Opinion Sur
Having an ethical compass can somehow guide our steps in this world of complex events marked by multiple personal and social developments. Although they are necessary, one cannot ignore that ethical compasses are social constructs. Billions of individuals going through personal and social transformational trajectories coexist in the world; this implies a vast amount of diverse and simultaneous decisions between multiple actors influencing each other. Each actor moves with its motivations, purposes and meanings, whether they are explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, rational or intuitive. The fact is that ideologies, interests, beliefs, the mundane and the transcendent, actors becoming aware that their truths are relative and others convinced of possessing the whole truth and forevermore, overlap in time and space.
Therefore the process of aligning interests between so many and such diverse actors is extremely complex. Some of those interests are antagonistic in nature and, as such, difficult to align. Others can be eventually reconciled in order to facilitate a fuller social and personal development. All imperfections and perfections are present when it comes to seeking convergences that, it is worth stating it explicitly, have an impact on everyone’s fate. The task of aligning interests, needs and emotions combines pragmatism and creativity; it also requires references of values that can bear meaning to the convergence of wills.
Values are essential elements in any transformation process. On one hand they are part of parametric conditions since the framework of socially established values carries significant weight on the prevailing way of functioning. They also affect the way we face random circumstances, whether they prepare us to receive its consequences or to prevent them. And what is especially important, the values we adopt shape our attitude and determination to face life and its changes.
Having an ethical guide can help us guide our steps in this world of complex events marked by multiple personal and social developments. It assists us in understanding the rationality and consistency of facts and processes as well as facing existential enigmas common to the entire human race that are mobilizers and, in more than one way, unfathomable.
Although necessary, it cannot be ignored that ethical compasses are a social construct and even though some beliefs claim a superior origin for certain rules and values, the truth is that even then its implementation and administration belong to human beings.
Facing all these challenges and the immensity of horizons, immerse as we are in crossroads that can lead us to very different ports, we move forward accumulating knowledge and traditions, carrying our free will (that conditioned freedom of choice) and clinging to an ethical compass that can somehow guide our steps. The luggage is not much but it is the one available for the journey we have undertaken from the day we were born.
