We figured you out!
Today I got out of work. Instead of work I was given the opportunity to attend a seminar on making good moral decisions. As far as I am concerneed, any training worth giving is worth attending, especially when the Coast Guard will send me for free. This training, was definitely worth my time.
We talked about what sort of things go into making a decision, and how to make your decisions promote the values and virtues that you find important to your life, and your work. We started the seminar out by identifying what values were important to us. In no particular order, my top 5 values/virtues were positive attitude, tolerance, honesty, respect, and creativity. After breaking into small groups and sharing our lists, my group was surprised at how different each person's list was. We discussed different situations, and how, based upon the values important to us, each would approach said situation in the "right" way. I found it interesting that on smaller issues we often found different responses as to what was the "right" course of action, but that when we were presented with larger issues, life and death decisions, that it was much more uniform.
There was a lot of great debate during the seminar about what different values meant to different people. I've always found it interesting that the exact same word, say Honor, or Love, or Respect, can have such differing meanings to different people. In any situation the pre-existing ideas that people bring to the table are quite diverse, and infinitely unknowable. Sometimes you find that people will argue and argue over some minute discrepancy, only to find out later they both were talking about the exactly the same thing only calling it by different names, names that didn't agree with the other. Strange. Words, our language is so strange. We attach feelings and ideas to different words and when people attach feelings and ideas different from our own to those same words, the whole context and purpose behind our expressions can be changed dramatically.
Let us find the high moral ground in our lives