To revalue the Ethics: The Current Imperative

 

The considerations on the ethics spilt in this essay tend to demonstrate not only the importance that it acquires today before the wiggled corruption, but also the important benefits that his exercise brings in all the areas of driving human being, especially in the work.

The word Ethics (Ethos) designates the moral existence of a person, his way of acting, refers to the moral life, whereas the Morality You (Reside) it refers to the nominative thing, the established thing, what there is written, the catechism, the codified thing, so to speak. They are basic characteristics of the being man his freedom and responsibility; although without freedom there is no responsibility, the responsibility adds something new to the freedom, since one can be free without being a person in charge.

 

The Ethics is something existential, it is in the person, it is his conduct, it is the vivid, real morality.

The Ethics of that time, it does not designate a moral code (ej.: Christens Doctrine), but to how this code is lived, to a way of life, to how the men live in the actuality.

In the frame of the western current society, pluralista, democratic, liberal, we can affirm that the ethics of the responsibility (of giving responses) are the name of the contemporary Ethics.

 

The ethics are proceeding faithfully, respectfully, to the word of the moral subject that, before acting, it promises to fulfill with her. The ethical conduct answers to a promise, a commitment, to the word freely assumed by a person.

The ethical Being acts in a free and responsible way. The moral Being is the Being when it operates in accordance with the duty to be (the normado), to the values.

 

The ethics are the vivid, this morality personified in the person, it is the form in which the moral conscience demonstrates. Every individual and every people has his different mulberry tree. A morality (Christian, Buddhist, Muslim) is a moral code, a regulation.

 

There are more modern codes of mulberry tree, as established by the professional schools (ej.: deontología Doctor). The ethics imply the free one acting, choosing with freedom a course of action or conduct, but this freedom turns out to be complemented by the responsibility, for answering for the proper acts.

The free election bears to the universe of values, this are universal, rules of conduct proved with the time that can help to take decisions in vital situations.

The value is the grade of utility or aptitude of the things for satisfying the needs, or to provide well-being or delight. The value is the quality that some realities possess, for which they are estimable, worthy of election or not. It has polarity (print or denial) and hierarchy (top or low).

 

The value is an idea supramundana that only the man introduces in the real thing, recognizing his presence in the world. Acting ethically is working freely and responsibly based on a process valorativo that will determine a harmonic arranging of the needs, but clerks on judgments of value (the good thing for me).

 

In the perception of an object or event there takes place a valency (feature of attraction or rejection). For are heterogeneous the targets to which I go, I organize them in a hierarchic system of priorities and preferences: importance objetiva or subjective, different evaluations or valencies.

 

There is established an order, an organized picture, to which the personality will subordinate the diversity of aspirations, desires or ends.

 

An alone object has value when it is desirable for the subject in the frame of his own scale valorativa, hence his subjective individual aspect. But there exist values that are common to all the men and for them looked and accepted: the ideal or transcendental values, which are those who chase the ontological perfection of any human being, and they shut the premeditation up axiológica of the same one (ej.: unit of the humanity, love, truth, kindness, beauty).

 

The values are essences objetivas and with validity to priori existing in the exterior reality. They are discovered by the thought and they preexist to him.

 

Valuing is to recognize a resident value in the object even if he should not be I agreed with the personal point of view of the subject.

According to Viktor Frankl, creator of the Logoterapia, the man is free to give a personal response before the condicionamientos, he is responsible to answer before every circumstance and by means of the autotranscendency (that is his fundamental condition) redimensiona permanently his reality, basically in the achievement of values, which can be of three types: a) Creative, related with giving and the work, the work, the creativity; b) Existential, related with receiving to perceive: the love, the beauty, the art; c) of Attitude, which assumes before the situations limit, the suffering, the fault, the death.

 

The values of attitude are that more plenifican to the human being and before the false dicotomía Success - defeat proposed by the consumer society is necessary to consider to be also Plenitude the antithesis - Desperation. An apparent defeat for this society mercantilist (as not to be able to prosper), it it will not be such if one is felt to the life, which it will take to the existential Plenitude; and on the contrary a rutilante Success (to be rich and famous) if there is absence in sense drives to the existential Desperation.

Socially the examples abound on this matter: big personages whose emulation to be able and economic status they immerse them in a frivolous, egoistic and unproductive, unsupportive life with the neighbor, inclined to all kinds of addictions, with abandonment of the Christian values and the due care for the family, and that very frequently finish in the moral or material misery, in the desperation, the alienation or the suicide.

