments too, including those that underlie terrorist acts. The belief in objective morality predicts greater intolerance of another person who disagrees. (See for example Goodwin, G. & Darley, J. 2008. “The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism.” Cognition 106: 1339–1366.)The moral objectivists alleged differences in factual beliefs and life circumstances rarely justify a different morality. Moral objectivists have argued that moral disagreements very often derive from disagreement about nonmoral facts. But if ignorance of nonmoral facts can undermine the existence of a true disagreement, it can undermine the existence of a true agreement too. To moral objectivists, slave owners may have believed that their slaves were intellectually inferior, and Inuits who practiced infanticide may have been forced to do so because of resource scarcity in the tundra. But would the inferiority of one group justify enslaving them? If so, why don’t we think it’s acceptable to enslave people with low IQs? Would life in the tundra justify infanticide? If so, why don’t we just kill off destitute children around the globe instead of giving donations to Oxfam? Differences in circumstances do not explain why people don't share the same values, rather they help to explain why values end up being so different. When scientific errors are identified, corrections are made. By contrast, there is no evidence for rational value convergence as a result of moral conflicts. Even with our modern understanding of racial equality, there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, although they represent a smaller percentage of the world’s population than in the past. Slavery exists from mega-harems in Dubai to illicit brothels in Bucharest, from slave quarries in India to child markets in Haiti. (See E. Benjamin Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery)There is no objective reason to prioritize among incommensurable moral values and there is no one moral value that explains all other moral values. Different values call for different responses: Respect, love, awe, admiration, nurturing, and so on. Values, for example, such as dignity and autonomy, cannot be objectively traded off with pleasures: Sources of pleasure have a particularly steep rate of diminishing response value. The first donut you eat is very tasty, the second is fine, the third may give no pleasure at all. But this response doesn't work when we consider values such as dignity, or autonomy. If there is a variety of ethical values, and if they are incommensurable, one would expect irreconcilable disagreement about what morally should prioritize. Objectivists imagine that ethical truth is possible only if there is the possibility of singular moral guidance. But how should we prioritize the harm caused by one moral transgression with the impurity caused by another?Suppose the Police Chief and Judge prosecute and punish a single innocent scapegoat to prevent rioting that will lead to substantial destruction of property and loss of life. In an experiment by Peng, Doris, Nichols, and Stich, American subjects are significantly more likely to think that the Police Chief and Judge are morally wrong. Chinese subjects are significantly more likely to hold the potential rioters responsible for the scapegoating, they attributed more responsibility at the level of the collective than did the more individualist Americans. (See How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism John M. Doris and Alexandra Plakias in Moral Psychology Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong)Making a concrete moral solution obey an abstract impartial categorical moral rule is only valuable if this is the ultimate goal, but this is exactly what is in a dispute about moral objectivity. Is morality grounded in maximizing objectively to the society the impersonal, impartial good of the consequences of the actions or rules rather than our interests? Some forms of moral partiality are morally admirable. Loyalty to one’s family, friends, community, or country, for instance, is commonly regarded as a virtue. Parents are thought to be morally obliged to take the best affordable care of their children and grandparents. Friendship requires us to do certain favors for friends without weighing our friends' welfare impartially against our working for a charity. ​​​We are simply less likely to conclude that our friend acted shamefully, partiality is part of what makes good friends. Forms of love can conflict with the requirements of impartiality. There isn't a morally neutral decision between impartiality and partiality, so there isn’t an objective neutral position to settle the moral disagreement.What is a mind-independence as a characterization of moral objectivity?Morality can’t be mind-independent to be objective. Consider the suggestion that objective moral facts, like objective scientific facts, are independent of our thoughts, capacities, and sensibilities. Our moral obligations are bound up with us and with who we are. Moral facts are mind-dependent: The relative pleasure or happiness that action brings about may well determine the action’s moral status. Facts involving moral properties depend essentially on our responses, intentions, beliefs, and feelings, facts involving moral principles cannot be mind-independent: maximize utility, act by the duty of fidelity, a patient’s informed consent can be what makes permissible an invasive medical procedure.According to classical utilitarianism, one is obligated to act to maximize moral goodness, and moral goodness is identical to happiness. Happiness is a mind-dependent phenomenon. According to Kant, one's moral obligations are determined by which maxims can be consistently willed as universal laws; moreover, the only thing that is good in itself is a goodwill. Willing is mind-dependent.If moral truths are like the axioms of mathematics, and they are out there to be intuited, then we should expect suitably well-informed people and with the same discernment to give incompatible accounts of what these moral truths