Sub Terra Vita: Chronicle #11—The Challenge of Ethics

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

August 3, 2015

Chronicle #11—The Challenge of Ethics

Everyone needs to learn lessons to regain their humanity in the mortal toil of living, the acts done, suffered, seen, or shared, in a sometimes cruel and unfair world. The more pain we suffered, the greater the wisdom by which we profited. Empathy, understanding conditions of someone's experience, will always remain a minimum requirement for humanity. Alternatively, life carries with it many joys, and joys imply happy lessons. We might exist as spiritual entities having a human experience. Therefore, in wisdom and gratitude, empathy for others provides a moral insight to our own flaws. Also, we must always strive to overcome our tendency to fail others, and fail at the test of humanity.

If the world offers little fairness, we might still grasp the justice inherent in the right and good happiness we offer others. By wisdom, we possess moral maps that guide us on the journey. In happiness for bigger things that connect everyone, we discover codes of personal ethics. Ethics allow us to live better lives on the margins of the moral balance scales, as those scales always need some assistance (divine?) to outweigh the bad in favor of the good.

In this hodge-pouri of a personal philosophy, simple rules must derive from something so complex. I have NO right or claim to lecture others on morals. Everyone knows, less or more, the choices between right from wrong. Harder “wisdoms,” to which we all expose our ignorance, more often than never, come under several headings: Love thy neighbor as thyself; “first” cause no harm to others (which actually comes second in this list); take no “joy in the pain of others” (quote defined as: Schadenfreude); and live healthier and happier every passing moment.

These precepts mean what they mean. And we all must try our best to live to a moral good. Yet, these (loosely) moral precepts have endured the challenge of lifetimes. How well people do them depends on things, or a god, mostly beyond anyone's control. Still, as objective ideas, they weigh the scale of justice both within and without our minds and spirits, in favor of the good. Like any “truth,” all humans must endure their own flaws, first and most importantly.

On ethics, very personal conduct codes, we also try to live beyond our expectations and our abilities to control. Each on our own probably deserve failing grades as humans. We deserve neither grace nor gifts. If morals stem from the culture that pollinates our surroundings, ethics guide social actions—in thought and deed—toward each other. Ethics determine our reality relating to everyone else.

I carry, for myself only, my ethics, and I fail miserably at my own standards to: understand self; know god; learn love; help others. But these ethics embody an ideal which I think worthy. But again, they apply only to me.

Challenge: Can you define your ethics? Can you attain them everyday? Exceed them? List them. The world changes, and the technology, the culture, and society each drive the other to more changes. Each for ourselves has something good to contribute to the scale of justice away from an equality with bad. Would deliberate living—defining and exceeding our ethics—benefit a world struggling for balance? Can deliberate acts of good, and thoughts of empathy and goodness, balance the scale in the future in favor of good over wrong? Like everything, it depends on the context we determine in our lives, for our own existence, and, ultimately, determines the moral survival of our individual humanity.