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Common Pitfalls Of Plastic Surgery
Common pitfalls of plastic surgery are those involving before and after pictures with photographic tricks or attractive models instead of the surgeon's patients, that are publicly displayed in printed ads, online advertisement or broadcasted by...
How Important Is It To Stand Apart From Others In An Interview And How Difficult Is It?
Q: How important is it to stand apart from others in an interview and how difficult is it?
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Any professionally trained interviewer can attest these questions...
Lifecare Communities’ Commitment To Quality
Too often the term “Nursing Home” is associated with poor care and poor conditions. That’s a shame and a concern because Nursing Homes are among the most regulated of services, and hundreds of thousands of people across the country spend their work...
More Effective Communication with Children - Part 3
I messages
More Effective Communication with Children - Part 3
Robert Elias Najemy
"I - MESSAGES"
We learned in previous chapters that in the I-message we explain to the child what we are really feeling and the thoughts, beliefs,...
What does Tech have to do with Women's Rights?
"Tech" isn't a four-letter word, but when it comes to "women's
issues" it might as well be. Technology has become a
male-dominated big business; profits have become the priority
over ethics and/or social implications. Women are missing from
the...
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Conscience
When I was a child my parents told me what was right and wrong, school had its rules and church had its sins. To be a good boy, all I needed to do was obey all the do’s and don’ts. If I did, I was led to believe I was following my conscience.
This view of conscience can carry into and through adult life so that one’s perception of right and wrong is shaped totally by the dictates of others. Is conscience just a product of nurture? Are we mere blank moral slates at birth or do we have an inherent sense of ethic from the get-go? I have come to believe the latter is the case because of my own internal reflection from the time of self-awareness in early youth, and the fact that society throughout time has had the same basic thread of ethic. I have sensed right and wrong from earliest memory. I’ll bet you have too, if you reflect. It is there from the beginning just as the homing instinct is within a migrating bird breaking from the shell.
We spend a lifetime tinkering with our conscience, testing its limits, compromising, suppressing, denying and ignoring it in an attempt to cheat life and gain unfair advantage. But it remains solid and true at our core always ready to be re-discovered and acknowledged. We often learn best by making mistakes and feeling the pain. It is those pangs of conscience and guilt remaining with me for a lifetime that have taught me the lesson to listen-up when conscience speaks.
The first step, however, is to reach within and decide what is your conscience as opposed to that of another. Somebody else’s moral dictate does not equal your conscience. If we had been brought up in another society, with other parents, a different school system and religion, then the rights and wrongs would be different and our “consciences” would be different. Some societies practice cannibalism, infanticide and suicide bombing because that is the way their conscience is groomed by others. But the conscience I am pointing to is not contingent. Conscience is like a receiver. We can tune it to the immutable law of universal truth or try to tune it out. Nevertheless, it remains there beaming to us whether or not we change the dial.
To make conscience dependent upon the whims and seasons of humans is to marginalize it into ethical meaninglessness. For example, who to kill and how to kill is formulated by military leaders and an ingrained patriotic “conscience.” Each side in a conflict sees it as moral to kill the other. If we kill and maim one or hundreds of people, as long as they are the enemy, we are doing our moral duty and our “conscience” is being properly exercised. In the legal profession, attorneys will defend the guilty and prosecute the innocent and do so completely in line with their conscience because the law (which others have devised) dictates that such is proper and right. In medicine, physicians prescribe drugs and practice surgery and other therapies that may do more harm than good. But they do so in good conscience because this is what medical school taught and it is in line with conventional standards of practice. If a patient dies as a result of therapy, the doctor can take comfort in thinking he has done all that can be done as defined by accepted medical standards. His conscience is clear. If a food manufacturer makes food composed of a variety of synthetics and food fractions, that’s considered fine as long as the food meets certain regulatory requirements and the label is designed “properly.” The product is perfectly legal to sell and the company need suffer no problems with conscience regardless of the health consequences to consumers.
On the other hand, consumers feel they need only follow all the societal norms to be of good conscience. Let doctors take
care of health, the government take care of the economy, the military take care of security, the attorney take care of disputes, the accountant take care of finances, the church take care of ethics, and the food industry take care of food choices. Sit back, watch TV, overeat, pay the bills and follow the rules. All is well.
This surrender of conscience first became apparent to me during a time in my life when I questioned the organized religion I was brought up in because I discovered it was committed to conformity to human edicts (church leaders), not the search for truth. This brought me to the following question: If I were to deny such outside institutional moral authority and be left alone with only my own conscience, would I become a thief, rapist and murderer? To my surprise, rather than a sense of amoral freedom, over time and with more life experience I found myself like in one of those rooms in the movies where all the walls start pushing in. Listening to the inner voice of conscience was far more exacting, demanding, constricting and at the same time liberating (the true inner me was in charge) than decades of religious mandate ever was. Virtue is choice, not obedience – a true (secular) epiphany for me.
