ETHICS are pragmatic philosophy.

Ethics are operating principles, broad philosophical understandings that have practical applications.

Ethics are not meant to be the definitive last word, unlike the self-confirmed righteous blanket of morals.  An ethic may not apply to all situations where you would think it would apply.

By contrast, morality is absolutist and sentimental.  Inflexible and abstract, morals are painted in primary coloured pictures of black and white, saints and sinners.

The absolutism of morals is relatively refuted.  When is killing ‘righteous’ and when is it ‘evil’?  Disturbed people are sent to prison and executed for murder, yet States maintain popular over-large armed forces with the sole remit of being capable of slaughter on a massive scale.

There are always alternative ways to look and loose threads.  Existence is an unfathomed swirl of dust that never coheres into an oxymoronic single totality of meaning as morality supposes.

Be ethical, not moral.

There is need to be pragmatic, as information and contexts change.  Ethics are pragmatic philosophical ways of managing universal chaos and change, relevant to the context.

CHANGE is inevitable.

An aesthetically pleasing oxymoron, change is one of the few constants in life.

Change is a condition of existence that is known but has no physical essence.

Change abstractly encompasses everything.

Universal existence changes at the minutest level as each instant passes, the sub-atomic atom acting independently or coalescing, constantly evolving and conjoining.

This myriad of independent changes across the universe(s) cannot be comprehended or controlled, the scope dwarfing humans into cosmic specks of insignificance.  The individual person cannot even control the many changes in their own world.

The best we can do is modify.

There is always something to manipulate, something for a person to play with, with an ability to manipulate tools.  Make things nicer, it all adds up.

But, as minutia in the grand scheme of atoms rebounding, accept that change may flatten your good works and comfort with a universal thwack!

TIME measures change.

Height, depth and width measure the volumes of space.  Time measures change in the volumes of space.  Four dimensions.

Time is about the present.  Memory recalls the past and thoughts project into the future from a mind in the present, in order to get a bearing on the present.

The past and future are incomplete records or mental fantasies of a reality that does not exist anymore or has not been yet.  The past has happened and the future will be, but they never are.

There is only now.  Live in the moment, it is what you have.

But draw a line from the fragments of remembered past experiences to the multiplicity of future permutations to help decide how to live in the now.  Manage change.

ORGANICISM is the fundamental mode of existence.

Life is organic, even where classed as non-organic.

Animals procreate, plants pollinate, chemicals react, rocks crumble.  Constant merger and separation, at all points from macro to micro levels, in the holistic spread of movement of an unpredictable organic existence.

Life grows and decays, erodes and shifts.  It branches out from its root and imperfectly reproduces, drifts and grows into alternatives, the same but not, individuated and messily differentiated.

Chaos Theory has a Petrie dish experiment that produces a different pattern of fractals every time, despite the same process and conditions.  This is not chaos, it is organic: there is fractal evolution.

The only aspects of human life that are not organic are abstractions, like mathematics.  However, such abstractions are functionless unless applied to the organic world and therefore in thrall to organicism.

The number two is only useful if you are counting something real, and real things do not uniformly come in twos nor does a two of one thing equate with another precisely.

Numbers are a theoretical concept which help to order, measure and make contingent sense of a quasi-random organic world.

Imagine existence as a tree or fungus, slowly spreading, growing, dying, flowering, etc.

We cannot control the spreading tree of existence.  But it can be pruned, shaped in direction.  This applies to the impersonal life of planets and the human life of systems and individual people.