Subscribe to my Feed
« Are you afraid to talk ethics with your employees? | Home | How will the next President deal with Guantanamo prisoners? »
Happy Independence Day!
By Lauren | July 4, 2008
On this 4th of July, I want to write just a little about how ethics and liberty go together. Too often, people think that ethics are all about restrictions: laws, rules, regulations, codes of conduct, and so forth. They focus on how principles of ethics restrain behavior, and overlook the freedoms that ethics protect.
In my view, however, ethics are less about what people shouldn’t do than about what they should. As I’ve written here before, ethics are the principles that help us live in ways that most of us agree are good. Honesty, integrity, keeping promises, treating each other with respect and consideration, are all essential to the ethical life. Americans enjoy remarkable freedom in part because we, as individuals and as a nation, have agreed together that we will live in an ethical way. Our collective ethics are reflected in our Declaration of Independence (”all men are created equal”), in our Constitution, and in the laws that govern our nation.
The founders of our nation wrestled with their own ethical issues as they sought to justify their revolutionary decision to break with England and become an independent democracy. They did not succeed in resolving all of those issues as we today believe they should have - if they had, slavery would have ended with American independence, the Civil War would never have been fought, women wouldn’t have had to wait until 1920 to vote, and native Americans would have been accorded the same rights as the members of the Continental Congress. Recognizing that they were fallible humans and not gods, however, any student of American history can tell you that our founders struggled long, hard and bravely to conduct their revolution for the right reasons, acting out of principle and not myopic self-interest. The fact that our nation is now over 230 years old is proof of how well they succeeded.
Look for my weekly post on ethical issues facing the next U.S. President tomorrow. Happy Independence Day!
Topics: Personal Ethics, Social Ethics, ethics |
July 5th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Hi Lauren,
Thanks for posting this. Most ‘issues’ I’ve had to deal with in life have been much easier to solve when people deal ethically with each other.
Have you written anything about differences between ethics and morals? Would you say there is a difference?