Ethics and Morality
Ethics and morality
Ethics is related to morality but it is not the same thing.
'Morality' comes from the Latin word 'moralis' which is more concerned with what we believe is good and evil (bad) or, right and wrong. Our morality is a set of 'pre-packaged answers', if you like, to the question posed by ethics: “what ought I to do?”.
Our own individual morality gives us the values and principles for making our decisions when we are faced with that question.
There is a position held by some that ethics "is the same as morality". This needs to be addressed.
The distinction can be demonstrated by using the analogy of a conversation. If one imagines that the field of ethics is a conversation that has arisen in order to answer the question, “What ought one to do?”, then moralities (and they are various) are voices in that conversation.
Each voice belongs to a tradition or theory that offers a framework within which the question might be contemplated and answered. So there is a Christian voice, a Jewish voice, an Islamic voice, a Buddhist voice, a Hindu voice, a Confucian voice and so on. Each voice has something distinctive to say - although they may all share certain things in common.
There are, in addition to the moralities that flow from the world's religions, the voices that represent the various attempts to found moral systems on the thinking of secular philosophers. Examples such as Utilitarianism and Kantian Formalism provide clear examples of philosophical theories that can give rise to moralities (so understood).
As with religions, here is much that is common to the approaches adopted by the philosophers in their attempts to answer Socrates' founding and persistent question.
This is not the place to go into an analysis of ethical theories except to say that in common with all such theories (whether sacred or secular in their origin), they fail to give an absolutely 'fool-proof' guide to behaviour.
No ethical theory or morality (from the West) has found
Ethics is related to morality but it is not the same thing.
'Morality' comes from the Latin word 'moralis' which is more concerned with what we believe is good and evil (bad) or, right and wrong. Our morality is a set of 'pre-packaged answers', if you like, to the question posed by ethics: “what ought I to do?”.
Our own individual morality gives us the values and principles for making our decisions when we are faced with that question.
There is a position held by some that ethics "is the same as morality". This needs to be addressed.
The distinction can be demonstrated by using the analogy of a conversation. If one imagines that the field of ethics is a conversation that has arisen in order to answer the question, “What ought one to do?”, then moralities (and they are various) are voices in that conversation.
Each voice belongs to a tradition or theory that offers a framework within which the question might be contemplated and answered. So there is a Christian voice, a Jewish voice, an Islamic voice, a Buddhist voice, a Hindu voice, a Confucian voice and so on. Each voice has something distinctive to say - although they may all share certain things in common.
There are, in addition to the moralities that flow from the world's religions, the voices that represent the various attempts to found moral systems on the thinking of secular philosophers. Examples such as Utilitarianism and Kantian Formalism provide clear examples of philosophical theories that can give rise to moralities (so understood).
As with religions, here is much that is common to the approaches adopted by the philosophers in their attempts to answer Socrates' founding and persistent question.
This is not the place to go into an analysis of ethical theories except to say that in common with all such theories (whether sacred or secular in their origin), they fail to give an absolutely 'fool-proof' guide to behaviour.
No ethical theory or morality (from the West) has found