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The first step in creating your own model for which you are responsible is to go through personal introspection concerning the four steps in the personal worldview imperative. The first two are types of global analyses in which an individual thinks about who he or she is right now in terms of consistency and completeness. These criteria are amenable to the prudential model. They are instrumental to making whatever worldview one chooses to be the most effective possible. This is a prudential standard of excellence. What constitutes the moral turn is the connection to a theory of the good: ethics.

Thus, the third step is to consider the principal moral theories and to make a choice as to which theory best represents your own considered position. To assist readers in this task, I provide a brief gloss of the major theories of ethics.

There are various ways to parse theories of ethics. I will parse theories of ethics according to what they see as the ontological status of their objects. There are two principal categories: (1) the realist theories that assert that theories of ethics speak to actual realities that exist³ and (2) the anti-realists who assert that theories of ethics are merely conventional and do not speak about ontological objects.