What separates us from the less intelligent species is not our opposable thumbs or our ability to reason. What separates us from the lesser intelligent species is our ability to utilize an ethical balance in our thinking. Our species can identify the ethical rights and the unethical wrongs with clarity when we test them with logic and common sense. It has been a burgeoning paradigm for us since we first were able to understand the idea of individual rights within our communities. Our ethics are a combination of our values, morals and principles applied to our individual and community behaviors. Since we are all different in small and big ways we need to apply our ethics with a broad brush in order to encapsulate all of our unique qualities. When we apply our ethics to ourselves we can pattern our behaviors to not only the larger group of us but as a right to our own individual behaviors. When we cross the thin line between what we think is right with what we want others to do as right is when we get into trouble. We have a general set of ethics for the larger group that we must all fall within. Then for ourselves we may tailor those larger ethics to a more specific ideal for ourselves to maintain our own personality identity. We have been able to do this for generations and although we may disagree at times as to how our ethics are applied, we may not disagree to give all the right to tailor their ethics to the person they are within the general framework of allowable ethical behavior. Equality demands that all of us share in the process of our civilization if we are to maintain an ethical civilization, so banishing one or more groups of individuals from the boundaries of ethical opportunities is the beginning of the down fall or our civilized superiority. We lessen our species by denying it the ethical guarantee of difference.
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