Living With Ethics - Personal Basic Code of Ethics

Sometimes we need to step back from the routines of daily life and think about our life as a whole.  What are we doing in our lives?  What are our values and what matters most to us?  Once we became self aware, we have to face choices, and deal with the fact that certain values, and courses of action exclude other.  We have to ask how all our concerns fit together, or even if they do at all.  We have to develop a firm state of doing the morally right thing.  And to get to that point we have to develop two things, a firm understanding of morality and the willingness to act on it.  It is not easy and it doesn’t happen fast.  To be virtuous is to be a person with a certain kind of character, and this requires reflecting in a thoughtful way about life as a whole and the kind of person one aspires to be, as well as having the motivation to follow through on this.

It is time to put everything I have learned in part one and two of this study and come up with my own code of ethics.  This is the basic code that everything else will come from.

1. Happiness is having a happy life; it applies to your life as whole not just moments in it.
2. All life is sacred. Being a meat eater who is never going to be a vegetarian, I must acknowledge each plant and animal that I eat and be conscious where it came from and how it got to me in the first place. And this is just the simple part of this rule.
3. Every action that I take has a consequence that I must be aware of and I must be prepared to compensate for any wrong that I have done.
4. Oath Keeping. Once a promise is made it must be kept so I must be very careful with my what I promise to people and be sure that I can keep it.
5. Honor. This is as much about my reputation in my community as about having a code of conduct that I live by.
6. Hospitality. Being a good host and also a good guest is very important.
7. Making an honest living and working with high standards.
8. I am a part of a community and so am subject to its laws UNLESS it goes against my ethics.   Serving my community in any way I can is also very important to me.
9. Consistency. I need to be consistent in everything I do and in the positions I take.  Some people would call it loyalty but I prefer consistency.
10. Honesty. This refers to being honest (telling the truth and performing the right action) with my self as well as the people around me.
11. Justice. Being in accordance with the truth, and seeking it for others whenever and wherever I can.
12. Courage. To me that includes knowing when to do the right thing even if it would hurt me or people close to me, which is never an easy thing.
13. Maintaining a healthy balance between the spiritual and the mundane.  This means knowing that life is not about just the spiritual, and that I have the mundane life to live as well.  But to do both with equal attention.  I connect to my deities through ritual and it is important to be correct in everything that I do in my spiritual practice.  But in serving my community can also be a spiritual practice but one in the mundane.
14. Wisdom.  This to me is about knowing and acknowledging that I don’t know everything, and going out and finding the answers where I can find them.

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• Posted in: Essays ♦ Ethics and Philosophy