The TST Ethical Roadmap is a five-step process for making, evaluating, and refining ethical decisions.
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 the deeper framework and its situational ethical tools.
Flourishing for all is the north star of TST Ethics. The Dichotomy of Control begins the process by identifying the moral agent and the boundaries of action. Group ethics then supplies the given guidance. Personal morality guides the moral agent in choosing among the available actions using the appropriate ethical tools. The agent acts with good intent, weighs the real-world result, and adjusts as needed.
The roadmap applies to decisions made by a moral agent. That agent may be one person, two people deciding for one person, or a group of people deciding on behalf of a larger group. In every case, someone must choose. When a group acts, its responsible decision-makers serve as the moral agents acting on its behalf.
The Dichotomy of Control separates what belongs to the moral agent from what does not. These are the only two categories. Influence is not a third category. It is one possible response to something the agent does not directly control. This first step establishes responsibility and keeps the agent from trying to command what lies outside their authority.
Group ethics supplies the given guidance surrounding the decision. This may include laws, policies, professional standards, cultural expectations, institutional rules, rights, and shared moral traditions. That guidance deserves serious consideration, but it does not automatically determine the choice. Groups can be mistaken, unjust, or harmful.
Personal morality helps the moral agent choose among the available actions. The agent uses the ethical tools most relevant to the decision, such as the Dichotomy of Advice, Epicurean Pleasure Dichotomy, Stoic Lens, Existential Lens, Confucian Role Ethics, or Daoist Natural Alignment. The agent then acts with good intent, weighs the real-world result against flourishing, truth, fairness, responsibility, and harm, and adjusts when the result falls short.
