Personal ethics

A personal ethic is our personal accountability. It 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 the ethic from which it arose. Now since a good ethic resonates with a healthy instinct, what we feel might be the right thing to do usually is right. Our core attitude, our core ethic, shows us how to form our attitudes and let us work things out for ourselves. We let answers gradually fall into place.
It may be that part of growing up is in 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 an inside-felt image. 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 in a way that satisfies us. 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.