morals

In the morality-driven world we juggle with the absurd notion that, whilst thinking ourselves peace-makers we can still afford to continue with a few violent habits. The example has been set by the double standards of our educational and religious institutions. They advocate non-violence but come unstuck over this troublesome issue of animal exploitation. Our leaders know that it would be dangerous to encourage people to alter their food choices or to mess about with that one big resource at our disposal – animals! For them to advocate stoping using them, to liberate animals in fact, would threaten the stability of society, so the connection between animal cruelty and violence is underplayed. In fact they attempt to hide it from the public (especially kids who aren’t taught about what happens to the animals they are eating). This makes our society’s moral codes look decidedly dodgy. On top of this, the authorities say certain harmless behaviours (like protected fornication) are immoral whilst ignoring the immorality of routine attacks made on animals. That’s quite confusing! Even destabilising. Our general disillusionment with society’s moral codes encourages people to go back to basics, to their own instinctive assessment of what is right and wrong. For our moral guidance we can no longer trust people in authority. So the very idea of authority based upon tradition begins to look old fashioned, weak and therefore ridiculous, which it certainly shouldn’t be.
It seems that most of us want to see ourselves as ethical people. In most respects we may lead our lives ethically and feel pretty good about ourselves but not if it comes to the part we play in the imprisoning, attacking and killing of our fellow animals. Not if we take the trouble to examine what we do.
If anything that we do as a society is written up as being morally acceptable it must first undergo scrutiny, be taken seriously, debated and decided upon. But, on this thorny problem of using animals, that’s what people are reluctant to do. Morally and ethically speaking, our attitude to animals doesn’t stand up well and neither does our habit of trying to brush it under the carpet..
A personal ethic reinforces the connection between our principles and the practice of them. It gets us over the hump of where a new habit, like an animal product boycott, is helped along by reminding ourselves of the ethic from which it arose. A good ethic gels with instinct. Humans usually get excited by anything they do that feels like they’re developing some life force, as when dealing with birth, nurturing and caring. It’s this core attitude, core ethic, that shows us how to ‘attitudinalise’ our adult life to the point where we can work things out for ourselves by letting answers gradually fall into place.
Part of growing up is discovering that we have innate knowledge about what and who we are and from that we develop an attitude of which ethics is a big part. This isn’t an outer, mirror-reflected image of ourselves but a felt image that seems to come from inside ourselves. Our self-identification process is used to relate to the outside world. A combination of self-produced and society-produced attitudes provide a guideline, to let us function at our best. If we’ve lost faith in society-driven ethics maybe we fall back on our own. Our personal ethics should make us feel so good about ourselves that we can carry this over to working co-operatively with others. If we feel we’ve done that successfully then again it’s another ethic that comes into play, that prevents us getting cocky about ourselves. The "ethics-behind-the-person-behind-the-action", lets us resolve matters without being righteous or using violent methods. Ethics exert a constraining force whenever we’re tempted to take the easy way out. Ethics help us to apply the accelerator or the brake where necessary.