I judge all my internal and external ethical rules and/or behaviors on whether I am able to love and support myself and others in the doing.

I will test the waters of this on purpose and on accident for small periods of time; and, as you allude to, I will use my standards and reactions to me by others to deny and/or reinforce my ethical norms; or changing them somewhat (if at all) to quite a bit, but generally retaining a spiritual sense of mine and other's evolution, one based in loving and supportive responses, in process of coming to be and become, guides my every moment.

I am able to love and support myself and others in the doing — Clay Stablein

Isn't this an ethical rule itself? What makes it exempt from possible change?

Yes, it is. It subsumes all others, really. This is the standard I use to measure my internal ethical rules and external judgments. Actual reality, once something, anything, happens, does not matter anymore. It can't be judged for it happened (your friend was murdered, you were cheated on a deal, the police arrested the wrong man).

What we often want is that reality didn't happen and we want it changed, when what can be changed is our response. Always respond with love and compassion, even if externally, you have to discipline, arrest or no longer join up with said reality later.

"...
By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? "

By our standard of comfort with the results and our association with how it makes us feel. Included in the results are the approbation or censure from onlookers or from those directly affected by our actions, or by our own assessment of the outcomes if those directly affected are unable or unwilling to respond.

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

you already answered the question in (5)

The problem is ethical dilemmas.

Is stealing to feed your family wrong?
Is diverting the train from killing one person tied down to the railroad track to a path that will kill another person tied down right?

Ethics is not based on copy and paste.

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

By the objective standard of whether our behaviour helps towards the ultimate ethical goal.

Morality is objective and instrumental in one sense ("if you want x, then given your nature and the nature of the world, you must A,B,C") but the choice of ultimate goal towards which the whole structure of ethics tends is subjective in another sense (although we do seem to end up with a basket of closely related ultimate goals - IOW "human flourishing" isn't a million miles away from "general happiness", which isn't a million miles away from "my happiness", etc., the ultimate goals that have been proposed for ethics are interrelated to some degree).

With the process you outlined, you develop (as a growing, unfolding person) something like an analysis of what all the rules seem to be tending towards, and you pick out and crystallize that goal. Once picked out and highlighted, then as a thinking person you can turn back, revise and reconsider the rules with a view as to whether objectively they are likely to lead to the goal or not.

There's an interplay, a to-and-fro between these two directions (top-down and bottom-up) in the formation of ethics. We inherit loads of rules from genetics and culture, and most of them probably work (after all they've lasted all this time) but it's not guaranteed, and sometimes revision may be necessary, or the addition of new branches (e.g. with new technology, which offer new possibilities of moral/immoral behaviour).

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

Your core values. These don't change that much, certainly not once you pass a certain age, but possibly never since they seem to be biologically determined for a good part.

That is what a philosopher would do anyway. Most people don't get that far, and stick to following authority, pretty much.

you already answered the question in (5) — csalisbury

I'm probably not very clear. Let's say the external reaction is disapproval but my own judgment was it was fine (eg. in accordance with my moral compass). How do I choose one over the other?

By the objective standard of whether our behaviour helps towards the ultimate ethical goal. — gurugeorge

How do you access knowledge of this standard? It's not a state of affairs we can observe.

Your core values. These don't change that much, certainly not once you pass a certain age, but possibly never since they seem to be biologically determined for a good part. — ChatteringMonkey

Are you suggesting there's a ranking of value? Which ones go first? Why? How do you arrive at that ranking?

Your core values. These don't change that much, certainly not once you pass a certain age, but possibly never since they seem to be biologically determined for a good part. — ChatteringMonkey
Are you suggesting there's a ranking of value? Which ones go first? Why? How do you arrive at that ranking? — Benkei

Not a general ranking applicable to everybody, but individual rankings of values, yes. You probably also do find some things more important than others, do you? Why is that?

How one arrives at such a ranking isn't an easy to answer question... probably involves years of experience and unconscious and conscious deliberation before something like that crystalises.

But generally it goes like any evaluation I suppose, you weigh values against each other, think throught the ramifications of certain values, test them against concrete life situations and dilemma's etc...

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

I think, naturally, we are always seeking greater harmony with our environment and everything in it. Because of that, we continuously seek to redefine the parameters of our interactions. I believe we all attempt to improve our ethics/morals, only some of us do it more often or quicker than others.

How do you access knowledge of this standard? It's not a state of affairs we can observe. — Benkei

It's difficult to observe, but not impossible - for example for "human flourishing" you can have, as a first approximation, proxies like mortality rates, infant mortality rates, suicide rates, successful medicines, reported happiness indexes, that kind of thing. It's necessarily imperfect, and not an absolute measure, but the main thing is that you can see the direction of trends, and change relative to previous measurements.

1. As children we mimic others' behaviour — Benkei

Yes, we do. Quite so. But there is a critical step that occurs at the same time involving parental instruction and punishment. Children are instructed to obey, behave, be quiet, play nicely with others, etc. and when they don't, they are punished. Punishment may be nothing more than being required to sit on a chair for a while (what terror!) or stay in their room alone (appalling) or some such thing. They may also be spanked (quelle horreur!). The essence of the child's punishment is the display of parental disapproval, and for a very young child, the possibility of the parent withdrawing their love (though of course the child wouldn't think in those terms). The parent has no intention of withdrawing their love, of course.

