I am a little wary of my own mind. Not that my mind in particular is frightening, but it’s a human mind. I know it’s capable of horrible thoughts because I went through an angry phase as a teenager and I had mean wishes for people who differed from me in ways that I no longer believe to be significant. I thought certain qualities made certain people somehow lesser. I thought a lot of bad things.
I was only a teenager and my brain wasn’t fully developed. But who’s to say that even a fully developed human brain is capable of making rational, ethical decisions? I thought I was right back then, and now I think I was completely off base. What if a few more years of wisdom end up leading me to believe that the way I think right now is completely wacko? How do I trust that I’ve reached a plane in which my brain is reliable? What gives me the power to judge myself worthy of writing a code of ethics worth following? Aren’t I just a teeny bit biased on that front?
That’s how I feel. I feel self-doubt, but I don’t view it as a negative insecurity type thing. I view it as a healthy sense of caution about myself as a human being, subject to human nature and human error. I take everything I believe with a grain of salt. :)
But it also feels wrong to borrow a belief system from somebody else. That somebody else is human too. Maybe a lot of other humans agree that that somebody is right, and that lends validation to it. But the crowd once thought slavery okay.
The only thing that feels right to me is to adhere to a small set of rules, ones that are simple enough to be self-evident. I truly believe that nothing can go wrong with these statements:
Hate in general makes life worse for everybody
It’s not immoral if it doesn’t harm anybody else (directly or indirectly)
If you have the opportunity to make somebody happy without causing harm elsewhere, take it
Beyond simple statements like that, I just take things one situation at a time and try to use my best judgement. And I make mistakes sometimes. And I learn.