The Three I's for Ethics as an Everyday Activity: Integration, Intrinsic Valuing, and Intersubjectivity

Abstract

In addressing the theme of ethics as an everyday activity, this essay makes a case for the primacy of preventive ethics over interventional ethics. Preventive ethics aims at creating a condition of viability and wellbeing for all members of the earth community, an ethical ideal that follows from the thesis that all life-phenomena are interconnected and interpenetrating. By sharp contrast, interventional ethics functions to redress the already accrued harm and damage that results from not paying attention, on an everyday basis, to the community members' bio-social-psychic conditions of wellbeing. This essay suggests three interlinked practices for preventive ethics. First, we must integrate the mind/body, self/other, and subject/object. Second, we must learn to value the world intrinsically, as we do in aesthetic appreciation. Third, we must cultivate the art of intersubjectivity in order to counter the prevailing habit of objectifying the other.