 

The human being, as integrity bio-psico-socio-espiritual, acts ethically on having chosen at freedom and with responsibility, morally illuminated by a horizon of transcendent values. This overlapping between the ethics, the morality, the freedom, the responsibility and the values, gives us the idea of the intimate relation and necessary existing interconnection between the above mentioned elements, and serves to understand the ethical crisis through that we live at present.

 

The postmodern life style precipitated a fall of values, of the normative morality.

The postmodernism, with his materialistic pragmatism it has led to the ethics completely it costs, where everything is allowed, everything is equal, there are values, neither models nor rules, only it is adored to the golden calf.

 

This serious crisis of the contemporary ethics has been denounced surprisingly from the antipodes of the human bogey.

The Pope Juan Pablo II in his writings and encyclicals, although he recognizes the kindness of the economic liberalism as factor of development of the peoples, is alert expressly against the injustices and economic egoistic abuses of the wild capitalism that the alienar and to degrade the alone man lead it to moving away of yes same, of his own spiritual essence and of God.

 

In another end, the supreme guru of the international finance, the Priest of the capitalist development George Soros, has proclaimed (in an unexpected self-criticism) the inequities of the capitalist system, which although they allowed his personal enrichment, with his indiscriminate and excessive pursuit of profit, he does not contribute to a more just, more balanced and equitable development of the peoples, since every time the minority of rich they are richer and the majority of poor are poorer.

Before these forceful critiques to the social capitalist model lacking in human values, we must remind here the wise Biblical judgment: " of what it costs to the man to conquer the world if it loses his soul ”.

 

Today to this society with crisis of values she is called the society pluralista. It is characterized by a great conglomerate of the people, much more than in the antiquity; it is lived differently from the small circle of the family, the quarter, the people.

There is a great miscellany of the people, of etnias racial and of cultures. The pluralism is so quantitative and cultural.

 

In the society pluralista there is no a moral unit from the normative point of view, whereas in the old society there was a narrower relation of the parents with the children, with religious more important and deeply rooted values.

 

This society pluralista, of that time raises us a major demand to have an ethnic behavior and to be mulberry trees.

Although the traditional values have disappeared or are in retreat, nevertheless there appears now the enormous importance of the individual conscience as he guides interns before the absence of external guide.

 

A good education is priority of that time directed to forming the conscience of responsibility, to inculcating healthy values, to encouraging the emergence of the intuition in the individual conscience as instrument that allows to discover the hierarchy of transcendent values that guide ethically our action. This way, although the traditional values have fallen down, this ripeness of conscience allows equally to the man to discover the only senses of the existence and to fulfill his mission in the world.

 

In a society pluralista it is lived in a relativism. Cultural pluralism exists but it must not make a mistake with ethical pluralism that must not exist. The morality cannot be relative, any morality protests absolutez, which must be, must be (without understanding this as rigidity).

 

It is a question of finding something absolute in the society pluralista that allows to be a mulberry tree in the above mentioned society; some value that everybody recognizes.

There exists absolute that that does not do differences of race, cultures, religions and that is in all: the common condition humanizes (that in potency and essence is spiritual and divine).

 

We all are mortal and we share the same penuries, miseries and human happy moments in the way towards the spiritual perfection. The common human condition is one of absolute, not ideally abstract but tremendously concrete values personified in the similar ones that I have ahead mine.

When one starts discovering what joins all of us in the society pluralista, there begins then to be more solidarity and brotherhood, one is perfecting the moral feeling.

 

The common human condition is an absolute value because it is something that us comes out, it does not depend on us.

We discover that his condition of absolute, transcendent value, it joins it spiritually with the purest Christian values: " it loves your neighbor as to you himself ” the paradigm is of that time to imitating.

 

We find this way an absolute anchoring of the moral piece of news, it is founded in an absolute value that is the terrestrial common human, simultaneously and celestial condition, all the men are equal because they are mortal, with his kindness and nastiness.

 

To be a mulberry tree implies respecting the human condition of other, uniting, helping.

We must perceive the common thing, which us fraternizes: we all are finite men opened for the infinite transcendency.

It is necessary to be united, to see what he afflicts to other.

 

In this society pluralista the individual is isolated, alone, sometimes delivered to yes same, does not rely on like earlier with the help of other. There are problems and common needs, sometimes the wild consumption is chased, there are bankruptcies in the health, the feeding, the education, the juridical safety.

 

The life is difficult, there are anxiety and fears that must be conquered. It is a possible moral being helping the brother, the similar one, answering to this claim and hoping that also it should help us.

I am thinking about having realized a suitable diagnosis of the situation. But that is not enough: it is necessary to look for a solution to the crisis of the contemporary ethics.

