Spiders and ethics

In class today we started the new topic of ethics with an introductionary discussion. One question that came up was what happens if we take away ethics? How would a society look like without ethics?
Personally, I think it is not possible to achieve. If the definition of ethics is a code of conduct regarding right or wrong, good or bad then the notion of no ethics is simply impossible. In our lives there will always be some things we prefer over something else, were one is right and the other is wrong. We always make choices based on what can be called an ethical code, weather it be personal ethics or the ethics of our country implemented by laws or norms. If we couldn't say that one choice is better than another, we would live in a sort of limbo without progress because right and wrong doesn't exist. Why is it that we have larger equality between men and women today compared to 100 years ago. Because someone thought it was wrong to suppress women and decided to change it. I think ethics deals a lot with what works and what doesn't work. You create a hypothesis and test it. So when people saw that women could actually contribute to society, it turned around and suppressing women became a concept of something wrong. This is how the world changes, when someone thinks that something is right and something else is wrong. Unfortunatly this has also been the case for things like the nazi-regime where something that we now look at as bad or wrong was then for millions of people right and good. This is also an example of how ethics is not something absolute or universal but rather something largely determined by our environment.
We might think that it is innate not to kill another person, but by looking at examples like the one above and for example child soldiers who are trained to kill from they are small and thereby don’t find it wrong, that right and wrong is not something innate but something learnt. Later in our lives, I think that our ethical choices are built both on egoism and on the environmental influences that we underwent earlier. If we use the example we discussed in class of weater to take a job in a well paid bank or in the UN, I believe that what has a major influence is bad conscience. If you were taught that capitalism destroyes the world and that we all need to make an effort to create a better situation for everyone, the bad conscience of going against that ethical value is so great that the money from the other job cannot make up for it. So, to avoid feeling guilty, you would choose the job in the UN. Obviously is not as black and white as that, but I think that our choices, ethical and other, are often built upon unconscious calculations where you weigh potential satisfaction against potential distress. To use the example of killing the spider or not, the distress I would feel by killing a spider would be so minimal that the fear of it creeping into my bed is much greater than the guilt of killing it, so I wouldn’t have hesitated to do so. For other people, plus and minus might weigh completely different and lead to a different choice.

Sorry for the chaos of this post…