You might hold an ethical position that it`s wrong to lie, but if you have plans for a war in Iraq, and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties, perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans, you may need to lie for a ...
What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that he doesn`t have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos.
We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you`re talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.
They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn`t specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differ...
Then I think the sense of it being one community breaks down; but if you know instantly and respond within twenty-four hours, it`s a very different sort of situation.