follows: Do not kill Do not cause pain Do not disable Do not deprive of freedom Do not deprive of pleasure Do not deceive Keep your promises Do not cheat Obey the law Do your duty The first five of these rules directly prohibit harming other people. Thus, they can be summarized with the slogan, 'do not harm'. The second five rules get their force from the fact that if it were generally allowed that those rules be broken, many harms (and losses of benefits) would result. They can be summarized with the slogan, 'do not violate trust'. Exceptions to the rules: the two-step procedure Gert holds that the moral rules are not absolute, but admit of exceptions. To determine whether a moral rule applies in a certain case or whether there is an exception, Gert advises people to follow what he calls the "two step procedure." The first step is to ascertain all morally relevant information about the scenario at hand in order to make a justified evaluation. The second step is to consider the consequences of other people knowing that they can violate the moral rule in similar circumstances. An example of this would be if you were to consider violating rule #9 (breaking the law) in order to run a red light. You evaluate the scenario and notice that there are no cars around and running the red light will not cause any harm, however, you do not want other people to know that they can run red lights too, because that would lead to more car accidents, which is indirectly causing pain and death. Another example of violating the moral rules would be killing in self-defense. If you evaluate the situation, you find that if you do not kill the other person, they will violate one of the moral rules and kill you. Also, it would be acceptable in this scenario for other people to know that killing in self-defense is allowable. Moral ideals Moral ideals, according to Gert, are objectives to lessen the amount of harm or evil in the world. These differ from moral rules, which are requirements that people avoid performing certain kinds of actions which produce harms to others. Morality encourages, but does not require, people to live up to moral ideals. Examples of moral ideals are the objectives of reducing the incidence of domestic violence or of breast cancer. What Gert