Excerpts From:

The Chrysalis Age: A Handbook for Spiritual and Global Transformation in the New Millennium
 

Ethics and Worldviews

“Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.”

Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship and Other Essays

 

The accident was over in seconds.  The driver of the semi-truck that cut them off didn’t even notice as John and Mary’s car spun off the highway and crashed head-on into a large sycamore.  Mary regained consciousness some ten hours later in the hospital intensive care ward.  She awoke only to be told that her husband had not survived the crash, dying on impact.  Grief-stricken, Mary quietly requested that the doctors preserve a small sample of John’s tissue.  The couple had been married for five years, during which time Mary repeatedly attempted to convince John that they should have children.  Unlike Mary, who had always felt she was destined to be a parent, John was against the idea of bringing more children into an already overpopulated world.  Mary persisted, but to no avail.  Two months after the funeral, she met with the director of a fertility clinic specializing in cloning.  With her donated egg and her husband’s DNA sample, Mary was soon pregnant.  She had briefly considered using a “celebrity sample,” but the licensing fees were high and, really did the world need another Tom Cruise to add to the two hundred it had already?  It didn’t matter, she was finally having a baby.   Nine months later, Mary gave birth to a baby boy who she loved deeply, in part because he was a baby boy that would eventually grow up to look just like the man she had loved so greatly and lost. 

This little bit of fiction may seem absurd, or by the time this book is published, it may be a retold tale from the evening news, but whatever emotions and reactions this scenario raises it poses some serious ethical questions.  Is it ethical to clone a human being?  Is it ethical to clone a loved one who has died?  Is it ethical to clone someone without his or her permission?  How many times is it ethical to clone yourself?  Is it only ethical the first time, tacky by the tenth time, pathological by the twentieth time and unethical the fiftieth time? If only these questions were hypothetical.  As of the writing of this book in the summer of 2003, it seems likely that a human being will be cloned within one to three years.  I won’t say successfully cloned, because there is no way of telling how the cloning process will affect this poor individual on a genetic level until many, many years later. 

Cloning is only the most recent ethical conundrum to face us as we plunge headfirst into a new millennium filled with moral confusion.  Everyday we are faced with unspoken ethical questions that underlie our lives.  For instance, is it ethical for the United States and Europe to use some seventy percent of the world’s resources and contribute roughly forty-five percent of its greenhouse gasses while only maintaining some ten percent of its population?  Is it ethical to invest in a company that uses cheap labor from developing countries without labor laws to make its shoes, solely for the purpose of raising its profit margin?  Is it ethical to take supplies from the office if the company makes billions a year?  Is it ethical to fudge the facts on your taxes?  Is it ethical to invest in a company whose primary product causes people to die slowly?  Is it ethical to buy products from a corporation that you know is owned by a tobacco company?  Is it ethical to work for a company that makes weapons, like land mines, that will be used to kill people, including innocent and unsuspecting children? 

These questions are phrased in the extreme, but we are faced with variations of them everyday.  As we move into this new century we will be faced with more of them, and they will become increasingly complex.  We will be confronted with questions whose answers will not only affect the lives of ourselves and our families but which will affect the entire world.  For instance, is it ethical to change the DNA of our children before they are born, and pass these changes down to future generations?  If it is, what kind of changes are ethical?  Is it ethical to change a sequence of genes coding for a disease, but not to change those controlling height, or eye color?  Is it ethical to insert a gene from another species?  Possibly you even have answers to all these questions.  If you do, the interesting thing to note is not what you believe, but why you believe it.  The way you respond to ethical dilemmas depends on your ethical perspective, and your ethical perspective is informed by your worldview.  The deeper your worldview the deeper your ethics.  

 

 

Defining Ethics

Before we begin to examine more closely the stages of ethical development that are available to us it is a good idea to spend some time defining terms, or at least defining how I will use them.  Due to considerations of space I cannot possibly delve into a full history of ethics exploring its nuances and contradictions, so these brief definitions will have to suffice.  They are fairly general, but if you find that you disagree with them, I hope the point I’m trying to make, that our ethics is part and parcel of our worldview, will not be lost. 

 

“Consequently, ‘will to truth,’ does not mean ‘I will not let myself be deceived’ but – there is no choice – ‘I will not deceive, not even myself’: and with this we are on the ground of morality. “

Freidrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book V

 

“The moral law is to be found everywhere, and yet it is a secret…. Great as the Universe is, man is yet not always satisfied with it.  For there is nothing so great but the mind of the moral man can conceive of something still greater which nothing in the world can hold.  There is nothing so small but the mind of the moral man can conceive of something still smaller which nothing in the world can split.”

Confucius, Doctrine of the Mean 12

 

What exactly is ethics?  The word ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, which means “character,” and is generally seen as an investigation into the attributes that define human behavior.  Usually ethics is referred to as the study of systems of morals, or as moral philosophy.  It can also be used to refer to systems of morals in general, or to a particular system of morals.  For my purposes I will use the word ethics in the later of these two fashions.  When I refer to an Integral ethics or a Spiritual ethics, I am referring to a system of morals characterized by a particular worldview, namely, an Integral or Spiritual one. 

Mores means “customs” in Greek.  By and large our morals can be defined as our customs, the rules by which we guide ourselves and society at large.  These rules can be construed in a number of ways.  They can be silently implied in small groups, like families or clans, and as unwritten rules guiding group behavior, such as in tribal societies.  Or they can be presented as part of the larger culture, as in a religion.  These rules can take the form of an oral tradition of edicts, or written proscriptions such as one finds in the Ten Commandments.  Additionally morals can be defined by interpretation of religious scripture, which has a long and varied history from Babylon to Augustine to the Taliban.  Morals can also be specific rules written into the laws that govern a society.  Noticeably, as a society changes, the laws which govern it change, altering the moral standing of various actions, while typically, once an action is considered immoral within a religion’s scripture, it takes quite some work for it to be redefined.  Abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, and euthanasia are obvious examples of this contrast.

 Morals, the rules we use to define appropriate behavior, are informed by virtues.  Virtues are the characteristics of human behavior that we define as positive and worth aspiring to.  Aristotle felt that “… virtue is concerned with passions and actions, in which excess is a form of failure, and so is a defect, while the intermediate is praised and is a form of success… Therefore virtue is a kind of mean, since, as we have seen, it aims at what is intermediate.”[i]  Aristotle was concerned with the ideal of harmony in all things, but other cultures could as easily value the virtue of excess, if it served a function within that society.  Different societies will have different virtues, as we will see later, these virtues will reflect that society’s stage of ethical development. 

In order to make a judgment about these characteristics, or virtues, we must know what we value.  Our value judgments and our values in general are informed by our worldview.  It is our worldview through which we see the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, desirable and undesirable.  When we experience a shift in worldview, we may or may not experience an attendant shift in what we value.  What will be different is why we value what we do.  In this way, a shift in worldview can change what and how we value things, altering our appreciation for various human characteristics, changing what we define as virtuous, amending the rules we call morals, and even our whole system of ethics. 

Having defined morals as the rules or customs that guide an individual or a society, morality then becomes a measure of how well the individual or group complies with these rules.  Of course the rules that individuals create for themselves may be at odds with the rules created by the society they live in.  Or the morals of a particular religion may be at odds with the laws of a given society.   This creates conflict and the resolution of conflict is the domain of justice.  Justice is the method by which the rules of society, its morals, and laws, are enforced.  Justice also exists on a personal level as the adjustment necessary to compensate for conflict arising from differences in behavior.

With these brief definitions of the basic principals underlying a study of ethics we can further explore the relationship between ethics, worldviews, karma, and good and evil.