The study reported here, a 'cartography' in the language of Mind Genomics, resulted from a discussion by author HRM with a group of students in Israel. The question was 'how do we know what is ethical in the world of everyday?' The question was framed as an inquiry into how one goes about establishing ethics in the world of the everyday experience. People know that it is unethical to murder, and so forth. There is the sense of ethics, whether that sense is innate from natural law, or emerging from convention, and internalized through education to become normative, both in action and in thought. The issue was not those topics, but rather the nature of right and wrong in the small actions of the everyday, actions where one might say are minor 'peccadillos' rather than ethical issues [8,9]. In an excellent summary article 'ethical feelings' for behavior, including the 'ordinary can be introduced by the simple set of paragraphs:
So, What is Ethics?Ethics is the manner by which humans regulate individual behavior in civilized society. One might say that humans regulate behavior by laws, which is true. But laws cannot apply in every instance, and all the time. So, ethics is how we train people to behave, or teach them how they ought to behave, even if no laws apply in some circumstance