title: Large ethics.
abstract: This essay presents an alternative to the traditional view that ethics means judging individual behavior against standards of right and wrong. Instead, ethics is understood as creating ethical communities through the promises we make to each other. The "aim" of ethics is to demonstrate in our own behavior a credible willingness to work to create a mutually better world. The "game" of ethics then becomes searching for strategies that overlap with others' strategies so that we are all better for intending to act on a basis of reciprocal trust. This is a difficult process because we have partial, simultaneous, shifting, and inconsistent views of the world. But despite the reality that we each "frame" ethics in personal terms, it is still possible to create sufficient common understanding to prosper together. Large ethics does not make it a prerequisite for moral behavior that everyone adheres to a universally agreed set of ethical principles; all that is necessary is sufficient overlap in commitment to searching for better alternatives.
authors.forename: David W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Chambers
mesh_terms: D028663:Ethical Theory; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations