Happiness Through Humanism: list of ethics

Wouldn’t it be nice if every decision we made was rational, responsible and reasonable? Of course it would. The problem is that figuring out what the rational, responsible and reasonable thing to do isn’t always easy. And despite our good intentions, getting a group to agree on the best course of action is even harder to accomplish.

The challenge is how to integrate your ethics into your decision making in a way that helps you make better decisions that will reflect your values and allow you to be the sort of ethical, compassionate and responsible leader you’ve always wanted to be without getting into arguments with others.

Step 1: Create a list of ethics you value most. You can get this list from your faith tradition or from the 10 Humanist Commitments. https://americanhumanistcenterforeducation.org/?page_id=19369

Note: Most people regardless of backgrounds - value the same things. Just understand that in a secular workplace - you must focus on the shared common human values and not on personal religious values like - obedience to God. Focus on the common public values and not on your personal religious specific values. The religious reasons why you value these things is a personal matter - that you value them - is a public matter as it tells others what to expect from you.

Step 2: Sort the values based on what you think is most important. Think of this as creating a priority list on how to break ties when more than one value is in conflict with another value. Which ones win out? Studies on global ethics find compassion is highly rated - as is personal responsibility and honesty for instance. The point is to understand which you think is most important.

Step 3: Start actively talking about - what good outcomes are - based on your chosen public values. Is this solution compassionate? Responsible? Honest? How can you maximize the good that comes out of a decision and minimize the harm? This is the actual practice of using your values explicitly in your decision making.

Step 4: The final step is to make sure- you are making your decisions based on - accurate information. This requires humility - which is hopefully - one of your values. If you make decisions based on bad information - your decisions will be bad - not good. To make sure your decisions are good - you have to make sure you have good accurate information - which means - accepting that what you think you know - may not be so. And being willing to correct yourself when you make a mistake. Learning how to determine what is true and what isn't - is an important life skill.

Want to learn more:

I have online courses that will teach you how to do this better. The first is:

Reality Based Decision Making For Effective Strategy Development - https://humanistlearning.com/realitybaseddecisionmaking/

Or consider taking one of my certificate courses in Applied Humanistic Leadership - https://humanistlearning.com/category/businesscourses/professionaldevelopment/certificateprograms/

What does it mean to be a virtuous person? Can virtuous people still have fun?

The School of Life in London issued a list of 10 virtues for the modern age. There is a reason people keep coming up with these sorts of lists. It turns out that to be good, we actually have to remind ourselves to be good and having a list of some sort to guide us provides a handy easy to remember reference list to consider when considering our actions.

Here is the 10 virtues from the School of Life - http://www.theschooloflife.com/blog/2013/02/ten-virtues-for-the-modern-age/ I’m not going to summarize them here – you need to click through the link to see what they are.

They view this as a project to foster public dialogue about what it means to be a good person. I endorse that goal whole heartedly. I just hate lists of 10.

I prefer lists of three instead. Easy to remember and count on one hand.

So here is my list.