Discriminating between ethics is a life choice.
A person owns their own life, and so are the proper chooser of their daily life choices: 1. What to think about next. 2. What to focus your eyes on. 3. What to do with your hands. 4. Where to go.
Because you are an animal, you are animated. You move, and you can only chose one motion option. For instance, you can only move forward OR backwards, OR to not move. You can’t choose all three options and carry out that choice simultaneously. You have to choose BETWEEN available options.
A large number of people find this fact unbearable. Even if they have 10 billion options to choose from they will complain about being “forced” to decide. They’ll decry the either-or binary dochotomy as a “prison” of rationality that you’re trying to trap them in to remove their “liberty” of choosing something non-existent. Artists and authors are particurly noisy about this, because they think it’s their job to produce something outside of existing reality, something “totally new” and unrelated to anything that exists.
The fact that you are only one person and that you are living only one life neccessitates the next conclusion: values are an ordered list. Each one must be ranked by priority.
We all like to think that we can value a variety of things, and we can definitely have more that one thing in our list. Our list of values can have multiple items, but each of us can put only one thing at the top of that list. Each item exists in an order of priority.
This follows from the fact that we are only one person. At each moment, we can have only one priority, for which we may have to drop any of the other value items in our list. We exist in only one place at a time, and we exist there whether we want to or not.
To be is to be somewhere. There is no way around it.
For many people, the choice of where to be at a given time is a fatal choice. It is non-trivial. It is fateful.
Each of the choices we make contribute to a sum, a consequence. Everything matters.
When we accept values and move them up near the top of our value list we are not just subjectively whimsically filling out a questionare of “likes and dislikes”. We are making the most fatefull choices.