We think we exercise conscience in our careers and personal lives, but few of us do. We usually are following the choices others are making for us. And these choices are too often designed primarily to benefit those who are giving us our do’s and don’ts. We are moo-ing along back to the barn to be milked by the conscience givers. Surrendering to others makes us too vulnerable to their self-interests. The end result, all too often, is that we become pawns, victims, experimental subjects, tools and objects of tyranny, resources and profit centers. Rather, we should reach out to become full human beings each individually exploiting our full potential and helping to bring the world to a better place through our own innate and cultivated inner voice.
I’m not sure how to properly define conscience other than to say it is innate within our being, an instinct to serve as an ethical guide. We will never come to know our conscience, however, until we free ourselves of the imposed consciences of others. This is not to say the views of others shouldn’t be considered, just that it seems to me that each of us are at least as justified in deciding what is right and wrong for ourselves as someone else is in deciding it for us.
I’m not suggesting just dropping out and being self-willed. It means taking on the heavy lifting of being informed and exercising ones own judgment. A conscience nurtured by search, openness, and a commitment to reason and truth is a responsibility each of us must shoulder. To not develop an informed and self-reflecting conscience, but rather to follow the rules of various surrogate mommies and daddies through life, is to remain a child.
About the author:
Dr. Wysong is a former veterinary clinician and surgeon, college instructor in human anatomy, physiology and the origin of life, inventor of numerous medical, surgical, nutritional, athletic and fitness products and devices, research director for the present company by his name and founder of the philanthropic Wysong Institute. He is author of The Creation-Evolution Controversy now in its eleventh printing, a new two volume set on philosophy for living, several books on nutrition, prevention and health for people and animals and over 15 years of monthly health newsletters. He may be contacted at Wysong@Wysong.net and a free subscription to his e-Health Letter is available at http://www.wysong.net.
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| Ethics Updates Home Page. Moral theory; relativism; pluralism ... |
| Designed primarily to be used by ethics instructors and their students to provide updates on current literature, both popular and professional. |
| ethics.sandiego.edu |
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| Ethics Resource Center: Celebrating 85 Years of Ethics Surveying ... |
| The Ethics Resource Center (ERC) is a non-profit, non-partisan research and survey organization in Washington, DC, dedicated to the study and promotion of ... |
| www.ethics.org |
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| Ethics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| One form of applied ethics applies normative ethical theories to specific ... There are several sub-branches of applied ethics examining the ethical ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| Ethics |
| Quarterly international journal of moral, political, and legal philosophy. Edited by John Deigh, and published by the University of Chicago Press. |
| www.journals.uchicago.edu |
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| Ethics, Electronic Edition |
| (ET ISSUES AVAILABLE ONLY SINCE VOLUME 112 NO 1). Help with Searching the Ethics Electronic Edition. Help with Access to the Ethics Electronic Edition ... |
| www.journals.uchicago.edu |
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| Ethics [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] |
| Describes the field and its division in metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. By James Fieser. |
| www.iep.utm.edu |
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| JSTOR: Ethics |
| JSTOR provides a digital archive of the print version of Ethics . ... Founded in 1890, Ethics is an international journal of moral, political, ... |
| www.jstor.org |
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| Institute for Global Ethics | Home Page |
| An independent, nonprofit, nonsectarian, and nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting awareness and discussion of global ethics. |
| www.globalethics.org |
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| Business Ethics |
| Business Ethics Articles from George S. May International Company ... Links to other e-business ethics articles can also be found at this site. ... |
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| The Online Ethics Center for Engineering & Science |
| The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science mission is to provide engineers, scientists, and science and engineering students with resources for ... |
| onlineethics.org |
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| Title Page: Spinoza's Ethics / Elwes Translation |
| Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order AND DIVIDED INTO FIVE PARTS, ... This edition of the Ethics utilizes internal hypertext coding to faciilitate the ... |
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| APA Ethics Office: Ethics Information |
| American Psychological Association sanctioned resources for ethics in psychology, including guidelines for human and animal studies, rules and procedures, ... |
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| Aristotle's Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) |
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| IEEE Code of Ethics |
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| st james ethics centre - imagine a more ethical world ... |
| Not-for-profit organisation which provides a non-judgemental forum for the promotion and exploration of ethics. |
| www.ethics.org.au |
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| Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University ... |
| The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University is one of the preeminent centers for research and dialogue on ethical issues in critical ... |
| www.scu.edu |
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| Poynter Online - Ethics |
| How Poynter developed ethics guidelines for our own publications. ... In creating online ethics guidelines, Poynter asks for your feedback. By Bob Steele ... |
| www.poynter.org |
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| ACM: Code of Ethics |
| Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. |
| www.acm.org |
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| US Senate Ethics Committee |
| Investigates allegations of misconduct by members, and recommends disciplinary action to the full Senate. |
| ethics.senate.gov |
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| LegalEthics.com: The Intersection of Ethics and the Law |
| Legalethics.com offers cases, codes, opinions, articles, links, and other reference material relating to ethics and the law. |
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