The fear of love's loss is what instills in the child the desire to "be good"--later on to act ethically. If this desire is not instilled, the child probably will not have a strong orientation towards acting ethically. That doesn't mean they will end up in prison before they reach 21, but they may slip and slide more around ethical issues. They may, for instance, preferentially opt to work for the Trump administration.

2. At some point we internalise our own behaviour along certain ethical rules — Benkei

What is internalized is the role of the parent. The parent is the guide for good behavior, and by the time the child is in pre-school (3-4-5 years of age) the job of internalizing mama cop and papa cop is done (one sincerely hopes). The internalized role of determining right behavior will get more complicated as the child grows up.

This system of rules assumes a high level of consciousness, reflection upon one's performances, kind of self-development and readiness to change yourself. Yet, most people unconsciously adopt themselves to prevailing norms and social environments. As far as they reach
a convenient equilibrium, they do not change themselves anymore.

I know we're supposed to assume for the thread that your list is roughly accurate, but number 3 just looks too contentious. I know I don't always act according to the ethical rules I think are correct. Beliefs conflict with desires quite often (unwanted obsessions, failures to keep to a diet, etc.).

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to?

Peer reaction (especially from family and friends) and our moral intuitions about what is bad. Both influence how our moral conscience develops.

Let's assume for the sake of this thread that we arrive at our personal ethical views as follows: — Benkei

Let's not. Rather, let's assume that there are values necessary to the survival of the kind of social creature that we are, and that these inclinations, preferences, values, are built in to the species as a whole. For instance, a species that has a long period of dependency of its offspring needs a loving, nurturing attitude to children. Other species abandon their offspring at birth or before to fend for themselves, but human genomes that tend in that direction die out.

Likewise, a species that relies heavily on communication through language must value truth, or lose meaning. A species that relies on complex social learning must value trust, and so on.

That is, children mimicking others is already an expression of a value.

Are you suggesting there's a ranking of value? Which ones go first? Why? How do you arrive at that ranking? — Benkei

No. It's not ranking of values. That's too simplistic -- and probably no one does that. It's deliberation of what needs to be done in the face of an ethical problem. And let's not forget fear-- we could do something about it but too fearful to do it. Or mistake in assessing the situation. Yes, we could be mistaken, too, and act according to this mistaken belief.

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

It's not condemnation and approval that rightly causes us to revisit our ethical rules (Premise 5), but it's introspection. Someone who revisits his ethical standards based upon the condemnation and approval is simply seeking approval, which would justify all sorts of unethical behavior. We change our internal moral compass when, through evaluation, we realize our behavior is not adhering to some higher principle. I would think we should consider the condemnation and approval of others only to the extent we evaluate the responses of others as reasonable.

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

It's not so much that we have ethical rules but that we have an ethical imagination extrapolated from and moulded by the sum of interactions both that we have experienced ourselves (direct conditioning) and that we have observed others experiencing (indirect conditioning), that both results in and is sourced from a complex set of dispositions, motivations, and orientations that is always in flux and that we loosely refer to by the term "values". So, it's less like we decide to change our moral compass (even when we think we do), and more like we react to it being changed whether we consciously acknowledge that or not. As in, it's less like we're sitting at the computer console of our values typing in new programs as new stuff happens to us, and more like we're a subroutine in a larger program struggling to get a foothold in it whereby we can function optimally (and where optimal functioning is not a purely pragmatic matter of externals, but runs deeper in terms of intra- and interpersonal fit—the working out of conflicts and contradictions within ourselves and between ourselves and others, respectively). Complicating matter is the fact that our ethical imagination encompasses both our actual values and our imagined values and a complex interplay between them that results in our ethical expressions not always reflecting what we admit to ourselves and others. So, I don't know, but I think the way you've described things is likely to lead to confusion on several levels including wrt the terminology.

E.g.
Ethical view: What is this? What we think and say we value or what is shown through our behaviour that we value?
Ethical rule: A conscious expression or an internal disposition? Hard and fast principles or context-dependent orientations?

It's not condemnation and approval that rightly causes us to revisit our ethical rules (Premise 5), but it's introspection. — Hanover

It seems like that but what motivates the introspection is a change in disposition that already signals our ethical "rules" have been revisited. The introspection is then more of a working out of the conflicts this raises.

We change our internal moral compass when, through evaluation, we realize our behavior is not adhering to some higher principle. I would think we should consider the condemnation and approval of others only to the extent we evaluate the responses of others as reasonable. — Hanover

The impetus can be anything that resonates. It can be approval or disapproval, it can be something we see others do, it can be something that's done to us, or it can simply be the environment we find ourselves in especially when that changes dramatically. The point is something moves us internally and we become aware of an imbalance or conflict or contradiction, the processing of which we recognize as ethical deliberation that may or may not involve reference to "higher principles" or any other particular ethical concepts but always involves either a recalibration or reinforcing of values.

So, how do we develop our ethics?

I'd say, for the most part, they develop themselves. Our ethical imaginations are fostered or stymied with experience and conditioning—we apply them to the contexts we find ourselves in, and when that application becomes problematic, a process of change occurs which involves and may be somewhat directed by introspection. But we should resist the temptation to imagine we have much conscious control over our values, or that what we tell ourselves about them is unpolluted by the same pragmatic social concerns that caused having them to be necessary in the first place.

tl;dr There's a whole mesh of processes and interactions external and internal, interpersonal and intrapersonal that contribute both to what we say about our values and how we act in terms of values that are difficult to disentangle, and it's an oversimplification to view the changes in this overall system as a series of steps or as a bunch of switches we can turn on and off as new information is absorbed.