PHILOSOPHY: Ethics

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." --Albert Einstein

Ethics is the search for proper behavior, actions between a person and an outside entity. One could even say it is the exercise of your own actions only. For my ethics, I derive my philosophical principles from my concept of life--truth (fact or pattern consonant with experience in a context), beauty (that which is pleasing), good (that which is beneficent), etc. All of these (I'm sure I've forgotten a couple) derive from aspects of our existence which are essentially life-supporting, which is why they are positive, pleasant-sounding terms. To apply them to the real world, I submit it would help if we Westerners would absorb the Easterners the concept of balance in all things, the Yin and the Yang concepts. We tend to oversimplify to all one or all the other when it is a blending which would better serve us.

My general ethical guidelines:

• Good is that which supports life from a given perspective.
• Ethics is the search for ways in which individuals may interact with one another which are good.
• Awareness, perception, and perspective influence what is seen as good in any given instance.
• Yin/Yang: the theory that people are best served with opposing entities balanced from their extremes.
• The Golden Rule: treat others as you would like others to treat you.
• The universe is a cold, uncaring, dangerous place except where we can make it otherwise.
• Life is fragile.

Take a difficult subject like abortion, where ethic, politics, and religion intermingle an an unholy alliance. The essential drive is life, but who's life? It's a horribly dangerous world out there, with something like a quarter million people dying daily by natural causes, violence, and neglect. I have to take the stance that the decision rests with the mother. This process has been going on for a long time, so we mess with it at our peril.

• If the process is broken, we will die.
• If we kill the mother to protect the infant, we will die.
• If we make the mother's life too difficult to bear, we will die.
• If we can destroy the planet and believe the Flying Sphaghetti Monster will protect us, we will die.

I believe religious extremeism is primitive animal reaction blamed on a religious conviction. Religion is a faith, most people are raised under its umbrella, and it does not demand tests of critical thinking for membership. If you profess atheism or agnosticism, you probably had to think about it, since you certainly went against the standards of your "community." Show me a whole community somewhere in the world of free-thinking, disagreeing, philosophers who do not feel the need for an overseeing deity--please. Aberrent behavior, like any behavior, has reasons, and reasons based on personal philosophies. It is difficult to build a destructive philosophy when you have to critically think your way through it. To hate is to feel, not think. The fundamental philosophies of the major world religions teach not to kill. The roots of all the worlds great philosophies are sourced in variants of the Golden Rule, that you treat others as you would yourself, which is a very life-supporting idea. Any thoughtful philosophy does. All the others killed each other.

Speaking of people who's folly allows them to commit the worst sins of a religion and then blame their all-powerful god on their acts, the question of sexual violence comes to mind. The subject came back to me one sleepless night about ten years ago when my mind wandered philosophical paths. What is the real rate of sexual violence? I've heard many statistics and they seem to always get revised upwards as the subject becomes more open to discussion (I've heard numbers as high as 1 in 3.

As a male in my middle years with modest social experience, I realized that no fewer than 25 of 50 women I could remember having become socially comfortable with (I am not considered "sexually aggressive" by my friends) had gone so far as to confide in me that they had been the victim of at least one incident of sexual violence before their 18th birthday. The violence experienced by these 25 was scattered pretty evenly between the ages of 11 and 17.

A very good female friend of mine, who is far more social than I, replied to my query on the subject that "greater than 90%" of the women she had known had suffered sexual violence during their lifetimes.

My own dear lady admitted "most" of the women she knew had had "problems" in this regard.

Most of these incidents went unreported to the police for a variety of reasons.

I have to assume this "statistic" will continue to be revised upwards until it approaches my own--that women have a 50 percent chance of suffering sexual violence before they even reach the age of consent, and that there is an extremely high probability that they will fall victim to it in their lifetimes.

I desperately hope that history proves me wrong.

Issues are often not clear-cut, since what is good based on one set of imperatives may honestly be evil from another set. Realize you can have a tremendous impact for good or ill on this planet by your actions. What you do now determines your ethical direction. This is why one must weigh different people's wants and needs. We are struggling against those individuals who would coerce our lives even unto death for wealth, power, and twisted ethical principles. The Golden Rule appears in many forms in all cultures: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

I, as an empath, put a good deal of weight on others feelings, but this is not the the only route to that goal. We are trained from birth to assemble our perceptions in a certain way as social animals. Far more people, while not overtly aware of the subtler empathic connection to others, are quite aware of punishment and praise from others. Don't be drawn to the fiction that we need maintain hard and fast models of our world at all levels at all times. A model's features are only needed when they are use in making a decision.

Our usual knee-jerk reaction to anything perceived as an attack is aggression, and sometimes fear if we are overwhelmed. In many modern settings, this reaction is not the best. Some go so far as to attack anyone who commits acts which are not in consonance with their own private view of how the world should behave, even if no one is truly hurt by the action. Learn to tell the difference between an attack on you, an attack on your world view, and an indirect attack on your world view and train yourself to act more appropriately. Also, learn the difference between a reasoned and an unreasoned attack--what intellectual level is your oppenent coming from? Would you react in anger if a hungry tiger chased you, or would you simply try and survive? Remember the sage advice of Master Po, from the old television show Kung Fu, to Kwai Chang Kane, when he asks what we are to do when given unreasoning injustice: "Return injustice with justice...and kindness--always with kindness."