Ethics and Principles
Like any other science, ethics seeks general principles applicable to a wide variety of different situations (cf. pp. 1.3:63-4). The consequences of our actions are often complex and subtle and may be far-reaching. Often, a single action may have short-term consequences that are good for us and long-term consequences that are bad for us—or vice versa. Principles are our basic tool for handling this complexity. When we encounter a new situation in life, we can bring to bear our previous ethical knowledge, gathered from previous similar situations and unified into principles. Thus we can usually determine readily which alternative action will be best for us, without having to reanalyze the whole situation "from scratch."