When it Comes to Ethics, There Are No Experts
“Get your ETHICS here!”
What are Ethics? Where do we get them? And, just who are the Ethics experts, anyway?
The problem starts right here. In believing that ethics are a thing we can learn, and that there are ethical experts who will teach us, as if we’re learning about quantum theory or how to change the oil in our car. When it comes to ethics, there are no experts.
Certainly, there are people who have devoted their lives to the concepts, constructions, and dynamics of ethics. People who have written and studied about power, dignity, trauma and shame, (thank you Cedar Barstow and Staci Haines among many others). There are people who’ve devoted their lives to the question ‘who is it for?’ (thank you Betty Martin).
But even these people are not ethical experts. When it comes to ethics – the exploration of how we behave in ways that are beneficent, generative, and future-thinking, while staying right here in the present-moment, yet deeply informed by the impacts of the past – we are all merely humans together.
Ethics is a community conversation and dance, one of transparency, humility, honesty, humor, generosity of spirit, ferocity of love, and so much more.
One of the greatest blows to our ethical Self has been the relentless messaging and system structuring that tells us there are ethical experts – that ethics is a noun, not a verb, and that we learn it from others and then simply do it.
If we turn our ethics over to others, we will never find our own, unique, ethical Self.
Our ethical Self, like the experience of our belonging that feeds it, is a weaving unique to each of us. It is living inside each of us always, awaiting just the right nourishment and inspiration to unfurl itself. Without nourishing our ethical Self, it’s possible that some of our most inspired work will never be born.
And what if we nourish our ethical Self? We just might be engaged and internally informed enough to come right up to the edges of the familiar and the known, firmly grounded in the present-moment, while being informed by the past, with an eye on what might blossom into the future...and take the next step. Our unique ethical Self is the one who takes that next step.
There are no experts here. There are those of us who have navigated this intimate terrain more than others. Yet in our humanness we are, each of us, only as ethical as we are grounded in humility, honesty, wonder, care and evolving self knowledge; embedded in our communities of belonging, human and more than human, with a clear understanding of who we are here, and the things that get in the way of us remembering.
Please join us for The Source of Embodied Ethics, as we explore this very terrain, as humans searching for our ethical Selves together. This 8 week course will bring us into territory that includes our experience of our own value, and what we learned about power.
It will invite us to take stock of our particular wounding and how it predisposes us to see certain things and not others, while showing us things that aren’t really there. We will talk about some of the cultural, community and personal fallacies about ethics and what it means to be ethical. In other words, we will explore what it means to be a human who holds other humans in their humanness.
Please join us. We begin Thursday March 4th at 9am (Mountain Time) and there’s plenty of room for you.
With care,
Christiane (and the IEI Faculty)