ETHICAL BEHAVIOURS SET OUR CHILDREN ON THE RIGHT PATH
WE all use our moral compass to make decisions each day. But what are ethics really and what does it mean to be ethical in today’s world?
Different levels of maturity require different ethics. Remember, as a child, when your greatest ethical challenge involved keeping your hand out of the cookie jar?
If we’re lucky as children, we grow up with an ethical framework that helps us do the right thing. Good parenting, moral guidance, an educational system that helps develop character and healthy peer influences can all contribute to that framework – but as we pass through stages of life, the framework itself adapts and changes according to our individual stage of maturation. As we mature, so do our ethics – hopefully.
When that happens, our ethics determine our actions, and our collective actions create our overall conduct – our personal pattern of behaviour.
So let’s pause for a minute and ask ourselves: How’s my conduct been lately? Have I lived up to the moral and spiritual values I profess?
Do we look at others and pass judgment on their ethics and integrity – I am certain we do this time and again, based on our own moral conduct or perception of what is right.
How often do we read of immoral behaviour that somehow almost gets rewarded by leniency. Is there a lowering of our benchmark to accept a greater level of indecent behaviour? Somehow I don’t feel this is setting a good standard for any of us.
What happened to integrity? What happened to doing the right things right?
What we’re seeing politically in this country and around the world does challenge the idea that morals and politics can work together. Instead, we seem to dismiss bad ethics and morals which is increasing the lies and corruption to a standard of normalising such behaviour.
Which begs the question what has changed significantly about morality that we’re going down the bad road more often than the good road? Do we view morality and ethics as one and the same? For me morality is a personal set of beliefs, the core of who we are as individuals. Ethics is expressed in terms of the expectations and the sanctions that are defined and enforced by a certain culture and society.
What’s confusing today is that the world has never been so interconnected, but what we forget is that the ethical positions or decisions or expectations occur within a given period of time in a certain cultural silo. That is why many of us are completely disconcerted by what we think is so obviously right and wrong yet others see their behaviour through a completely different lens.
We also need to reflect on whether messages in society are consistent or inconsistent with one another?
When an influential person behaves morally and ethically, then young people are likely to emerge as moral and ethical human beings. When the opposite happens, quite the opposite outcome is likely.
The eyes of our children are watching – so let’s check our moral conduct to ensure we are setting a high standard for them to learn from and to raise the benchmark of today’s sliding ethical values.