By examining the values of life embedded in action and interaction – or simply communication – people create new conditions for a better life, their own and that of others.

Traditionally ethics, or examined values, are what the law is grounded in and protects.

Arguably, the law as it works today, is simply inadequate to protect the larger matters of life?

The law is so absorbed by tradition and is too slow to respond in the face of immediate threats to our local and global life sustainability.

While the actual purpose of ‘laws’ is to protect life and people, especially from our own self-destructive proclivities.

In this case, ethics, formally defined as the ‘examination of life values’ is the human basis for law, government and everything else that exists to regulate life between us.

Everyone holds ethics as a ‘valuation tool’ and all individual interpretation identifies values. Values through which we each examine and judge the world.

There is literally no logical position outside these values. We are all unique and subjective.

Scientific discoveries stretching back, since at least the early twentieth century, have emphasised how complex the world is.

The old ideal of definite outcomes and certain results, in such a dynamic-complex world, is simply ludicrous.

Reflecting this same complexity, the virtual world of the internet has taught a similar lesson.

That none of us can grasp with certainty the actual state of the world. Or what is happening even to our experience locally at any given moment.

Fake news is not merely produced by the media, great or small. It is built into our language, as well as being part of a deep complexity characterising our world itself.

This is the background to a call for a new interpretive lens, especially to face the greatest period of change since the dinosaurs went extinct.

An interpretive lens capable of building arguments and agreements, of balancing debates and disagreements and most of all, a lens based on an ethics of life. In order to protect life.

Such is the role of communication ethics. A species-wide adaptive skill that emphasises the vast human capability involved in everyday and technical communication.

This is a standpoint that might protect us all, by focusing on our grounding values and communications.

A human standpoint that is developed alone yet is always shared. A way of negotiating what is important by deciphering the wonderful complexity of our vast and dynamic multiple realities.