are. Mathematics, if we are modeling the world, is not the only deduction, it is intelligible to imagine mathematical truths being different, like Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. In mathematics, we don't deduce models of the world from axioms. Rather we try to model the world by introducing axioms, check which theorems follow from the axioms, and compare these results in the world against the model. If the results agree we are happy. If the results disagree, we change the axioms. Deduction helps us find consequences from the axioms, but it does not tell us how to gauge the validity of the model, nor how to adjust the axioms. Mathematical objects play a representational role in empirical science, and because of this, they don’t need to be mind-independent to be applicable. Consider “The average mother has 2.4 children”: there isn't an actual object known as the average mother. Models of morality change with contingent concerns and desires, preferences, and motivations. The role of axioms in pure mathematics and in physics is different. In pure mathematics one neither "proves" or "disproves" axiom assumptions for a set of theorems. In contrast, in physics a comparison of axioms with experiments always makes sense.Is morality like colors, they are real but mind-dependent? Are virtue and color not qualities of actions or objects, but they are internal responses that only exist in the perceiver's mind? What perceptions represent when they represent colors? Some of the colors we can see don’t have a corresponding wavelength, they are entirely constructed by the brain: white, sky blue, brown, magenta, rose, etc. We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it a reality. Perceptually things seem to be, say red because those things and their properties causally interact with our perceptual system. But if moral properties lack causal power, then we cannot explain why morality seems to the intellect to be true. Immoral acts comprise a miscellany: lying, stealing, hoarding, hurting, killing, neglecting, harassing, polluting, insulting, molesting, vandalizing, disrespecting, and so forth. What objective properties do these things have in common apart from the fact that we disapprove of them all? If our moral concepts were responses dependent on objective properties, disagreements about their truth would necessarily involve a concept perception error on someone's part. But it seems that a utilitarian and a Kantian may both be conceptually competent while disagreeing about what is wrong. So, for example, in disagreement over the moral permissiveness of eating meat, it is unclear what are the criteria in light of which there is a true normativity. Sometimes the ground of a common value would be lacking. Consider disagreements about the taste of coriander. Studies have revealed a genetic variation that leads to coriander having a fresh taste for most, but soapy for some. It simply turns out that the disagreement about this value is based on a false assumption: namely, that there is only one way for coriander to taste. There isn’t a true normativity.Moral judgments are like when we evaluate sunsets as beautiful, novels as meritorious, motor vehicles as good or bad ones. These evaluations don't need that our judgments are based on a mind-independent reality, or need consensus with others whose basic desires might be different from our own. We will not need to believe in transcendent goodness relating to human beings any more than we believe in transcendent automotive value.The objection to a choice of an ideal judge as being objective ethics is that we cannot be justified in believing the premises of appeals to a moral authority without assuming moral beliefs.Why suppose that the ideal judge would use for example a utilitarian calculus, as opposed to another method of making moral judgments, as deontological ethics? There is no fact of the matter about what an ideal moral judge would approve of, any more than there is a fact of the matter about whether the ideal judge prefers vanilla to chocolate ice cream. A thorny problem for realism objectivist is explaining why people with different moral standards are simply talking about different subjects, while believing that they are talking about the same thing, but not necessarily those who disagree on standards for an ideal holiday.Alleged objective moral authorities can make disputes more intransigent if the parties consider their positions to be the only morally correct ones. There are no authoritative moral judges or decision procedures for determining God’s will, or of which act will maximize utility. The debate will always come down to whether there is some other reason to believe in moral authorities. Moral authority is not like that of a judge whose decisions constitute the law, since morality remains independent of someone's beliefs.The strongest possible answer to the question of the existence of moral objectivity is to show that an individual can flourish without living a moral life: In the United States and South Africa, and elsewhere, gated and walled communities, private schools, the flight of white class to increasingly remote suburbs, gentrification, signify the widespread conviction that one can isolate oneself from the moral problems of society at large. A just world would be one in which one could not succeed in this effort.If there is no adequate calculator to tell us when it would be rationally best to be moral or immoral, then morality as an objective and inescapable true authority is undermined. There is not a normative reason to act morally when morality and nonmoral reasons conflict.WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS IF THERE ISN’T A TRUE MORALITY?Does the fact that the perspective of a true morality can be rejected without the charge of irrationality make ethics irrelevant? No. Morality is the prevalence of putting oneself in the position of others, this prevalence is evidence that the majority is interested in acting in ways that can be justified impartially in a moral community. However, accepting or