I don't have time address all the points brought up, but I want to make a couple quick comments that are important foundational concepts.
First, there is no real mathematical distinction between "hardware" and "software", and no clear break between the two in practice. They are the same thing and interchangeable i.e. everything that exists as hardware can be implemented in software and vice versa. I often see people treat them as different in these discussions, but that is largely a consequence of the peculiar structure of the computers that most humans are familiar with (i.e. the von Neumann architecture). This isn't a necessity, just a convenient way of working with silicon substrates.
Second, "free will" is an illusion that all self-aware FSMs will have as a consequence of what could be described as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem applied to state machinery. Being perfectly aware of your own state ("your own state" assuming a self-aware finite state machine) is mathematically impossible, though you can make good approximations as to what you will do next, and therefore you cannot have perfect prior knowledge of what you'll do next until you do it. In other words, what you might view as "free will" could be correctly viewed by a much more powerful outside observer as you following a deterministically predictable trajectory.
What "free will" really means is that you can't know exactly what you'll do next until you actually do it. "Choices" have predeterminable (to some entity at least) outcomes, but you won't be aware of it until you make a choice. This may not be easy to digest, but it is the logical mathematical outcome of self-awareness on finite state machines. It should be noted that non-FSMs are even worse in this regard, so positing a different underlying reality doesn't help much here. And in the end, the existence or not of "free will" doesn't really matter a whole lot; it might change the excuses, but not the reality.
If free will exists, than logical absolutes must exist. A logical absolute being; ‘X’ cannot be X and not be X at the same time. Or – ‘if I go into the house that is on fire, I will be burned’ and ‘if nobody goes into the house that is on fire, the baby inside will die’.
Now if logical absolutes exist, do moral absolutes exist? A basic moral absolute is ‘do not hurt an innocent person intentionally’. For morality to exist there must be good and bad.
If good and bad does not exist, than we are only left with logical and illogical choices. So we are left with the question of ‘is it logical to hurt an innocent person intentionally?’. If the answer is ‘no’ we must have a reason. This reason can only be in the realm of morality.
Even still, logical absolutes are conceptual, they transcend all people at all time and are absolute in all circumstances since they are absolute.