Ethics don’t come from just one place. Most people develop their sense of right and wrong through a mix of family, culture, personal experience, human instincts, and reflection over time. They exist because humans live together, depend on each other, and need ways to build trust, reduce harm, and cooperate.
Family and upbringing
Our first ideas about what’s right or wrong usually come from parents, caregivers, teachers, and the people around us growing up. Children learn a lot by watching how others behave — how people treat each other, handle conflict, show kindness, or take responsibility.
Religion and spirituality
For many people, ethics are deeply connected to religion or spiritual traditions. Teachings from traditions like Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and others often provide guidance about compassion, justice, duty, forgiveness, and how people should treat one another.
Culture and society
Every society develops values, customs, laws, and expectations that help communities function. While cultures may disagree on certain issues, many ethical ideas — like protecting others from unnecessary harm or valuing honesty and fairness — show up across the world in one form or another.
Reason and philosophy
Some people look to philosophy and rational thinking to understand ethics. Philosophers have spent centuries asking questions like: What makes something right or wrong? and What kind of life should a person live?
Aristotle focused on character and becoming a virtuous person.
Immanuel Kant believed ethics should follow universal moral principles and duties.
John Stuart Mill emphasized reducing suffering and increasing well-being.
Biology and evolution
Humans also seem to have natural social instincts like empathy, cooperation, fairness, and protecting others. These traits likely helped groups survive and work together over time. Research in fields like Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience suggests that some moral tendencies appear very early in life.
Personal experience
People’s ethics can also change as they grow. Relationships, hardship, responsibility, work, travel, politics, and exposure to different perspectives often shape how someone thinks about fairness, empathy, justice, and responsibility.
A common modern view is that ethics comes from a combination of:
human nature,
living in groups and societies,
cultural learning,
and conscious reflection and reasoning.
In other words, ethics isn’t usually seen as something that comes from only one source. It develops through both human experience and our need to live together in a way that allows people and communities to function and thrive.
Reason and philosophy
Some people look to philosophy and rational thinking to understand ethics. Philosophers have spent centuries asking questions like: What makes something right or wrong? and What kind of life should a person live?
For example:
Aristotle focused on character and becoming a virtuous person.
Immanuel Kant believed ethics should follow universal moral principles and duties.
John Stuart Mill emphasized reducing suffering and increasing well-being.
Biology and evolution
Humans also seem to have natural social instincts like empathy, cooperation, fairness, and protecting others. These traits likely helped groups survive and work together over time. Research in fields like Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience suggests that some moral tendencies appear very early in life.
Schopenhauer
The philosopher who wrote extensively about the endless cycle of desire and suffering you describe was Arthur Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer’s Core Idea
In his major work The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer argued that life is dominated by an irrational and insatiable force he called the will—a blind striving that drives all existence toward constant wanting and never-ending dissatisfaction.
He believed every desire arises from a feeling of lack, which is inherently painful. When a desire is fulfilled, relief comes only momentarily before a new desire emerges. Thus, existence swings “like a pendulum between pain and boredom.” In Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view, suffering is not accidental—it is the very structure of life because the will can never be fully satisfied.
Escaping the Cycle
Influenced by Eastern thought, especially Buddhism, Schopenhauer suggested partial escape from this suffering through the renunciation of desires—a life of simplicity, inner calm, and contemplation. He also saw experiences like music and art as moments of transcendence, where one briefly escapes the tyranny of desire.
In short, Arthur Schopenhauer identified this condition of unending wanting and dissatisfaction as the essence of the human condition, seeing it as the root of suffering and the reason lasting happiness always eludes us.