rejecting the impartial categorical perspective is not an all-or-nothing thing. It is possible to have a strong, but not overriding or categorical desire to act as required in a moral community.If nothing is morally wrong as moral nihilists claim, then isn't it morally wrong to torture babies just for fun?The view that the self-evidence for moral realism in case of conflicts with nihilism trumps in principle, begs the question, as it assumes the claim what nihilism cannot be true. Beg the question to argue against moral nihilism based on common moral beliefs, no matter how obvious those beliefs might seem to us, and no matter how well these common beliefs cohere together. If moral nihilism cannot be ruled out in any way, then moral skepticism follows. Some people are led to moral nihilism by the absence of any defensible theory of morality. Some people might believe in moral nihilism for reasons similar to those that led scientists to reject phlogiston. The nihilist theorist knows of no phenomenon whose explanation necessarily requires supposed moral facts; the very features of moral properties like free will seem incoherent. Why don't most people torture babies just for fun? If all of our moral beliefs can be explained by social sciences, evolution, and psychology without assuming that categorical, absolute, objective, real, mind-independent conception of morality is true, then we can reject morality as true as we reject the literalness of metaphors, fictions, make-believe. Knowledge implies truth, but justified belief does not. Thus, if moral beliefs cannot be true, they still might be justified in some way that is independent of moral literal truth.The idea that without a supposed absolute, objective, real, mind-independent morality we become immediately antisocial and irresponsible, requires the unsubstantiated premise that absolute, objective, real, mind-independent conception of morality is the only thing that keeps us kind, altruistic, cooperative, and so forth.If moral rationality is sufficient for moral judgment, the absence of emotions won't lead to deficits in moral judgment. The crucial case is psychopaths, who seem to be just as rational as the rest of us, but lack emotions. The individuals who are indifferent to the fear, distress, and sadness of others, who are difficult to socialize, show the importance of emotion and affect in moral cognition and behavior. Psychopathy is a neurodevelopmental personality disorder affecting approximately 1% of the general population and 20–30% of the prison population. Relative to non-psychopathic criminals, psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate amount of repetitive crime and violence in society. They lack attachment to others, and difficulties experiencing empathic concern and remorse. They lack a fear of punishment and do not experience insight into the consequences of their harmful actions for others. Structural neuroimaging studies associate psychopathy with a host of morphological brain abnormalities. A study using EEG demonstrated abnormal relative insensitivity to actual pain. Nevertheless, their capacity to understand an agent’s intentionality is not impaired. This uncoupling between affective sharing and cognitive understanding likely contributes to psychopaths’ callous disregard for the rights and feelings of others.However, emotions may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for morality. Empathic concern does not necessarily produce moral behavior. Empathy may lead one to act in a way that violates justice and fairness, when, for instance, allocating resources preferentially to the person for whom empathy was felt. On the other hand, a lack of empathic concern for the well-being of others is a risk factor for amoral behavior, a hallmark of individuals with psychopathy. There is a complex nature in the relationships between empathy and morality. Empathic arousal may be necessary to develop some aspects of moral reasoning, such as care morality. But in some situations, empathy can be powerless in the face of rationalization. Empathy is relatively more predictive of prosocial behavior when the victim is an individual. In a social context, reasoning can play a more crucial role in guiding a moral decision. (See Why Developmental Neuroscience Is Critical for the Study of Morality - Jean Decety and Jason M. Cowell)Some moral philosophers think they can provide a moral theory capable of convincing a psychopath. Psychopaths don't generally lack reasoning abilities but cannot respond with feelings like empathy and guilt. A generally convincing moral theory for psychopaths cannot be provided because a person who is unable to understand emotional motivation and who refuses to accept negative emotions from babies tortured just for fun will usually not be convinced by any rational argument in favor of a moral conviction. Psychopaths don't care about the harmful consequences their actions have for others. Rationality doesn’t enable moral objectivity. It is generally not possible for a belief about a matter of fact to motivate without the presence of emotion. Passions don't represent how things are, so they can’t be true or false or stand in logical relations. Therefore motivating processes don't deserve to be called reasoning.Why has humanity managed to persist in the widespread delusion that there is a true morality? If morality is false, how can it be useful? Judging an act to be something that must be done whether one likes it or not may strengthen one’s resolve to perform it. It may be motivationally superior to the thought “this action would satisfy my desires” because this judgment seems to invite inner rationalizations that ultimately amount to self-sabotage. By contrast, thinking “I just must do it” works to shut down inner debate. Desires for the benefits of living in a cooperative society are at risk of being overwhelmed by short-sighted selfish temptations. Morality strengthens our motivation to act cooperatively by providing false categorical imperatives.Does the belief that morality is false need to be suppressed for