There appear to be two “scales” in ethics. There are the extremes of good and bad. These scales don’t allow for gradation, a thing is either good or bad, and there is no middle ground. This can perhaps be called a classical scale. The second kind of scale is Aristotle’s golden mean. Instead of the good being one end of two extremes, it is the midpoint between two vices.
Let’s relate these scales to economics. In the traditional scales, being poor is seen as bad, and being rich is seen as good. This is, of course, because the rich hold much of the power in society, and thus influence values. The golden mean would entail that there’s an ethical place that exists between being impoverished and being filthy rich. Society doesn’t think there should be a ceiling for wealth and a floor for poverty. This runs into the virtue of fairness, which requires a kind of equality and proportionality. Everyone should get what they need. If there’s more than what is necessary then an equal and proportional distribution is made. This appears to run into the problem of merit and ownership, i.e. distributing according to work done (or some other criteria) and distributing according to authority over goods.
In order to be active in ethics, one needs a well-formed epistemology. Most people have corrupted epistemologies due to religion and other faulty ideologies. Religion is particularly heinous because it gives people the belief that they have an ultimate truth, destroying positive traits like humbleness, curiosity, and open-mindedness. They believe they know the ontology, which is profoundly absurd. They think belief in a thing they claim is omniscient somehow also gives them powers of omniscience. Many of these laypeople, being uneducated in philosophy, have no sound justification for their beliefs. The unsophisticated, informal methods of reasoning found in holy books (mostly fallacies of appeals to authority) are used for real-world problems.
Lies are easier to generate than the truth. Both are related to language and communication. Once one has a language that can express enough content, one can generate any piece of information and claim it is true. Obviously, obtaining the truth requires more than the mere communication of information.
People will by default appeal to the truth, rarely does one see them put in the work to express it proper. This is because the truth is multifaceted and complex. I can’t say I have the truth, merely that I seek the truth and discover what I hope are aspects of it. There seems to be a hierarchy of the truth. At the top of the hierarchy is big T Truth. This is ontology, the all, it is the dynamics of all things. We’ve spoken of the hierarchy because it is the same as philosophy.
Next is the process of discovering truth, which is perhaps akin to a flowchart or algorithm. First, is one coming from a place of ignorance or some knowledge, that is to say, is one building a foundation or upon a foundation. There’s likely no true pure ignorance without being part of nonexistence. The first tools for discovering truth are those provided by the body, primarily reason, the senses, and movement. The next tools are perhaps those discovered by reason itself, mainly mathematics, logic, and science. The next part is perhaps knowing which sources one can trust. One would need to record who is consistent and whose predictions come to pass.
