Hi friends,

Not caring about how your actions impact others is an ethical issue.

That does not mean that you do not get to live the life that you want to live. It doesn’t even mean you are a bad person honestly.

That simply means that if you are adamantly putting out that you don’t care how other people are affected as long as you get to do what you want to do, then you’re not being ethical.

If you live your best life while causing harm to others and you don’t care, you have an ethical issue happening.

You can or can not choose to sit with yourself and figure out how to manage that ethical issue. That is up to you.

When people have conversations about ethics, they are having discussions about conscious decision making, understanding your relationships with others, and comprehending how we interact as social beings.

Note:

I’d also like to note that while typing this out, the Grammarly editor tried to change this to a synonymous term of moral.

The problem is that ethics and morals are not simply synonyms just because they deal with the same concept.

This is where a lot of people get mixed with these terms. And what I’m about to give you is a very crude explanation of the differences. I invite you to actually take some time to do a little self-study about the differences so that when people are talking about them, you aren’t trying to apply them in the incorrect way that might actually cause harm to yourself.

While these terms address the same concept, they also address the way in which that concept is interacted with.

Ethics is social and society based. Moral is individual and based on your personal perspectives.

Moral can also be applied to large groups such as religious groups, but those groups are only groups because of the concepts in which they apply. They rely on multiple people’s personal perspectives centering around a similar theology/ideology that isn’t necessarily relevant for all people.

Morals don’t even actually address harm reduction in a social group. That is what ethics do.

Also, address the fact that laws are part of the same conceptual ideology as ethics and morals, and they also do not necessarily address harm reduction. Justice activists and people who work with the law (enforcement and advocates) can give you first-hand experience of how their job is not about harm reduction rather than upholding a decision made into law even if it has negative impacts.

Ethics is the only term in this grouping of similar words that actually addresses the individual and social impact of harm reduction.