Ethics:

Humans are tuned to feel negative emotions when faced with problems.  They naturally respond to danger with fear, to injustice with anger, and to evil with hatred.

Picture negative emotions as wounds.  Emotional wounds, like physical wounds, can become infected in the form of complexes and traumas.  Complexes and traumas cause people to repeatedly experience fear, anger, hatred, despair, guilt, insecurity, anxiety, etc.

Ethics treat emotional wounds by teaching how to overcome negative emotions.  They explain how to overcome habitual ways of thinking which cause negative emotion.  They also explain how to solve problems by using positive motivation instead of negative motivation.

Here is how humans both achieve ethics and benefit from understanding them:

The Five Ethical Beginnings and Ends (5CO):

  1. Knowledge (Perception)

  2. Rationality (Rationalization)

  3. Organization (Association)

  4. Ability (Expectation)

  5. Happiness (Motivation)

Ethical behavior generates greater knowledge, rationality, organization, ability, and happiness.  Additionally, a shortcut to ethical behavior is seeking these ends.  If one seeks knowledge, rationality, organization, ability, and happiness, one is more likely to achieve them.

The problems of ethics are fundamental to all problems.  Ethics maximize the effectiveness of thought processes, and thought processes are problem-solving tools.  All thought is reducible to individual tasks of sensing, explaining, sorting, planning, and acting.  Ethics teaches how to most effectively sense, explain, sort, plan, and act.  

Certain ethics demonstrably generate more information, rationality, goodwill, productivity, and happiness.

Humans throughout history have attempted to condense ethics to its most fundamental, irreducible concepts.  Confucianism teaches five virtues; Christianity teaches seven heavenly virtues and seven deadly sins; Buddhism defines ‘Right’ views, intent, and conduct; Hinduism teaches the five observations; Abrahamic religions teach the ten commandments; etc.  Five Categories Theory provides the most fundamental and irreducible set of ethical concepts, with the clearest boundaries.  This is because the model is built on a matrix of fundamental human desires, problems, emotions, and behaviors.  The topics have clearly delineated boundaries, due to the new possibility of grouping meta-behaviors in relation to The Five Categories.