[lit-ideas] Re: Ethics and morals

From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: 16 Feb 2005 16:45:47 PST
> In the meantime the "Five  Types of Ethical Theory" line reminds me that I
have 
been trying for a few weeks  to figure out how to make the distinction between 
"ethics" and "morality", or  "ethical" and "moral" clear to my 13 yr 
old....it's not as easy as it first  feels.  Any ideas?<

There's no clear distinction, really. University courses on ethics (and labeled
Ethics 201, or whatever) are courses in moral philosophy, usually (if intros),
courses that hit all the big names (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, J. S. Mill, e.g.)
who each had, depending on how you parse it, ethical theories, or moral
theories, or theories of morality. For ages there have been courses in 'business
ethics,' which more or less circumscribe the limits of 'ethical behaviour,' qua
business person. This may give you a sharper, because more narrow, distinction
between the ethical and the moral. For example, insider trading in the stock
market is unethical (and also illegal) but not clearly immoral. (Kant might ask.
What if this practice were universalized? but it isn't an immoral practice like
child slavery. 

'Unethical' sometimes almost blurs into breaches of ettiquette: no _attorney_ e.
g. should do _that_, leaving it open whether an ordinary person should or
shouldn't. That is, professions may have their parochial 'ethical standards,'
while morality is supposed to be all-encompassing. Is insider trading immoral? I
wouldn't get as exercised about it as I would about child slavery but this
really illuminates nothing. Aristotle's ethics--as set forth in the Eudemian and
the Nicomachean Ethics--is introduced under the heading 'Ethikos,' but there is
little in either of them that is easily understood in terms of what we now call
'morality.'

I wouldn't try to draw an absolute, and clear, distinction between ethics and
morality for your daughter, for the simple reason that to draw one would be
misleading. The best one can do is to see how these words are used. I 

One of the first questions I used to ask in my _ethics_ courses was, 'What is
morality?' on the grounds that that was what we'd be talking about.

Robert Paul
Professor of Everything and Nothing
Mutton Collge
Sheepskin NE
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[lit-ideas] Re: Ethics and morals

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