moral commitments to be effective in bolstering self-control and cooperation? We can interpret that explanations in a moral language are somewhat like a metaphor, a fiction, make-believe, of the true explanations in social sciences, psychological and evolutionary terms. Like a metaphor, moral language has a literal false meaning, but it can convey real truths of great importance standing behind it. Metaphors and moral language can be emotionally deeply motivating in ways that are of enormous importance. The belief that morality is categorical, objective, absolute, is sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful. It can inflame disagreements and encourage disputants to dig in their heels and refuse to compromise. If one interprets a moral judgment as true in a categorical objective mind-independent sense, this judgment tends to make one less open towards diverging moral views. Judgments that are regarded as a subjective expression of desires, by contrast, make one more open towards diverging moral views. We should normally be on the lookout for adverse effects of moralizing, and be prepared to go for a neutral normative language if possible, like scientific and legalistic language. Moral terms are too vague and open to interpretation. There are nonmoral values, norms, and reasons, considerations that lie behind morality as absolute categorical objective normative truth.Is there a kind of psychological dissonance if a person believes that promise-keeping isn't categorically obligatory while cultivating the emotions and motivations consistent with promise-keeping being figuratively categorical? Metaphors, like moral terms, have a vividness and focus of attention in a way that a neutral normative language talk cannot, like scientific and legalistic language. This is the principal general reason why metaphor and moral language has such a central place in our language and thoughts. What justifies avoiding the breakers of promises is the belief that one is untrustworthy, not that morality is categorical, objective, absolute.Can moral responsibility be ultimately under the control of free will?Can moral responsibility be ultimately under the control of free will? Control is possible if someone controls morally himself, but then, does the early self-control a later self, leading to infinite regress in a finite life?An agent acts with moral responsibility only if he has control over the ultimate source of his action. There is no control over the ultimate source of the agent’s action if it is caused by natural laws and the past, but also if it has no cause of control. Nothing can be causally before itself. Therefore, moral responsibility and free will are impossible.Is it true that because determinism, that of an agent could not avoid acting wrong, and therefore morality and criminal punishment are errors? From the skeptical of responsibility perspective, morality is not about backward-looking assessments of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, rather, morality is forward-looking, functions by invoking recommendation. The denial of moral responsibility is consistent with the principles of moral rationalism. The imposition of sanctions could have purposes other than the punishment of perpetrators: it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating, and deterring offenders. There are measures for preventing crime more generally, such as providing for adequate education and mental health care, which the moral responsibility skeptic can readily endorse. Juries routinely condemn defendants without empirical evidence that defendants' will is not determined by any antecedent conditions outside them. Even if a criminal is not morally responsible if there is no free will, it may be as legitimate to segregate or control him in defense of others as it is to quarantine or control those who are not responsible for their contagious diseases. We want to prevent the effects of misbehavior just as we want to prevent the effects of disease or hurricanes.If free will is the basis of moral responsibility, why can moral judgment have morally irrelevant reasons of which we are not even aware? Moral psychology experiments show that moral thought is affected by environmental factors of which we are not even aware that are completely irrelevant to the moral issues. Examples among many: A- Emotion: viewing a humorous video clip can have a substantial impact on a participant’s moral intuitions. Hearing different kinds of audio, stand-up comedy, or inspirational stories has divergent effects on moral intuitions. B- The order in which the moral hypotheses are considered. C- Moral judgments can be affected by the smells in our environment: a whiff of fart spray; spraying the questionnaire with a disinfectant spray; people are more unconsciously generous outside a store from which the smell of freshly baked bread emanates, than outside a hardware store. D - Whether we're in a messy room, or a dark room. E- Whether we've recently washed our hands, even the proximity of a hand sanitizer dispenser, the presence of dirty pizza boxes, have all been reported to influence moral intuitions. (See for example Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006, “Moral Intuitionism Meets Empirical Psychology”, in Terry Horgan editor, Metaethics After Moore; and “Moral dilemmas and moral rules” - S Nichols, R Mallon - Cognition, 2006) Supposed intuitive objective moral self-evident propositions cannot be proved or known by inference from premises. But in reality, moral intuitions justify only after inferences to check them. At least some of a priori or intuitive moral judgments are highly unreliable because various morally irrelevant factors and biases can affect moral judgments. Supposed “objective” intuitive moral claims aren’t self-evident because the non-inferential justification of moral intuitions is unreliable.Would skepticism about moral responsibility undermine attitudes such as moral resentment, indignation, guilt, and gratitude, essential to good personal relationships? Is there a tendency of the moral