People generally tend to have 2 ethical systems they follow either explicitly or implicitly without even knowing:
- Small scale like personal, immediate family and small community ethics.
- Large scale like direction of government or large community ethics.
There are many ethical schools of though and here’s a quick brief (very simplified):
Small scale ethics:
- Virtue ethics - cultivate good character, be just, honest, wise etc.
- Care ethics - all about close community and relationship building, your people first
- Deontological ethics - focus on rules and duties, never lie etc
- Egoism - me me me, I only have one life and that’s the most important thing.
- Existencialism - take full responsibility of your choices and persona, create your own meaning as it’s fit now.
And for large scale:
- Utilitarianism - the most common position. Greatest good for greatest amount of people. Save as many as you can by pulling the trolley switch
- Contractualism - society must be organized around rules we all agree on without knowing our place in it. i.e. poor and king have to agree without knowing who they are yet.
- Deontological Priority - free speech, bodily autonomy etc. All fundamental rights must be protected even when inconvenient.
- Communitarianism - focus on community, tradition over individual rights and freedoms
- Libertarianism - maximize individual liberty
- Marxist - prioritize equality and collective ownership
- Environmental - prioritize protecting our surroundings and all life even non human. Challenge human-centered ethics.
Most commonly people fall virtue or deontological at small scale and utilitarian or deontological at large scale without even knowing much about ethics. What about you?
That which is justified by reasons (in the what do we owe to each other sense).
Care for others. Care for the self. Empathy for others. Empathy for the self. Education of others. Education of the self. Empowering of others. Empowering of the self.
If one cannot explain their reasons, one cannot know if one’s actions are good or evil.
That’s not true. Most moral decisions are subconscious, they feel right to you or come as intuition.
To apply logic first you need some axioms or principles, and that decision can’t be done by logic as it falls outside of it.
You are correct about the selection of Axioms must occur outside of logic.
But there is a difference between what we feel is right and correct versus what we can reasonably justify as right and correct.
And we also have the fun topic of compatible axioms versus incompatible axioms and what actually are the axioms that one holds (and how to deal with intentional and self deception of axioms )
If you can’t use logic to justify it, then it’s the same as to just having a feeling for it
My morality doesn’t require me to justify my axioms to anyone and likewise I don’t require anyone to justify their axioms to me.
But trust does require coming to understand what others have as their axioms.
And a general recommendation for others is don’t accept the premises of assholes. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T38pZ9pFXA0