Interbane wrote:Try to summarize your individual moral codes.

johnson1010 wrote:Every interaction with a person during your day will have an impact on their lives. We can have positive, negative or neutral impact. At a minimum, we should not make their days any worse, or harder to deal with. Best practice seems to be to leave them with something better than they had before you entered their lives. We should always strive to maximize the mental and physical health and wellbeing of all we encounter.

Even buying something at the gas station is a chance for you to change a life.

You can say something cheerful and pleasant, or you can be generally grouchy and depressing. How easy is it to ruin someone’s day?

Somebody hands you the wrong item from behind the counter.

“That’s not it. What are you stupid?!”

That has ruined a day. They don’t know you. They don’t really care about you personally. But every time they have a quiet moment, they will think about how some random person said something spiteful to them over nothing. That sours their mood and makes a chain reaction that spreads out from them to everyone they interact with that day.

How easy is it to improve someone’s day? Maybe their life?

I see our current issues as a lack of appreciation of what our "group" should be. Our group should include not only the people in our families, or towns, or countries. But everybody on the planet, and the other organisms on our planet.

I don't think you could put out an unchanging edict that would be appropriate for all times / places / intelligences.

Interbane wrote:. . .
I believe a good part of it will be teaching a worldview and communication; the information we hold and how we express and exchange it. The present analogue is the curriculum of state education. It teaches a worldview and communication. Math is essential to any truthful worldview, as it describes the mechanisms. Other fields are math-laden. Further from math, and more in line with what we consider worldviews, are the differing philosophies. Somewhere in between is science, history, and the humanities. Art, english, writing, music, etc, are all communication.

When we Westerners think about morality, we use concepts that are thousands of years old, but that took a turn in their development in the last two hundred years. We don’t realize that our approach to morality is odd from the perspective of other cultures, or that it is based on a particular set of psychological assumptions—a set that now appears to be wrong. Every culture is concerned about the moral development of its children, and in every culture that left us more than a few pages of writing, we find texts that reveal its approach to morality. Specific rules and prohibitions vary, but the broad outlines of these approaches have a lot in common. Most cultures wrote about virtues that should be cultivated, and many of those virtues were and still are valued across most cultures7 (for example, honesty, justice, courage, benevolence, self-restraint, and respect for authority). Most approaches then specified actions that were good and bad with respect to those virtues. Most approaches were practical, striving to inculcate virtues that would benefit the person who cultivates them.

. . . An additional common feature is that these ancient texts rely heavily on maxims and role models rather than proofs and logic. Maxims are carefully phrased to produce a flash of insight and approval. Role models are presented to elicit admiration and awe. When moral instruction triggers emotions, it speaks to the elephant as well as the rider. The wisdom of Confucius and Buddha, for example, comes down to us as lists of aphorisms so timeless and evocative that people still read them today for pleasure and guidance, refer to them as “worldwide laws of life,”9 and write books about their scientific validity.

. . . A third feature of many ancient texts is that they emphasize practice and habit rather than factual knowledge. Confucius compared moral development to learning how to play music;10 both require the study of texts, observance of role models, and many years of practice to develop “virtuosity.” Aristotle used a similar metaphor: Men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, we grow just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising our self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.11 Buddha offered his followers the “Eightfold Noble Path,” a set of activities that will, with practice, create an ethical person (by right speech, right action, right livelihood), and a mentally disciplined person (by right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration). In all these ways, the ancients reveal a sophisticated understanding of moral psychology, similar to Franklin’s. They all knew that virtue resides in a well-trained elephant. They all knew that training takes daily practice and a great deal of repetition. The rider must take part in the training, but if moral instruction imparts only explicit knowledge (facts that the rider can state), it will have no effect on the elephant, and therefore little effect on behavior. Moral education must also impart tacit knowledge—skills of social perception and social emotion so finely tuned that one automatically feels the right thing in each situation, knows the right thing to do, and then wants to do it. Morality, for the ancients, was a kind of practical wisdom.

Is a hundred or thousand years enough time to educate the likes of Boco Haram on the principles of morality?

(for example, honesty, justice, courage, benevolence, self-restraint, and respect for authority). Most approaches then specified actions that were good and bad with respect to those virtues. Most approaches were practical, striving to inculcate virtues that would benefit the person who cultivates them.