ETHICS IS CENTRAL.
The most central human issue in our lives involves creating a more humane environment.
At first glance, one can see that there are two crucial elements to the first commitment (to Ethical Humanism), and how one understands those elements will determine how one understands the commitment. Almost immediately, however, I find that a dissonant note is sounded by the subtext regarding “the most central human issue.” The subtext seems to override and obviate the need to examine the commitment itself in any broader terms. I challenge that. I am willing to consider that creating a more humane environment, broadly defined, is an important, probably even a central issue in our lives, but I cannot, without more thought, agree that it is the most central of all issues. In any case, I cannot agree that “ethics” and “creating a more humane environment” are sufficiently equivalent to make the latter the definition of the former, i.e., that “ethics” equals “creating a more humane environment.”
Beginning again, the two crucial elements of the commitment are “ethics” and “central.” While whole books have been written to explore the nature of ethics and much ink has been spilled to argue the difference between “morality” and “ethics,” I am content that Oxford Languages’ (OL) online definition of “ethics'' is sufficient: “moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity.” For my own practical purposes and general understandings, I actually prefer the OL second definition given for “moral” (as a noun)--“a person's standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do”--and will use that as my own definition of “ethics.” Either way, we are looking at principles and standards for behavior.
Ethics as a standard for my behavior must come, I believe, from my own experience, knowledge, and reason. What I learn from experience will serve me as practical knowledge that has revealed both positive and negative results. I can--and do--learn from both my successes and my mistakes. I also learn from the experience and knowledge of others. In some cases, they may tell me--personally or through books and articles--the positive and negative results of various behaviors. In other cases, I may make my own observations of behaviors and interpret the results as positive or negative.
One of my earliest memories of learning from others’ mistakes came when I was just barely a teen. The debate in our family was whether I could wear short shorts. Nice girls didn’t, but I certainly wanted to. Resentment festered as I looked for ways to push back against the parental edict until one evening we went to the drive-in theater for a family evening. In those days, parental negotiations ran to the sort of horse-trading that included a Paul Newman movie for Mama and a John Wayne movie for Daddy. If the double feature included both, it was a win-win. If not, promises for the future would balance things out. For me, the excitement was in getting to the concession stand. The rewards might be popcorn, a soda, or even a little bit of boy watching. On one occasion, there was the need to stand in line to use the facilities. I happened to see a teenage girl, not so much older than I, with her hair in pin curls, covered by a long pink chiffon scarf. She wore short shorts. Really short shorts that had ridden up above her thighs and settled in a manner that revealed more than, perhaps, originally intended. The image has stuck with me for more than 60 years, likely because it shocked me in my sheltered existence, but also, I think, because it was a moment when my own ethical thinking kicked in. I reasoned, quite simply, that I did not want to look like that, did not want to show myself in those ways, that wearing short shorts was not going to be “acceptable for me to do.”
What is also telling about that moment is that it was not my parents’ will that drove the decision. Nor was it the values of my then affiliation with Christianity coming to the fore. Had I made the decision not to wear short shorts at any point prior to that trip to the concession stand, I would have to think that I was bowing to the authority and moral dictates of either parents or church or both. At that moment, however, it was my own observation and reason that said “not me.” I made the choice for myself, just to be clear, not for Daddy and not for Jesus. That my decision reflected the conservative values of the community in which I was raised made the decision, I believe, no less my own.
I think that my personal experience, while likely unique in content and context, is not all that different from what others have done/are doing as they develop their own standards for what is acceptable for them to do. They--we--observe. We read. We learn. We analyze. We reason and decide. We combine experience and knowledge with reason to exercise our capacity to distinguish right from wrong in ways that include the whys and why nots of how we choose to behave. In this way we create our own ethics as we live our lives.
There is more to be said regarding the process of creating our own ethical principles and standards for thought and action, but one point should be emphasized at the outset: We are capable of forming ethical principles through our own human capacities and do not, therefore, require any outside force or authority for our choices. Laws may compel our action in specific ways, but it is up to our own conscious awareness of right and wrong to decide whether the law is just and whether we will obey it. Belief in a god may provide a whole list of general principles and specific rules for our behavior; absent such belief we still have the capacity to establish for ourselves a distinction between right and wrong through our own experience, knowledge, and reason.
