The TST Ethical Roadmap is a five-step process:
Group ethics guides. Personal morality chooses. Act with good intent. Weigh the result. Adjust.
For most everyday decisions, the simpler principle is enough:
Act in a way that supports flourishing for all.
When a decision warrants more care, use the five-step roadmap. For unusually difficult or high-impact decisions, the roadmap opens into deeper ethical tools.
The moral agent is active throughout. In Step 1, the agent listens to Group Ethics—the laws, rights, duties, policies, traditions, and other shared guidance surrounding the decision. As part of that step, the Dichotomy of Control helps clarify what is actually under the agent’s control, what authority they have, and what properly belongs to someone else. Influence is not a third category. It is simply something you may choose to do when the final outcome is not yours to control.
Then Personal Morality chooses. Personal Morality is not the moral agent; it is the ethical judgment the moral agent uses to decide what to do. The agent may be one person, two people deciding together, or responsible decision-makers acting for a larger group. Either way, someone still has to choose.
Depending on the situation, the moral agent may use tools such as the Epicurean Pleasure Dichotomy, Stoic Lens, Existential Lens, or Confucian Role Ethics. The agent then acts with Good Intent, weighs what actually happened, and adjusts when reality says the choice fell short.
Group Ethics guides. It does not decide. The moral agent carries the roadmap from beginning to end.
