After my conversation with Metta (see the comments on my previous post), I started thinking about ethics. I’ve always been uncomfortable with people trying to turn ethics in a list of rules and nail it down too much, in my opinion this can encourage people not to think, simply to follow.

This was one of the main things that turned me away from mainstream Christianity, the view that the book, the list of rules, is the final word on everything. There’s no account of the situation, of the moment, just the unbending rules. An example given to me was imagine that you are in an occupied country during the second world war, harbouring a family of Jews. Your ethical system has several commandments, including being forbidden to kill or cause a death and being forbidden to lie.

One day, the Gestapo turn up at your door looking for Jews, putting you in a paradox, keeping one of your commandments involves breaking another. Being truthful kills several people, saving the family involves lying, either option compromises your ethics in some way. Of course, if those commandments were guidelines, thus recognising that there are exceptional situations, there wouldn’t as much of a problem.

I remember an atheist from the Orkney islands demonstrating an breathtakingly simple paradox that demonstrates the problem with the idea that the book is the final word on everything and cannot be disagreed with. Admittedly he used it to invalidate the way the Christianity is currently practised, but more on that another time.

This is one of the things that moved me to look at Zen Buddhism, the emphasis is on the day to day practice not so much on the literature. That, for me, is the point that a rigid ethical system misses, ethics are applied in the moment. A ethical system has to be flexible, there has to be give and take I prefer to stick to a few basic guidelines and then take it from there.

It goes a little deeper than that consider the way we usually compartmentalise our ethics, the classic example is the cats and birds scenario. Cats hunt and eat birds and other small animals, now suppose we decide that the the ethical thing to do is to stop the cats killing these animals, sounds good yes? No more cute little furry animals die and we’re all happy.

Hmm. Are we though? By compartmentalising our ethics and failing to see the wider view, we’ve missed the point that predation by cats kept the populations of smaller animals in check. Unchecked, their populations will expand rapidly outstripping the food supply, they’ll starve.

It seems to me that the best way to hold an ethical course is to be flexible and to try and keep an eye on the bigger picture.