It is always about the End

I've got many more topics to post, but I was hooked up in a great business course at one of the biggest technology companies in the world, so I was a little pre-occupied.

However, about meaning and ethics. Behaviour has always some future return, either bad, wrong or neutral. At the moment the behaviour is exhibited, it is possible that one does not fully realises the future return, let alone think whether that return is desired or not. To make the right decision such that the right behaviour emerges, one needs to know what returns are desired. So, it is about the end.

But what is the return? It can depend. You can look two days forward, and say that if I eat less the following days I will be hungry. You can look four months ahead, and say that if I eat less, I will lose weight. You can look years ahead, and say that if I eat less, I will die sooner.

We can already see trends in changing ethics. In previous centuries, food was scarcer, so it was more compelling to be fat that thin, and thus the general ethic was to eat more than enough, and show health and prosperity by being on the fat side. Nowadays we are stocked with food, and as we see that many diseases are related to what we eat, the general ethic is to eat not too much, even less if possible, in order to stay slim, which is now the indicator for health.

Some say life is about the journey. And yes, it can be about the journey to justify many things in the past, but in the end, it is about what matters now. Those things that matter now were due to the past, and such, past behaviour is linked to what is now, and current behaviour is linked to what will come.

Ethics is therefore about the end. If one does not fully realises what the end should be about, then ethics will come as heuristics as to ensure that one's behaviour will lead to the undesired return.