Forced marriage is wrong even when families and local custom strongly approve of it. In other words, forced marriage lacks the free and ongoing consent of at least one person.

A prison should prohibit prolonged solitary confinement for nonviolent rule violations even when most citizens believe harsh isolation is necessary for order. In other words, the rule would set a moral limit on isolation even when the punishment is lawful, traditional, and publicly popular.

Deliberately targeting civilians in war is wrong regardless of the cause being defended. In other words, the principle of distinction requires separating military targets from civilians.

Employers should have to meet a universal minimum safety standard even when strict enforcement would close factories that provide scarce local jobs. In other words, the same basic workplace-safety rule would apply across countries even when compliance causes serious local economic costs.

Societies may legitimately adopt different laws on assisted dying because ideas about dignity and obligation are partly shaped by culture. In other words, different societies could reach different legitimate answers about assisted dying because their ideas of dignity and family duty differ.

There is no single objectively correct model for how extended families should divide long-term caregiving responsibilities. In other words, there may be several legitimate ways for relatives to share elder care, rather than one arrangement that is morally correct everywhere.

Public policy should allow substantial moral disagreement about gestational surrogacy when the adults consent and evidence of serious harm is uncertain. In other words, the law would leave room for consenting adults to use gestational surrogacy while societies continue to disagree morally about it.

Schools should present major ethical controversies as disputes shaped by different traditions rather than teach that one framework has settled every issue. In other words, schools would explain the leading moral traditions and their disagreements instead of presenting one theory as having resolved every controversy.

Because societies hold different moral views about human enhancement, deployment should be paused until broad cross-cultural consent exists. In other words, deployment would wait for broad agreement across different cultures because the technology changes human abilities in morally disputed ways.

A hospital ethics board should give protection of innocent life lexical priority over autonomy, dignity, and social cost whenever those values conflict. In other words, lexical priority means that protecting innocent life would always come first instead of being weighed against autonomy, dignity, or cost case by case.

Deliberately ending a healthy viable pregnancy for nonmedical reasons is objectively wrong regardless of the pregnant person’s beliefs or the surrounding culture. In other words, once a fetus could survive outside the womb, personal or cultural approval cannot by itself make an elective late abortion morally acceptable.

Whether abortion early in pregnancy is morally permissible should largely be left to the pregnant person because reasonable moral traditions disagree about fetal status. In other words, early abortion may not have one culture-independent moral answer that government can confidently impose on everyone.

A society may legitimately prohibit most elective abortions when its moral tradition regards fetal life as part of the community’s duties, even if other societies permit them. In other words, a restrictive abortion rule can be morally valid within one historical and cultural tradition without proving that every society must adopt the same rule.