Article 17. Morals and Ethics

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 moral codes we try to follow are inconsistent. If violence is thought to be morally wrong then surely non-violence must be a whole lot better. But non-violence isn’t promoted because we are forced to accept so much violence in our everyday lives, especially where our food is concerned. It’s difficult for our educational and religious institutions to advocate non-violence when this troublesome issue of animal exploitation (and vegan principle) is lurking in the background. Our leaders know that it would be dangerous to encourage people to alter their food choices or to mess about with the one big resource at our disposal – animals! To advocate that we stop using them, to liberate animals in fact, would threaten the stability of society, so the connection between animal cruelty and violence must always be underplayed. The fact that it’s hidden from the public (especially that kids aren’t taught about what happened to the animals they are eating) makes our society’s moral codes look decidedly dodgy. On top of this, we get double talk from authorities who say certain harmless behaviours (like fornication) are immoral whilst ignoring the immorality of these routine daily attacks being made on animals. The general disillusionment with society’s moral codes has encouraged people to go back to basics, to their own core ethics to assess what is right and wrong.
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 when it comes to the part we play in the imprisoning, attacking and killing of our fellow animals. If anything 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 attitudes to animals don’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. We like a good ethic because it gels with our instinct; humans usually get excited by anything to do with nurturing and protecting. It’s this core attitude, this 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 we are and who we are, and from that we develop an attitude 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 provides our guidelines, to let us function at our best. If we’ve lost faith in society-driven ethics maybe we should give our own a try. Our personal ethics should make us feel so good about ourselves that we can carry this over to working co-operatively with others. Ethics exert a constraining force whenever we’re tempted to take the easy way out. The "ethics-behind-the-person-behind-the-action", lets us resolve matters without using violent methods.
Our own ethics have to be constantly upgraded to keep pace with our own increasing levels of violence and vanity. As complicated as it may seem, it really always comes back to the difference between an intelligent way to behave and an unintelligent way. All this would hardly be worth a mention if it wasn’t for morality’s imposing of ridiculous codes of behaviour and making nonconformity to them very unattractive indeed. But in our western world, during the 1960s, a lot of the main moral codes began to fall apart. They were laughed at and to a certain extent the baby was thrown out with the bathwater; we did experience unnerving doubts about who we were, etc. But out of that something else appeared. We began to free our selves from authority and convention. As we lost confidence in authority, so we began to question good, bad, right and wrong. Even though an ethics revolution didn’t exactly catch on (except in the expanded consciousness of hippy revolutionaries) the morality bubble was burst. Now, our choices are no longer automatically made in accordance with given morality, but by applying ethical discrimination to our relationships, to our eating habits and to treading more lightly on the earth.