Ethical and Moral Living

UPL’s focus is ethical conduct, moral responsibility and community service, with justice, compassion and fairness in all dealings.

The traditions agree that a good life is owed to others as well as to oneself. Judaism calls giving tzedakah, a word that means both righteousness and charity, and Maimonides set out eight levels of it, the highest being to help a person stand on their own. Islam makes Zakat, or charitable giving, an obligation, and places justice and the community, the Ummah, at the centre of a good life. Jesus taught that what is done for the least of his brothers is done for him, and blessed the merciful and the peacemakers. The Yoga tradition of Hinduism counts non-injury, ahimsa, first among its restraints, and the Buddha asked his followers to refrain from taking life, from taking what is not given and from false speech. The Sikh Gurus teach that the one who works for what they eat, and gives some of what they have, knows the path.

UPL takes regular giving into its own ethical guidelines, and takes from all these traditions that ethics is lived and not only believed, and that it grows with practice.