There is not enough the rational categorical imperative of Kant directed to the subjectivity of the individual, his willful postulate that he says: " It works only according to the maxim that it does that you could want at the same time that it is a universal law ”; since any energúmeno of bad conscience would proclaim constantly that the law of the forest is a universal law.

 

 The today imperative is to revalue the ethics, it is that infundirle again spiritual values to these so empty current ethics, light and superficial.

The problem of fund to resolve is in recovering the transcendent values that guide the moral conscience, which they allow us to distinguish the good of the evil. Only in the measurement that we could elucidate clearly this we will head for a moral illustrious conscience.

Of course a flat way is not this, the moral conscience develops progressively from the most tender infancy up to the adulthood, during the whole life. Nobody is exempt from having endured some ethical submission one day - knowingly or not - but as “ the one who is frees of faults that the first stone throws ”, we have to with indulgence, comprehension and just steadfastness look for the repentance and the capture of conscience that makes possible that they are more the advances than the regressions; the securing of the cleanliness of conscience and spiritual peace is the just reward to such efforts.

 

A suitable balance between the imagination provided by the feelings and the proper knowledge of the reason, not only allows to overcome the old clash Romanticism - rationalism, but it turns into the instrument adapted to gesticulate correctly in the reality.

 

Hence the importance of strengthening not only the rational attitude but basically any spiritual education (be or not strictly religious) and mulberry tree that, emphasizing the principios and Christian values privileges the value to the family, to the neighbor, to God, and think about how to realize the supreme Good.

 

Also, from a psychological point of view, the benefits multiply geometrically, since a person who gains access to the universe of the values and it spends his time and his conduct fits to realizing them, he finds a meaning, a sense to his life; it does not live already in vain, there overcomes the neurotic triad of our postmodern time (the violence - aggression, the depression - suicide and the addictions - alcohol, drugs, power) plenificando this way his individual existence and his community participation across his work and works, becoming useful and united for yes same and the society in his set.

 

This approach allows to recover this way the initiative, creativity and individual responsibility, the man is a maker of his own destination again; it will not even fall down in the consumer conformism of doing what others do not in the dictatorship masificante of doing what others demand that it should do.

 

Inside the free game of the democratic institutions we must form for the responsibility, take charge of other, answer other, the son, the helpless one, the patient.

 

To be a moral today is an ethics of service, a man is a servant of the similar one.

 

The out-standing spiritualist Alice A says. Bailey: service to the humanity is a service to God. And here we find the nodose point that gives foundation to the ethics in the work.

 

 Understanding the work as one of the most important sources of achievement of values, and as a dation, a service that the individual does to the community everything, there is clear the most appropriate ambience (especially in the public function) to canalize his work as an ethics of service, which he answers morally to the community needs of the most varied nature.

 

In this sense, there is very commendable and praiseworthy the making of the codes of ethics for the different labor performances, since, on having offered healthy rules orientativas, he induces the individual to recognize authentic moral values, managing not only to work this way appropriately in his function but also to find a sense to his work, to his life, and to come out humanly in the achievement of his spiritual and divine essence.

 

Lic. Juan Martín Nuñez

Bachelor of Psychology (U.B.A.-University Buenos Aires). Work in External Offices of Medical Psychology of the Hospital of Clinics. Teacher of the Chair of Medical Psychology of the Faculty of Medicine (U.B.A.) and of the Chair of Psychological Orientation of the Faculty of Psychology (U.B.A.) . Participant of journeys, seminars, congresses and courses of specialization. Formation in Compared Religions, Oriental Philosophy and Spiritual Philosophy, Lucis Foundation Argentina-Arcane School England. Two-annual formation Logoteraphistt, Foundation Argentina of Logoterapia. Ph.D. (Posdegree Threeannual) in Logotherapy in Catholic University Argentina-UCA. Master Studies in Psychology University of El Salvador. Cultural Adviser of Mutual Asociation Custom Employees-AEANA. Creator and leader of the political, educational grouping and cultural web site Faro of the Utopy. Member of the Academy of the National Thought. Representative in the Federal District of the Educational - cultural Projects INFOCIBER-ISES and AIKE TO DO MORE of the Institute Salesiano of Superior  Studies-ISES of Rio Gallegos, Province of Santa Cruz, Southern Patagonia Argentina, (with professional contribution in both), developed as a whole with the Worthy Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico, under the patronage of the CONSUDEC, Superior Council of Catholic Education. Tutor of the Section Psychology of the web page of the I.S.E.S.. Achievement of Design, Writing, Style, Collation and Theoretical Content (psychological, philosophical, cultural, religious) of the Project U.N.E.S.C.O. in Argentina. Lecturer, Essayer, Writer and Journalist (as Professional Collaborator).

E-mail of the Author: lucisterris@yahoo.es