Ethics helps me to be better

It is a common error to consider ethics as the whole of precepts that, for more or less noble reasons, limit one’s behavior. In the best case scenario, according to this way of thinking, I should limit my personal freedom to a more elevated social motive. That is, any “lesser freedom” is justified by a higher, superior good––the common good. Even if the former affirmation has some truth, this notion is too reductive and does not help us understand the problem.
Instead, we can also consider ethics as something that helps me to be better. It is not simply a list of precepts, rather it is positive behavior on the part of the subject who acts in such a way as to be transformed. One is not the same as he or she was before. Once the action is realized, or completed, the actor is something more or less––more comprehensive, ordered, magnanimous, or good; less lazy, egotistical, or bad. This way of understanding ethics allows one to enter into another dimension that perhaps prior he or she was not able to grasp.