skeptic to suppress evidence for moral skepticism when witnessing atrocities or when engaging in moral argument and political debate? The understanding of the lack of moral responsibility modifies the rationality of certain emotional reactions. While moral anger, resentment, and indignation don’t disappear if we feel that moral responsibility doesn’t exist, there are alternative attitudes available to us, such as moral concern, disappointment, sorrow, and resolve. Instead of moral guilt feelings, an agent can acknowledge that he has acted immorally and he feels deep sorrow for what he has done, and as a result, he is motivated to eradicate her disposition to behave in a bad way. One can be thankful to a young child for some kindness without supposing that he is praiseworthy in the basic desert sense. In certain situations, refraining from resentment or moral anger may be beyond our power and, therefore, even the skeptic of moral responsibility may not be able to adopt alternative attitudes. We might expect to be unable to appreciably reduce immediate emotional reactions of moral anger as an immediate reaction upon being deeply hurt in an intimate personal relationship. However, in a non-immediate rational reflection, moral anger can be diminished or even eliminated, and we can reject any force that is supposed to justify a damaging response to evil.If free will is the basis of moral responsibility, why does luck undermine evaluations of moral responsibility?We seem to blame those who have murdered more than we blame those who have merely attempted murder, even if the reason for the lack of success in the second case is that the intended victim unexpectedly tripped and fell to the floor.Imagine that two otherwise conscientious people have forgotten to have their brakes checked recently and experience brake failure, but only one of whom finds a child in the path of his car. Why does the unfortunate driver receive more moral blame and criminal punishment?Gauguin feels some responsibility towards his family and is reasonably happy living with them, but abandons them, leaving them in dire straits. Gauguin chooses a life of painting in Tahiti over a life with his family, not knowing whether he will be a great painter. In one scenario, he goes on to become a great painter, and in another, he fails. Thus, how the success turns out, something which might be almost entirely a matter of resultant luck seems to have a lot to do with the evaluation he'll get.We tend to think that people should be praised or blamed only based on what they can control, and yet we regularly praise and blame people based on the results of their actions, even if these are beyond the control of the agents.Luck undermines evaluations of moral responsibility. Our genes, caregivers, peers, and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are. We lack control over everything: the results of our actions, our circumstances, our constitution, and our causal history. Where can one draw a line of principle between worthy luck and condemnable luck?Does the free will of Compatibilism preserve moral responsibility?Compatibilism claims that we have free will and that we are morally responsible even though all events are causally determined. We can define free will in terms of control in the action necessary for moral responsibility. To the deterministic aspect of Compatibilism, the source of the traits and dispositions of the agent can be traced back to conditions of origin that were completely beyond his control, having them is subject to luck. To the free will aspect of Compatibilism, agents are responsible for their actions if they intentionally modify themselves to have a certain set of traits and dispositions. A compatibilist might say that as long as an agent takes responsibility for his dispositions and values, in time he will become morally responsible for them. But having the series of dispositions and values by which agents shape and modify their dispositions and values is subject to luck too. Thus, the actions by which agents take responsibility for their dispositions and values are explained by luck.Why does rationality as the defining normative authority impose moral actions on yourself? You willing an end no necessarily imposes rational actions on yourself. We can act against our better judgment: We can spend on luxuries worth a month's income, we can fight to quit smoking. The normativity of coherence is merely apparent or maybe merely a standard of proper functioning without giving anyone reason to comply with it. The rationality of evaluations doesn’t entail any particular conclusions about what we do: One can be irrational without having any intentions based on false beliefs. One could fail to intend the means believed necessary for one’s ends because of other motivations, or one devalues the reward that comes later, which doesn’t necessarily involve any false beliefs. One can also have intentions based on false beliefs without being irrational. Some actions are morally good to do, but not morally bad to not do: Why is it more praiseworthy if an agent risks his life testifying in court to save someone, to whom the agent has no special duty, from unjust imprisonment than if the agent only sacrifices his afternoon? If morality is rationality, and rationality is the same in both cases, why is there more praise in the first case? Moral rationality means that the rational ends are morally defensible, but it is better than the idea of rationality is independent of morality, or there is a circular definition of rationality and morality. Rationality isn't intrinsically moral: Recent work in empirical ethics has indicated that even when we are asked to give reasons for our moral intuitions, we are often finding nothing to say in their defense (See Haidt, J., 2001. “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment,” Psychological Review, 108: 814–34). As we saw in the previous section, the supposedly intuitive "objective" moral claims are not self-evident because the non-inferential justification of moral intuitions is unreliable. Even