Firstly, don’t feel guilty if you’re having trouble completing all your action points, but don’t give up either. Or a ‘bad’ life? For example, your planned action of visiting your relatives in Canada more often (to reflect your value of caring about people) might conflict with your value of caring for the environment (and the action of taking no flights). One important lesson here is therefore to be careful about the values you choose to adopt. Take a notepad or Dictaphone with you. We need to have constructive conversations with people who know things we don’t, and with people we disagree with. Some actions will obviously have more impact than others, and you need to bear this in mind when planning your actions so that you make the time, money and energy you’re investing in this as effective as possible. These values can affect a lot of your actions, choices and behaviour in a range of areas of your life. One powerful force for change is the market – for goods, services and capital – and it is important to help steer this to the positive, Dr Palmer says. If you have two and a half hours to do this and four values to work on, you could split his time up into 30 minutes for each value and then another 30 minutes at the end to do final checks and changes. Secondly, it shows that ‘the right and the wrong things to do’ aren’t always as black or white as many people believe – there are often many different ways in which we could live in line with each of our values and in which the line could be drawn within each action. Our ethics analyst Amanda Richman discusses what falling biodiversity levels mean for human health – and what we can do about it. If you find yourself continually failing to meet your rules, and feeling guilty about it, then perhaps you’ve set your moral rules too high. Worried about the state of the world? When you’re thinking about a possible value you may have, ask yourself whether it is a real value of yours or one that you’ve inherited from other influences, people, or places, and that might not be how you really feel. Again, a healthy dose of common sense is needed in these decisions. Hopefully, this will be an exciting time getting started on making changes to your life. “It’s important to understand what’s going on here, so that we make sure we use ethics not just to have some interesting debates but to actually make ourselves and our societies better.”. Similarly, when you’re reviewing your progress, don’t try to mislead yourself about whether you’ve really done the actions or not. These are changes that you’ve decided will improve your life, so try to make the time for them. The action plan template can be downloaded from the ‘Ethical action plan’. To help you do this, we’ve developed a template document that you can download from our site, save to your computer and then fill in as you go through the remaining sections in this booklet. In this section, we’ll give a few ideas on how you can keep yourself motivated to take your actions and to see your action plans through. Again, you’re doing this for yourself, so there’s no point in trying to fool yourself. From this point in the booklet, we will be taking you through the process of reviewing your values and writing an ethical action plan. There is however very little discussion in the mainstream media of what ethical living actually means, or how to live an ethical life. Let us now explore some of these issues and how to deal with them. A Good Life, Eden Project Books, London, 2005 But many people find the issue of ethical living complicated, confusing and guilt-inducing. In some cases, you’ll be able to work out the relative impact of each action using common sense – simply by standing back from the action and looking at it objectively. Additionally, particular ideas of how we should behave might have been made up to support religious ideas, maintain power or support prejudices. These potential conflicts can make people feel anxious or guilty because they don’t know how to deal with them or feel they may have made the wrong decision. Have you been over-ambitious and put too many things in the short term which it won’t really be possible to do? In either case, make the decision then move on and don’t give yourself a hard time. To get you thinking about values, you might want to ask yourself some basic questions. Additionally, even when you do select some actions that could be consistent with your values, there are no rules on where the line should be drawn on the strength of each of these actions. www.greenelectricity.org As individuals it is our values that define how we think we and other people should live, including what we view as considerate behaviour. This involves thinking about which actions have the most impact in relation to the particular value you’re thinking about. 10 ways you can support good causes most effectively. It can be useful to set some basic rules for yourself for each of your values, as this can make it easier to decide on specific actions to take, and also make it easier to see if you’re living in line with your values. www.gocrueltyfree.org Living in line with the values you’ve listed may take some changes in your life and behaviour. Remember to be aware of which ones have the most impact, and to do some prioritisation. Given that our modern global problems require us to take individual responsibility, we want to define ethical living in a slightly different way in this booklet. The first thing you’ll need to do is note your completed actions on an ongoing basis. www.wearewhatwedo.org His key tip is “keep an open mind as you decide what change you really want to see; and don’t forget that to create that change, you’ll need to be part of it”. Australian Ethical CEO John McMurdo discusses our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The action plan template can be downloaded from the ‘Ethical action plan’. Do your best Then, do the same thing for each of your other values in turn. The final point to consider in this section is how you can live happily with your ethical values. These are the very same questions we face every day – whether consciously or not – in choosing everything from the goods we consume to the services we use and how we behave towards others. 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