Ethics has to do with human relations and with how human beings cooperate harmoniously. It also is concerned with the good life for the good individual.
Let us reduce Ethics to its simplest elements: The most fundamental aspect of Ethics is caring. Before there is cooperating there is caring; one must care enough to engage in cooperation. The same applies to collaboration with others, to courtesy, and to compliance with moral principles. Compassion may be defined as intensive caring. Empathy is an intuitive form of caring. Kindness is caring in action. Self-interest is caring applied to the self. Love is a willingness to serve and care for another because one beholds countless possibilities and qualities for mutual enhancement.
The classroom or academic term for this is ‘Intrinsic valuation.’ It is a process of giving full attention, getting involved, identifying with, and eventually bonding. This is a technical way of speaking about maximum caring. To employ the term I-valuing is to refer to this process.
Self-interest is enlightened, or wise, when there is an awareness that what really helps you helps me, for we need each other. We are social animals. Cooperation enabled us to survive to this day as a species when so many other species have become extinct. We need more cooperation on goals that we share. We individually, and socially, attain a quality life by creating value. For further details see the writings to which links are offered below - safe to open, and cost-free.
In other places I have explained how having good character tends to result in good conduct; and acquiring character is a factor of either having a role model of good character, or learning early in life that treasuring a living person is worth more to you than treasuring a material thing (such as your new yacht); and that a material thing, something concrete and tangible, is worth more than the ideologies, systems and theories. One way of acquiring a good character is by making use of the self-chosen “obligatory norms” of which R. S. Hartman speaks. See the quick summary in the section on Norms, p.19, in BASIC ETHICS: A Systematic Approach (2014) - myqol.com/wadeharvey/PDFs/BASIC%20ETHICS.pdf
True, we need all the dimensions of value, and a holistic viewpoint is healthy; and that is why the child – once Ethics is widely taught - would learn about the web of life and how it is connected to the web of the universe, how human nature is a subset of natural forces – and above all, if we get in harmony and alignment with those natural forces we will have a life full of joy and serenity, a life of fulfillment. We will flourish.
Furthermore, this new, yet old, paradigm for ethical theory in the manual - a link to which is offered here: hartmaninstitute.org/wp-cont … course.pdf - offers the reader value knowledge. …And what is the benefit of that?
Value knowledge is insurance against personal and social disorder.
Science presents us with empirical value. As we know from the history of science, Philosophy is prior to science both logically and time-wise. There was natural philosophy before there was physical science. Philosophy asks the right questions. It is indispensable.
Philosophy discovered that every value is fact-laden and that every fact is value-laden…i.e., persons select which facts to give attention to, and thus to value, selecting these out of the myriad of other facts available. This gives a new perspective to the distinctions made by Hume, in 1739, in his Treatise. Hume believed that there is a rigid gap between fact and value. Hartman, in 1967, taught us that value arises out of a novel recombination of facts. (Creativity is a rearrangement of existing properties.)
So let us be thankful for, and appreciative of, Philosophy.
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