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Background: Morality and Ethics

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on the philosophy of morality and ethics, so there may be inaccuracies and omissions below. I would appreciate any corrections or additions.

Morality vs.

Ethics

A (particular) morality is a system of principles and standards that guide individuals in a society on how to evaluate intentions, decisions, and actions—to determine what is right and wrong, good and bad. An example of a moral belief you might hold: “Lying is wrong”.

Ethics is the systematic study of moral beliefs. It is a branch of philosophy that seeks to understand, analyze, and evaluate moral concepts and theories. It asks why certain actions are right or wrong and tries to establish general principles. An example of an ethical question: “Is it ever justified to lie?”.

Simple analogy:

  • Morality is like the rules of a game.
  • Ethics is like the study of why those rules exist and whether they make sense.

Ethics includes three branches:

Corresponding examples are:

  • Applied Ethics: If I find a wallet on the street, should I try to locate its owner?
  • Normative Ethics: Is it always wrong to steal, or are there circumstances where this is acceptable?
  • Meta-Ethics: What does it mean to say that an action is “wrong”? Are moral values objective or subjective?

Questions

Morality and Ethics ask and answer fundamental questions such as:

  • What is good vs. bad or evil
  • What is right vs. wrong
  • What is just vs. unjust
  • What is proper vs. improper
  • What is a good life?
  • What are good character traits?
  • How should we live our lives?

Basic Concepts

Here are some basic concepts of morality and ethics.

  • A duty or obligation is a requirements of what a person ought to do in certain circumstances.
  • A permission is what a person is allowed to do in certain circumstances.

The relationships between these terms:

  • When someone has an obligation to do something, that person is not permitted to refrain from doing it.
  • When someone has a permission to do something, that person is not obligated to refrain from doing it.

Another concept is Rights, i.e. what people are entitled to. These include negative and positive rights. They are “positive” and “negative” not in terms of “good” and “bad” but in terms of “interference” and “no interference”:

  • A negative right obligates inaction. E.g. the right to life of a person means that other people are obligated not to kill that person.
  • A positive right obligates action. E.g. the right to a fair trial of a person means that the judicial system is obligated to provide a fair trial to that person with due process.

Source of Answers

The standards for answering the questions above can originate from various sources:

Different Systems of Morality

Differences across cultures

It is a fact that different societies hold different moralities. For example:

  • In some societies, it is considered morally wrong to eat pork. In other societies, it is considered morally wrong to eat beef.
  • In some past societies, it was considered morally legitimate to own slaves. In modern societies, this is considered morally wrong.
  • In some societies, it is considered immoral to charge interest on a loan. In most societies and the international banking system, charging interest is considered legitimate.
  • In some societies, it is considered wrong to marry someone of a different race (considered “Miscegenation”), or a different religion. In other societies, this is considered perfectly legitimate.

There are different approaches for facing this reality, depending on whether moral statements are considered to be subjective or objective, i.e. dependent on a particular person’s beliefs and attitudes, or independent of them:

Moral Universalism

Moral Universalism is the view that there is a universal system of morality that applies for everyone, for all similarly situated individuals, regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, or any other distinguishing feature. In this view, ethics should issue normative statements, and the moralities of different societies can be judged as correct or incorrect.

The justifications for such a universal system differ across various approaches. One approach is moral realism (ethical realism) and ethical naturalism – the position that there is an objective right and wrong, so ethical sentences express claims that refer to objective features of the world (independent of subjective opinion) and can be discovered and understood by reason. Other approaches include basing universal ethics on human nature, shared vulnerability to suffering, commonalities among existing moral codes, or divine commandments.

Moral Relativism

Moral Relativism is the view that there is no objective right or wrong, and no single standard exists or can exist by which moral statements can be objectively assessed. In this view, morality is subjective, is merely a matter of personal preference, societal conventions, or cultural practice, and hence ethics can only describe the prevailing moral concepts in a society, but it cannot issue normative statements. Some take it one step further to actually make a normative claim that ethics should not issue normative statements, and that any morality is just as valid as any other, no one better than any other.

Moral Nihilism

Moral Nihilism is the view that nothing has intrinsic moral value. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is intrinsically neither morally right nor morally wrong. Other variations are that moral statements are meaningless, or that we cannot possibly know which ones are true. See also moral skepticism.

See Also