In the theoretical framework, I hold the position that ethics is related to what emerges as a part of life protecting the integrity of itself before its environment and itself, sometimes at its own cost (sacrifice, postponement, contention, pain, renunciation, guilt), and it is a manifestation of an ongoing and unrelenting evolutionary process. I hold the position that ethics supports itself  on – though it is not limited to - the capacity of life to become aware of itself and its environment, and its capacity to discriminate what is “good  or “ bad” for itself. This occurs from the most rudimentary, simple and primary levels, up to the most refined, complex and integrated forms, thanks to the attributes of sensitivity, irritability and subjectivity of living beings. In its most evolved forms, this self-perception of life that evolves from the proto ethics to ethics, manifests itself in emotions and feelings – altruistic and selfish at unison -, emerging from the awareness of the state of the organism’s homeostasis (consciousness of wellbeing and survival, limbic resonance, empathy, resistance to fragmentation). Ethics is named and elaborated by reflexive thought and supported by memory and consciousness that humans developed to extraordinary levels. Thus, I hold that ethics include ethical thoughts elaborated by human beings and the real ethical praxis of men that name ethics. I found in this context the need to invent the appropriate words, á la Bohm, to transform the substantive “ethics” into a verb: to ethicate, ethicative, ethicant. The creation of these words, became very important in order to finally clarify the vision and mission of this project.

The word “ethics” comes from the Greek word ‘ethos’ or ‘ethikos’, meaning “home”, “place to live in”. And “morality” comes from the Latin word ‘moralis’, which refers to mores. Both words have some obvious connection to a protected space, to a safe behaviour. That is why I feel comfortable enough  to hold that “ethics” refers to “that which protects”. When I perceive that quality in the etymology of the word “ethics” I can literally feel such space in human existence, and to resonate with the human drama, with the process humanity has followed before arriving to such a concept.

Instead of trying to define a substantive as “ ethics” I found much more fruitful and suggestive to try to describe this ethical process, the ethicant function, the ethicative quality, that emerges from the evolution of life itself, of a process I form part off as the reader does too, an activity that protects life from its disintegration, just as inevitable as its resurgence. I believe that just as subatomic particles emerge from the space-time continuum, ethics emerges from the evolution of life, appears and disappears, and reappears again, just as matter and anti matter.

It is from such perspective that I would like to deal with ethics, not as a dead concept, but as a process that includes writing these lines, motivated by the most human concern to differentiate “good”  from “ evil”. I am making a statement about ethics and whatever I say may or not be ethic, or anti ethic, as I understand, or as the reader perceives it, depending on whether it is an ethicative activity, and its results are ethicant, for thoughts and language are real in themselves, as real as their own context. It is in such sense that we do not fall in the mistake of separating ethics in our thoughts as a “thing”, fragmented away from the world and separated from the activity of whoever deals with ethics.

Moral values are, I believe, a particular feeling that emerges in our human bodies, in the complex and dialectical relationship between human thoughts and the environment, related to what is “good”  or “evil” for survival and for wellbeing of individuals and “others”, or their entourage, their community and its environment or ecology.

Ethics does not come from “outside” but is built from within, by the ethicant activity of men, based on sensitivity, and for such a construction the ‘other’ is needed, also as a sentient being, as part of that quality that emerges through evolution from the beginning of life, beginning in its most primitive forms. In my view, we, the educators, educe such quality among students if and when we educe it in ourselves, and we relate to it by modulating it, exerting some influence upon it, helping to fine tuning it so to say,  but the quality exists before our intervention, as the natural endowment or gift, the product of ontogenetic and philogenetic evolution that manifests itself in the ethicative, ethicant, behaviour and knowledge.

While developing this section on the biological basis of ethics, I reckoned the fact that, along with proto ethics, I had to admit that nature includes anti ethics, destructiveness, life threats, at least of a part of life against the other, thus men do too. That made me place ethicative behaviour in a very interesting and important place: as the deliberate creation of a space for the conscious struggle of a part of our nature against the other, which emphasizes our ground for freedom.

• The detailed study of life processes, led me to emphasize the role of emotions, feelings, consciousness, unconsciousness, in the ethical or ethicative process, unveiling the paths followed by the limbic system, the neocortex, and different parts of the nervous system as it evolved and made perception possible, as well as sensitivity, irritability and subjectivity and the intersubjective regulations that sustain ethics. Feelings are central for the evolution  of ethics and  describe them in this text as an integrative experience, as the perception of a particular state of the body, together with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts related to certain subjects.
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• I paid special attention to ethology in the theoretical framework of this project. Animals, in particular the more evolutionary near to us, and above all mammals, let us see the dawn of human ethics in ever more surprising ways, as we allow ourselves to discover their evolutionary origins, shedding away our superiority varnish we inflicted upon us in order to believe we are so different. As Tagore said:

I often wonder where lie hidden the boundaries of recognition

between man and the beast whose heart knows no spoken language.

Through what primal paradise in a remote morning of creation ran

the simple path by which their hearts visited each other.

Those marks of their constant tread have not been effaced though

 their kinship has been long forgotten.

Yet suddenly in some wordless music the dim memory wakes up and

 the beast gazes into the man's face with a tender trust, and

 the man looks down into its eyes with amused affection.

It seems that the two friends meet masked and vaguely know each

other through the disguise.

In this unique dimension of four indivisible sides or aspects, integrated, not fragmented: body, mind, spirit and the ‘other’, I hold the body as an axis for it is the loci of the mind, the platform of the spirit, the real actor in the interaction with the ‘other’, and it is in the body that takes place the evolutionary process that makes us as the unique species we are. It is in the body and trough the body that we can be aware of the four sides or aspects of that non fragmented dimension that I am living, feeling, recognizing, and naming with these words.

When I refer to the ‘other’, to the inter-subjective space, I am referring to the objective presence of the inevitable connection with others, with human beings capable of having an existence different from mine, capable of authentic desires, different from mine, a person that somehow articulates my own equilibrium (or disequilibrium) by means of its bond with me, thus it includes the internalized ‘other’, that lives within myself in a certain way, a person that also integrates myself within herself or himself.  That ‘other’ articulates my equilibrium or disequilibrium by means of our bonding which may be healthy or not. Ethical sexuality cannot be conceived separate from the ‘other’ because I am not myself except through inter subjectivity. In fact, our brains, neurologically speaking, is structured by the paths we follow when relating to others, a loci where our character emerges as a strategy for survival that can be pregnant with creativity or destructiveness. The same can occur with ethics,… or anti ethics.