Tag Archives: values

My virtues and ethics: Exploring a journal prompt from Chapter 11 of “Changing Paths”

Hello dear readers! It’s been a busy and hectic week for me. I’ve been posting #ChangingPathsChallenge2024 posts a little (or a lot late) for the past few days as a result. What’s more, I didn’t find time to write a post for chapter eleven of Yvonne Aburrow’s book, Changing Paths until today. But I’d rather not just skip putting up a post this week, so I figure a day or so late is the better option. So here’s the journal prompt I’ve chosen from chapter eleven:

Make a list of your personal values and virtues that you hold sacred.

I’ll note that I covered this to some degree earlier this month in a blog challenge post. However, while I talked about the beliefs that tend to inform my ethics and offered a few list of virtues that influenced me, I did not write down my own list. As such, I’d like to take this opportunity to do exactly that.

The values I tend to think about and hold most dear, in no particular order:

  • Compassion
  • Integrity
  • Freedom
  • Creativity
  • Industriousness
  • Joy
  • Hospitality
  • Justice (though more through restorative than punitive means)
  • Fidelity

I hope it’s obvious that this is not an exhaustive list. Merely these are the nine (convenient that I came up with exactly nine off the top of my head) that I’d say I most consider when making moral decisions.

#changingpathschallenge2024: My values

Today’s blogging challenge prompt is “my values.” As I considered what to say about my values, I decided to look up a definition. The University Texas of Austin’s website Ethics Unwrapped defines values as “beliefs that motivate people to act one way or another.” This made me immediately think of a Threads post from the start of May in which I offered my top three beliefs:

  • Everything and everyone is sacred.
  • We are in dialogue with the Divine.
  • Creation is an ongoing process and we are participants in it.

I’d say that these three beliefs form the foundation of my morals and every decision I make. It is that dialogue and my role as a co-creator that urges to realize that the choices I make have consequences, while my belief that everything is sacred and my desire to treat all everyone and everything with the dignity that such a sacred nature requires informs my choices.

Of course, this trio of beliefs alone are not sufficient for making day-to-day choices. For that, I rely on virtues, those qualities that I have come to deem worthy of pursuing and upholding. I can’t say as I have a definitive or formal list of all the virtues I embrace and seek to uphold, but I’ve been heavily influenced by the Wiccan virtues, the Nine Noble Virtues from Asatru, and Ar nDraiocht Fein’s own list of virtues from their dedicant program.

The thing about a virtue-based morality is that it’s not black and white, nor are there any easy answers in such a system. For each situation, I have to consider the virtues I hold dear and determine which ones have something to say about that particular situation. I then must consider whether any of those virtues come into conflict in the context of that particular situation. If so, I have to decide how to best resolve that conflict. This is why i appreciate being in dialogue with my deities. Their wisdom in navigating such a complicated world is greatly appreciated. But in the end, it is up to me to decide what to do. After all, I am the one who has to take responsibility for my choice and the consequences that result from it.

(This post is part of #changingpathschallenge2024. For more information on the challenge, check out Yvonne Aburrow’s post to learn more about the challenge.)