Take the potato. As an example of an object in need of the application of ethical principles, the potato is, one would think, a much simpler target than, say, abortion. And yet the potato is rich with ethical dilemmas and choices well beyond any question of whether to bake or boil. Seeing a potato on the kitchen counter, one must, for example, decide: To peel or not to peel. There is an abundance of tools available for the specific purpose of peeling potatoes, pointing to a strong preference among home cooks to peel. Indeed, there are largish machines for industrial scale potato peeling pointing to a social and cultural bias in favor of peeled potatoes. Certainly there are a number of lovely things that one can do with a peeled potato.
The problem, aside from any considerations of the nutritional value locked in the potato’s skin, is, of course, what to do with the peeling. The potato peel can be considered garbage which, of course, should be disposed of in a sanitary manner lest it become rotting garbage and so attract flies, cockroaches, and other undesirable visitors. On the other hand, that peeling could be labeled as food waste, a loaded term is ever there was one (food = good; waste of good things = bad; food waste = ethical minefield).
Food waste does not have to be an ethical concern. Indeed it is not for most Americans. Our nation wastes as much as a third of all the food it produces. (Imagine going to the grocery store, buying three bags full of groceries, and tossing one of them into the trash can before you take the rest into your house. Imagine doing that every time you go to the grocery store.) For most home cooks, standing at the sink with a handful of potato peelings, the next step is automatic: Toss them in the garbage can (or the sink disposer if available). There is no ethical concern if we are unaware of (or uninterested in) what happens to those potato peelings next. Nor is there an ethical concern about the role of those potato peelings in relation to our community. There’s not much a few potato peelings can do for food insecurity; one potato’s peelings really won’t add a significant amount to our community landfill. Any potential for ethical concern is also eliminated if we have already accepted a philosophical orientation to the planet as our gift from a deity so that the earth and its resources are ours to do with as we wish, without consequence or blame for simple waste, which may be the deity’s own will anyway. Either way, it is not our concern or responsibility.
There is, however, for some of us, that moment when we stand at the sink, potato in hand, and see it as part of something larger. That potato had a history, a journey, before it came into our hand. While it may yet have its moment of glory as it is served on our table, there may be within us a degree of concern for what that past history was and how it connects to us through the potato. There may also be a moment of concern whether we should feel any connection to those parts of the potato that did not make it to our table. Could we have used the entire potato? Are we disposing of the remains of the potato in a way that does no harm to us or our community? What about all those leftovers?
This may, however, be the point at which we should consider the second component of the first commitment: Central.
For ethics to be central in one’s life and, therefore, in one’s behavior it must be at the core, the focus, the pervasive and unifying orientation for thought and deed. If ethics is my standard of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for me to do, then whatever I do, no matter how insignificant or small, needs to be considered in terms of whether it is acceptable according to those standards, whether it is, in a word, ethical. I have said “Food waste does not have to be an ethical concern,” and offered various reasons why someone might view ethics as irrelevant in a given situation. Once, however, we make ethics central, everything becomes subject to consideration of what the appropriate--and ethical--behavior might be in relation to it.
In this sense, we fail to behave ethically if we do not bother to learn about the effect of food waste on the environment. Our waste can only be ethical if we learn that food waste is not an issue for global warming. Once we know that food waste can produce greenhouse (heat trapping) gases, we become ethically obligated to see what we can do to avoid or mitigate the waste of food. We fail to behave ethically if we see ourselves as individuals, not connected to others of our humankind, not connected to the planet from which we sprang (some long time ago), not connected to the star stuff from which our planet came (even longer ago). To behave ethically, we must seek the knowledge that reveals our origins and our connections and then act as the individual part of the whole system/entity which we are. Inevitably, that will lead us to proactively shape our actions to sustain ourselves, our community, and the planet of our origins. We fail to behave ethically when we delegate our responsibility for making decisions about our own standards for what is acceptable to unseen and unverifiable sources. When such magical thinking allows one to do as one wishes without regard for the consequences, those consequences, if based in the nature of the planet, will nonetheless occur, often to ill effect for the planet, the community, and ourselves.
