Exchange, Honesty, Ethics, 5

And the development of ethics is gradual; it’s as if each individual drew a circle around self, a sort of border of one’s ethics, and then cared for what’s within that border, and cared not for what’s outside of it. As if one wore spectacles that limited one’s sight to a given distance only. Some include in this circle only self, some their family only, while some include their whole community, mankind, the world at large. Some widen their circles with time, some don’t, some take them in.

We may call the size of the circle the ethics level of the individual. And the hard fact is that the society and the world simply cannot afford individuals with an insufficient ethics level: a society and a world will be there only as long as there are enough individuals with their circles wide enough. Particularly now that we have the means to wipe out ourselves and the world as well.

First, philosophy sparks, shapes, puts together the questions; then philosophy itself and common sense, religion, psychotherapy, management and basically every human endeavour propose answers and/or methods implicitly or explicitly based on proposed answers. In the final analysis, the common denominator of all the sane, sensible, constructive, useful ones among these answers and endeavours, the basic of basics, the point on which all well−meaning people can agree whatever other disagreement they may have, is the awfully simple but precise, exact and all−embracing definition above: greatest good for all, longest and highest level of existence for everyone and everything – nothing and no one excluded. Less all−embracing definitions where only some ought to survive, and at the expense of others, are just incomplete, stupid, short−sighted, ill−intentioned or worse, because they are doomed to fall short of the final objective of survival and end up rather closer to its opposite.