There are many different kinds of ethics—virtue ethics, daoist ethics, honor ethics, natural law, contractarianism—just to name a few. But my students have usually only heard of deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics, not realizing that there are other dimensions to choose from.

Deontological and consequentialist are the two varieties I tend to hear most about, although I admittedly don't often talk ethics with others.

What a culturally-insulated life you lead!

My social circles are unfortunately a bit lacking in people whose opinions I would trust to be sufficiently reasonable, and my environment makes finding such people tricky at best.

I'm from the Southeast United States, which is a bit infamous for toxic responses to people revealing deviation from certain cultural norms, and I have more than a few such deviations.

Ah, Christian ethics. I left that off my original list.

It is my understanding that you abandoned Christian ethics when you left the faith. Did you become an evil person once you realized there is no God to tell you what to do?

Well, at the time I didn't jump to "there is no God", instead just "I don't think they're looking in the right place if there is something".

At the time, I still felt like my ethics were fairly reasonable, even if I was more willing to ponder situations in which I might tolerate things often considered "unacceptable" than others.

Eventually I reached a point where I had to have something as the basis of my ethical system. I ended up rebaselining it around what seemed to be my "core morals" (morals which wouldn't budge when I tried using self-manipulation to shift them), and since then that's been the heart of my logic.

I think you're thoroughly non-confused here and don't have any noticeable problems to untangle.

It's nice to get some rare feedback.

Feeling non-confused is often a problem, but not one that can be untangled.

It can be tricky to even notice the need to check for non-confusion.

If you notice you are confused, that indicates a contradiction in your beliefs. Trace that contradiction to the root and you can untangle your confusion.

If you notice you are non-confused…what then? There is no contradiction to untangle. No stacktrace to diagnose.

If it's my first time noticing a moment of non-confusion, I'll still try and run some tests anyways. I've had enough software bugs sneak past initial testing to trust things seeming right the first few times. After a reasonable amount of "sanity checks" that come up clean, I'll permit the non-confusion to persist.

Your tests pass. Then what? How can you make yourself confused again?

At that point, confusion only tends to return if I encounter clearly-incorrect output.

Becoming right is a cycle of becoming confused, untangling that confusion, and becoming confused again, over and over. "Noticing you are confused" is what you do when you are confused.

When you are non-confused, you must generate clearly-incorrect output. How do you generate clearly-incorrect output when you think your systems generate correct output?

The real world usually makes sure I have plenty of new reasons to be confused.