So then does making ethics central also make “creating a more humane environment” central? In Ethical Culture we often say “deed before creed.” That’s a call to action, saying basically that we should not worry about the ideology when there is work that we can be doing. It becomes, however, a means of avoiding the question of what the ethical principles are that will guide our deeds. How do we choose the deeds that we should be doing without some understanding that what we do is, in a word, ethical? It becomes, moreover, a means to avoid looking at the central transformation that we seek in Ethical Culture, which is to become more ethical in both thought and deed. We avoid “creed,” and we focus on “deed,” but, if ethics is central, it may well be that we should turn our focus to ethics and the principles that will guide our deeds.
To return to the example of food waste, we realize that there are many reasons why someone would decide that wasting food is a “bad” thing to do. It may be a matter of thrift. If money to buy food is in short supply, one would not want to waste any of what can be purchased with those limited funds. Or food itself may be in short supply as we have now seen with broken and slowed supply chains during a pandemic. We would want to protect our limited resources for the duration, being less wasteful so that our supplies will last. This seems less a matter of ethics than of necessity, but it may also be that food waste could be viewed as part of a larger concept of waste that is to be avoided (“waste not, want not” is a prudent philosophy). Not wasting food could also be part of a larger sense that the food on our plate is part of a long chain of supply, with many resources and many hands needed to get it to our plate. Simply recognizing that long chain connects us to the various points on the food’s journey from seed to supper. As we are mindful of that connection, we can see the potato on our plate and consider its growth in soil, with the sun and rain to nourish it, with hands that probably belong to a migrant worker earning less than a living wage lifting it from that soil to begin its journey to our table. Despite the abundance of our circumstances that does not itself require that we conserve food because of scarcity of food or funds, if we are mindful, we know that sun and rain are now subject to the forces of climate change. Too much sun, too little rain, and the growing of our food becomes less certain, more costly. The potato becomes part of our connection to the earth: Whether the soil can sustain growth, whether the climate will be stable enough to provide both sun and rain in appropriate amounts and thus provide the nutrients that we will then take into our body become now a more prominent element of our concern for that connection.. And the migrant worker? How she lives, where he sleeps, how their children are cared for are also connected to us through the potato. This connection is not some mystical thread of spirit extending from one person to another; this is no matter of unseen outside forces holding us together as humankind. It might be the star stuff from which our planet and we are made that connects us in a literal sense, but it is also, I believe, our own reason and awareness that allows us to observe and create/construct those connections. Once seen, my ethics lead me to believe that I need to respect these connections, not take them for granted, not waste them.
To make ethics central is to make ourselves aware and accept that there is nothing we can touch in our world that is not also bound up with the questions of how we are connected to it and how we should treat it. From the humble potato to our dearest friend to the stranger at our border, we are connected in multiple and varying ways. Each of those connections place burdens and constraints upon us as we seek to act in ways that we can believe are acceptable by our own standards of behaviors and beliefs. This requires, I believe, a continuing process of awareness, analysis, and revision of connections, standards, and principles.
Indeed we may from our experiences, knowledge, and reason derive certain principles related to food waste, such as:
We are connected to each other through our origins on this earth.
We are connected through our dependence on each other for survival and community.
Our connections provide valuable contributions to our personal well being and that of our community.
Any product of these connections should be respected for its source, for its value to our well being and community, and for the processes of connection in the long chain from its origin to its final destination.
These principles may apply to other matters aside from food waste. They may hold for a period of time, providing us with guidance for how we approach the situations in which we find ourselves. As our experience grows, our knowledge increases, our reason leads us, we may find that new principles may be derived, and these may be revised.
For ethics to be central in our lives, the only requirement is that we make ethics central. We begin with a consideration of what our standards and principles may be for what we think is acceptable thought and action. These may take time to develop; they may change. We succeed as we manage to remove the distracting needs and drives that push against our wish to focus on ethics as our guide for living. As we find our connection to the earth and to our fellow humans, we also find ourselves seeking to find ways to protect and nurture those connections as a means to fulfill our own needs and expand our sense of well-being. In all of these steps, however, what is needed is the intention to focus on ethics and make that the pervasive and unifying orientation for our thought and deed. Only with the intention to make ethics central can we do so. As a commitment to Ethical Humanism, we are committing to that intention, to that making, so that in all we do we consider whether what we do is acceptable to our own standards, which are derived from our experience, our knowledge, and our reason.
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