professional philosophers are prone to such lapses of clear thinking. Moral normativity hasn't both inescapability and authority. Even if all agents manifest a reliable connection between moral judgment and motivation to act morally, it will be false that such a connection is necessary. (See Schwitzgebel, E. and Cushman, F., 2012. “Expertise in moral reasoning? Order effects on moral judgment in professional philosophers and non-philosophers,” Mind and Language, 27: 135–53.)If there isn’t a true morality, why is it morally wrong to think that something is morally wrong for others, but not for me? There is only one real way to stop oneself from distorting things in one’s favor, to see if one is so different from others that what would be required of them is not required of oneself. The appeal to supposed objective categorical principles doesn't stop this sort of thing, because an appeal to supposed categorical objectivity can be distorted too. In being driven by supposed objective categorical principles, a principled person can distort the relevance of some features by insisting on filtering them through principles he thought objective. If after you found supposed objective principles, you are going to be incorrigible, you had better always be right; incorrigible error is the worst of all worlds. Reliance on supposed objective moral principles encourages dogmatism and narrow-mindedness. People who have high estimates of their objectivity might be less likely to take verification measures against bias. Kant in "Metaphysics of Morals" argues that masturbation is so immoral that it exceeds even murdering oneself since one uses himself as a means to satisfy an animal impulse. He argues that women should not be allowed the right to vote since their existence is only natural. And bastard children can be freely killed since they are born outside the protection of the law. A confident belief in the reliability of one’s intuition can be tragic.Does thinking rationally require at least that one thinks consistently, and in ethics, this just means taking the same feature to be the same reason wherever it occurs? Moral skepticism claims that one cannot extract from one case anything that is guaranteed to make a difference to another. Moral skepticism allows a relevance of experience, what one should not do is to say: “it mattered before and so it must matter after”. There is no need to suppose that how morality works is by the extraction of objective principles from the earlier cases, which we then impose on a new case. When we are thinking of reasons for a general belief,the kind of consistency required of us is simply that we don't embrace beliefs that can't all be true together.. There isn’t a consistency requirement in a different way when we turn to moral beliefs. If someone can need medical help, and I can be the only person around to summon it, I don’t need supposed general moral objective principles, but simply my human nature.On a moral skepticism account of morality, people are left to work out their differences with each other in ways that are very much like the give-and-take of politics. One must make decisions about whether to bargain or compromise partly within and partly outside one’s moral framework. Human beings have strong natural propensities to try to dominate others and to avoid domination by others. The non-existence of a true morality against human sacrifice and slavery does not entail that there are no grounds for rational criticism. We can criticize these practices from a point of view that relies on our values. Moral skeptics can criticize moral systems and they can identify what they consider behavior progress. Skepticism will not understand moral progress as a movement toward a single true categorical objective morality. If there’s no moral true justification, there is dogmatic solidarity, making community with the people who are like you, and saying things to each other that you all endorse as a way of feeling community with others. Against those who believe in a single true categorical morality, the moral skepticism argument is that they will have to arbitrarily dogmatize single correct answers to fundamental disagreements without giving plausible and specific explanations for why moral skepticism is in error. Categorical objectivists might propose that fundamental disagreements arise because at least one side has an interest in not acknowledging some moral or nonmoral facts. The moral skeptical could retort that this sort of explanation is quite general. As seen in a previous section, experiments show that seeing an issue as objective correlates with the perception of the current consensus on the issue. Folk morality doesn’t think that there is only one correct answer for all controversial moral claims.There are no moral categorical reasons to obey. For example, an exceptionless moral principle “don't kill an innocent” might prevent a little girl needless suffering as a terminally ill patient that would serve as a reason for killing a little girl. The context at least partly constitutes the meaning. A spy might well not be “honest” whereas a platoon leader relentless in training his soldiers who are about to be sent to the battlefields might well be only “cruel”. Depending on contexts, “honesty” and “cruelty” might well change from blamed to praised. An action is not in any way determined by universal moral principles, but by the relevant context. One cannot extract from one moral case anything that is guaranteed to make a difference to another. Any morality is ad hoc. Subjectively, any action, no matter how objectionable in itself, can be morally permissible if it were necessary to prevent a sufficiently greater evil.More Argumentation Details - Does morality have an objective, inescapable authority?Empirical research does not support that moral agreement necessarily arises when contenders are fully rational and fully informed of the relevant nonmoral facts. If even with knowledge of nonmoral facts, persistent moral disagreement does not represent a threat to moral objectivity, how or