Personal Perspective on Ethics

Ethics is a very complex web of what is right and wrong as a route to living life in our own justifiable terms. When I think about what ethics means to me, I do not really consider government regulations, religious beliefs, or social norms. I don’t consider government regulations in the sense that I have grown up to be shaped by them but now as a cognizant being I can realize that I do not agree with a significant proportion of them and do not hold complete faith in the system. I am not religious and although I have attended church services and taken some theology courses I do not feel the need for its teachings to guide me at this point. Social norms, well, I feel that this is obviously self-explanatory, but if you don’t know me all that well, then let’s just say that I see a lot of negative influences on our society. I cannot say that the systems stated earlier have not shaped my beliefs but knowledge has guided me to pick and choose what I believe is sensible and just.
How do I make decisions about what is right or wrong? Well, I take previous experiences and judge from that point. I make moral and ethical decisions based on knowledge I gained in an ethics course of human nature: sentient beings are not means to an end but an end in and of themselves, to treat them as anything else is to treat them as something other than what they are. I think many things can be judged ethically by the outcomes they (would) produce. These are the basis of how our social systems were founded. It is the outcomes, or possible outcomes, that allow us to understand what is ethical. That is how we decide whether to act. Putting ourselves in the situation we are encountering can allow us to understand our feelings about the matter. At which point our feelings can guide us on the path of right and wrong. I judge right and wrong by what I believe is good and bad from previous life experiences; and all of it is completely subjective.
Dictionary.com states that ethics is “that branch of