Morals

Morals are rules or norms within a group for what is proper behavior. There is no absolute authority on what morals are supposed to include. It is quite common to attribute moral codes to deities, in order to make them more effective and make people follow them without question. But you notice of course that the different religious moral codes are quite a bit at variance with each other and are often a reflection of local conditions in a certain region at a certain point in time. E.g. rules about what kinds of food are allowed and how they are supposed to be prepared.

It can be useful to make a distinction between pre-packaged morals and a more fluid and live sense of integrity. See, a moral code is the attempt of some wise and powerful people to think up the best ways they can think of for everybody to act. The assumption is that the general population consists of stupid and/or mean-intended people, so everybody would probably be better off if some smarter people told them how to act.

Moral codes and laws in general might well make some people act in more useful and sensible ways than they otherwise would. However, canned decisions are never quite as good as decisions made with integrity based on knowledge and empathy for what is actually going on. After all, the world is continuously changing, and full of different conditions and unexpected circumstances. It is somewhat futile for a human to come along and think he can write down all the specific right and wrong actions that anybody can take anywhere at any point in the future.

HoloWorld includes a basic right to act as one chooses with integrity, limited only through any conflict with the rights of others to do the same.

However, it might very well be desirable for many different communities to set down moral codes for themselves. The key point here is that it is for themselves. Nobody has any authority to go out and force everybody else to live by the same morals as them. Thus a country is much too big a chunk of the world to try to impose common morals on. The members of a certain community need to have some kind of realistic chance of participating in the selection of norms for the group. The group also needs to be small enough so that there is always somewhere else to go, so that one is free to leave the group if one no longer believes in its norms, without having to move to a different continent.

Different communities might include very different degrees of moralization. You might find very strict religious communities where everybody's wearing the same clothing and everybody's going through rigid rituals and have very strict laws controlling their behavior, and all of that might be written up in an ancient religious text. That is all perfectly alright, as long as there is always an option for people to leave.

Many communities will probably choose much more free-flowing diversity amongst themselves and will have a minimum of norms and rules, leaving things mostly up to individual choice and integrity.

Some groups will have norms and common practices amongst themselves that other groups might find highly distasteful or immoral. Well, tough luck, basically. You can not go and hold another group to your norms, even if you don't like what they are doing amongst themselves. If the other group actively invades your territory and tries to push themselves on you against your will, then you have the right to be protected from that. However, the mere fact that another group exists and is publicly accessible or visible and interacting with other people does not qualify as any attack on your rights.