why would be morality self-evident?Objective nonmoral facts can influence morality, but morality can determine how we use objective nonmoral facts: Our moral-political preferences affect the ability to solve mathematical problems, which should be the cornerstone of rationality and objectivity. An experiment can prove this: First, the capacity to handle numbers and the moral-political inclinations of the 1,111 volunteers is measured. They are then divided into groups that were presented to different versions of the same mathematical problem involving the calculation of proportions. It wasn't an easy question, as 59% of people couldn't solve it. Those who were good at math were able to do it well, but the results changed depending on how the problem was presented. If described in a moral-political neutral way, such as calculating the efficacy of skin cream, the numerically competent had no difficulty in solving it. But when the same question became about the effectiveness of arms control in combating crime, moral-political preferences spoke louder. Those who were better at math answer more related to their previous preferred side than the less math skilled. If there is a good picture to describe our moral rationality, it is less that of a scientist interested in obtaining the truth than that of a lawyer interested in winning an argument. When moral-political relevant facts become identified as symbols of membership in and loyalty to affinity groups, people will be motivated to selectively engage empirical evidence in a manner that more supposedly reliably connects their beliefs to their moral-political particular groups than to the positions that are best supported by the evidence. (See Misinformation and identity-protective cognition - Dan M. Kahan, Behavioural Public Policy, Vol 1, Issue 1,2017).Moral-political disagreement grows when science literacy and numeracy increase. Ordinary individuals remarkably more well equipped with science’s knowledge select more scientific information that secures their previous moral-political personal interests. Disagreement about scientific facts stems not from the public’s incomprehension of science but a distinctive conflict of interest: Between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share moral-political close ties, and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote the common welfare. (See The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Nature climate change, 2(10), 732, 2012)Americans from the Southern States were much more likely to endorse violence of various forms in response to moral transgression than Americans from the North. Because many Southerners are descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants who had to develop a “culture of honor” to survive under harsh, comparatively lawless conditions in Northern Ireland before coming to the United States. (See Nisbett, R.E., and Cohen, D. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, 1996) The moral judgments of rural Mayan people in the Mexican state of Chiapas do not judge actions causing harm to be worse than omissions which cause identical harms, while nearby urban Mayan people judge actions to be substantially worse than omissions. (See Abarbanell, Linda and Marc D. Hauser, 2010, “Mayan Morality: An Exploration of Permissible Harms”, Cognition, 115(2): 207–224)It is a fallacy assuming that because all instances of moral disagreement that we have ever encountered can be due to a supposed deficiency of true information among interlocutors, providing true information will lead to moral convergence. This is like saying that because death was caused by a lack of oxygen in the room, death would have been avoided had the room been filled with 100% oxygen. The question of what shared psychological traits and information is sufficient to ensure convergence in the moral agreement is to a large extent an empirical matter, many of the details of which remain unknown. There is a growing body of literature revealing that the things that can influence an individual's morally relevant attitudes can be quite surprising. We might not have supposed, for example, that a person's tendency to act dishonestly can be enhanced by her wearing sunglasses or being placed in a dimly lit room. Nor might we have guessed the effect of handwashing on a person's moral evaluations. We might not have appreciated how easy it is to manipulate someone's moral opinions by placing him in the presence of a dirty tissue (see a previous section). Attitudes prompted manipulatively in the setting of a psychology lab often survive the debriefing session. Disgust can remain in situations of full information. Even medical placebos sometimes work in conditions of full information. (See Richard Joyce - The Accidental Error Theorist’ in Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol 6)Is there a true objective categorical morality? The most plausible explanation for persistent disagreement among rational agents, with the same information and same discernment, maybe that there are no facts that make objective categorical morality true. Consider case examples:Is human life always better than the pleasure of a good meal? No matter how rational and well informed we are, we are incapable of being motivated to count everyone’s interests. An emergency-room doctor can efficiently spend 20 hours a day saving lives instead of only 16. If he spends only 16 hours at work and chooses to spend precious hours during which she could be saving lives having fine meals instead, he has not measured the values at stake incorrectly because what matters in a lived life is the pursuit of a balance of values. Therefore sometimes the pleasure of getting a good meal is more important than the value of human life.For any possible population all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living because the total sum of the quality of life is greater. Therefore, is it possible to make the world an objectively better place by creating more unsatisfied people? Or have we moral objective obligation to make a world where the