And why does it matter?
To me, morals is an understanding you have with yourself (and perhaps your God). Ethics is an understanding you have with your profession.
Or said another way, morals are how you conduct yourself personally, ethics are how you conduct yourself professionally.
In the legal profession is where you’ll see this matter the most. Lawyers have a very strict set of ethics, that those of us in the real world would consider immoral. But they have a duty to their client, and not to society. If a sick bastard tells his lawyer he has kidnapped/rapped/ murdered a bunch of children, the lawyer is bound ethically to confidentiality, as well as to provide the best defense for his client. Morally he’d want to feed the guy to a wood chipper.
Engineers on the other hand (at least in Canada) have a duty to society, and not to their client. Again, their ethics may clash with what we would consider moral.
In short, ethics are often codified in some way, morals always seemed more ambiguous.
About the same as the difference between hogwash and bullshit. And it doesn’t matter.
ETA: On emacknight’s point about ethics being actual rules–in that case they are just “rules.” If one wants to call them “ethics” or “ethical rules” or whatever, then I guess that’s fine, but they are just a set of rules. If one means ethics in the more general sense (i.e., not as referring to a set of rules), then they are just either hogwash or bullshit.
If only there was a resource somewhere that would tell us what words mean.
The difference is one of etymology. Moral comes from Latin mos (plural mores) meaning customs, habits. Ethics comes from the Greek ethos meaning character, manners.
In terms of what they actually mean, their meanings substantially overlap. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines ethics as “The science of morals; the department of study concerned with the principles of human duty”, and it defines morals as “thought and discourse about moral questions; moral philosophy, ethics (and morality is “ethical wisdom, knowledge of moral science”). In short, the Greek-derived term is defined by using the Latin-derived term, and vice versa.
The Greek-derived term turns up in English later than the Latin-derived term – from the seventeenth century onwards. It’s a wild guess on my part, but this may have something to do with a desire in the Englightment to go beyond – or, more accurately, behind – the Christian-framed philosophical discourse about [moral/ethical] questions, and to draw directly on the resources of pre-Christian classical thought on such questions. The medieval/ecclesiastical use of Latin gave us the term morality; if we look to the Greek philosophers we are much more inclined to employ the term ethics. But we’re talking about the same thing.
In terms of usage today, there is a tendency to employ ethics in a secular context; thus we have “professional ethics” rather than “professional morality”. But in the Acadamy there is no such squeamishness; we talk of “moral philosophy”, not “ethical philosophy”.
That doesn’t seem entirely reasonable. I mean, even if you consider them unimportant or nonexistant or that arguments one way or the other are by their nature unimpressive or simply pointless, that doesn’t mean that understanding the definitions that people use isn’t worthwhile. Knowing the differences between two species of bullshit can still be helpful.
Morals keep you from doing things that’ll get God mad at you.
Ethics keep you from doing things that’ll get society mad at you.
As good a distinction as any, I figure.
I’ve always felt that morals were the broad guidelines on what is right and wrong and ethics were the specific practices that arose from those guidelines. So being moral is knowing what is good and being ethical is doing what is good.
Which one keeps me from doing things that’ll cause me to get mad at me?
Morals are Good. Ethics are Lawful.
Or to put it another way: morals are about consequences, while ethics are about procedure.
Are you under the impression that words have a particular meaning? That’s not going to fly very far around here.
Guilt.
This is a very good way to put it. Morals are a set of goals for the proper relationships within the self, with society, and with a divine moral order. They do not require a deity, per se, but that the mroal order itself is transcendantly good and applicable eternally.
Ethics are prodcedural rules which ensure complete fairness. They’re very often self-protection for those who use them. Interestingly, ethics are not self-evident. That is, they only make sense ina society which believes that fairness is morally right. Many societies who don’t embrace or even consider this view simply odn’t have ethics in the way we think of them.
It’s also interesting to put “lawful” into the mix:
“The senator acted immorally”
“The senator acted unethically”
“The senator acted unlawfully”
From there we can see how the three words, as least as far as US usage can carry very different meaning. Bricker is famous for defending the last statement, and ensuring that it isn’t confused with the first two. But we can see that a specific action (receiving a gift) can be attributed to one of those sentences, at the exclusion of the other two.
Alessan is referencing Dungeons and Dragons’ alignment system. “Lawful” with a big L as distinct from “lawful” meaning “legal”.
Personally, I make the same distinction as Bryan Ekers.
Uh, okay, but what **Alessan **using an Icy Burst Adamantine Greatsword of Backstabbing? I didn’t think so, roll again.
It’s Vorpal or nothing for me, baby.
(And yeah, I tend to think in D&D terms. That’s essentially the religion I was raised in).
Ouch. That’s a religion with no principles, or maybe they have them but they change every edition.
I remember the arguments over “Lawful Good” being “someone who fights evil without mercy.” Man, that was rough when the game specifically orders your Paladin to become a psycho killing machine.
I think Ethics is essentially codified morals where the higher authority it appeals to is concrete, not abstract. As in, a doctor’s ethics are supervised by other doctors and a soldier’s ethics are supervised by other soldiers, while they can both be morally impeached by anyone. Laws fall behind because of their bureaucratic stagnation and will always be behind the curve, esepecially for professions that are still evolving.