selfish possibility of a smaller number of human high-quality flourishing is greater? Can it be objectively better for children in a family to allow existing children’s well-being level to plummet so long as the parents have managed to offset that individual diminution through the total sum of well-being with the production of more unsatisfied children? What is the objectively better choice: Either to bring into existence a genetically impaired child with life below some normal threshold of quality of life or no child? Has a fetus not yet conscious of being alive moral objective rights of being brought to suffer a life below some normal threshold of quality of life? Or have parents' moral objective right of procreative liberty despite that an impaired child can have deleterious well-being effects on brothers? Suppose that men choose to deplete natural resources instead to conserve them. Far future generations' existence can be more restricted under depletion, but it can be just as restricted as now under strict conservation. Conservation or depletion of resources may mean fewer people now or in the future. As conservation of natural resources decreases now the quality and quantity of life, would we have the moral objective duty of maximizing the future total sum of quality and quantity of life for an unknown number of people and their technology in the far future?Suppose Alison is one of 25 United States government officials on an airplane, each with a briefcase bearing an official seal. Terrorist hijackers announce they will kill one America per hour until their demands are met. Alison switches briefcases with Babette, a french woman, while she is in the bathroom. The terrorists shoot Babette. Suppose now that Allison doesn’t switch briefcase, but surreptitiously covers her briefcase official seal with a Libya Air sticker. The terrorists pass her briefcase and shoot Beatrice, the next American. What is the objective principle that satisfactorily determines the difference between morally avoiding harm in self-defense and immorally sacrificing others in self-defense?Is homosexuality objectively against natural law? The fact that something is natural to make it good? Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, mass extinctions are natural. Even if there are certain characteristics held in nature by all human beings, like visual impairment in adults, it does not follow that these must be what we want to have. Being unnatural renders something bad? Computers, curing diseases with medicines, and using artificial sweeteners are unnatural. Homosexuality is natural and does occur among animals. The frequency of homosexual-propensity genes in human populations is above the level expected from mutation alone, a sign that the propensity has been favored by natural selection (See Genesis - The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson). The homosexuality level is too high to be explained solely by random changes in genes that affect sexual behavior. Individuals that join professions useful to society but counter to their reproduction, monastic orders, and homosexuality are examples of social activity that do not favor reproduction. It is logically impossible to derive any normative truth from any non-normative truth. If there are no normative words in the premises, there can be no normative words in the conclusion. Knowledge of the natural facts will not take you to morality. The religious natural law point of view puts procreation at the center of marriage as its natural fulfillment. However, if for example, they were to place love and mutual support for human flourishing at the center, it is clear that many same-sex couples would meet this point of view. By placing procreation as the natural fulfillment of marriage, religion denigrates sterile marriages, and grandparents helpers because they are not done for procreation, and surely they are not wrong. Homosexual acts can be humanly appropriate because in performing them partners realize a common good they can realize in no other way. A significant number of those who divorce or who report that their marriages are not what they had hoped cite disappointment in their sexual lives. There aren't causal connections between the recognition of homosexual marriage and the prevalence of attitudes that destabilize families. Slippery slope arguments falsely assume that we will be unable in the future to distinguish the consensual, harmless sexual activity between rational adults, in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, from incest, and pedophilia. Oral and anal sex acts are never potentially procreative, whether heterosexual or homosexual, but why is this biological distinction morally relevant? Tolerance for gay relationships increases with the cost of child-rearing. How can God's good purposes for procreation account for example, that were extinct well over 99% of species that ever lived? Moral facts that do not provide reasons for everyone are not moral facts. We have laws for the imprisonment of people who inflict suffering upon animals. The disvalue of the suffering of animals outweighs the value of the freedom to inflict suffering on animals. Why don't animals have free will, yet they suffer like us? If animals are incapable of undergoing a process of spiritual growth, animal suffering is just pointless. There is no reason to believe that biological evolution is sensitive to God’s moral considerations. If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or because of rational argument, that is not faith. So faith is believing something in the absence of evidence or reasons. Religious people think that sacred scriptures give them the moral authority to dictate the rights of others but their children will look back at them like we look at those who told blacks and women that they didn't have the same rights as white men. Citizens’ interest in liberty and pursuit of their good outweighs any state or religion's interest in promoting only procreative relationships.This is a supplement to What are the strongest arguments against religion?