What are "ethics" & "morality?"
Another surprise...
mores [Latin] characteristic customs and conventions of a community
ethos [Greek] the practices that constitute a person’s character or the practices valued by a society
Etymology is the history of words; as you can see from the definitions above, the original meanings of the root words for “moral” in Latin and “ethics” in Greek are the same
That is, “ethics” and “morals” BOTH originally meant “what is customary”
Neither of them, therefore, aimed to invoke anything general or "cross-cultural”
The two terms have, of course, come to be used in distinct ways: ethics has come to mean codes of conduct for societies or religious principles, while morals is used to describe personal standards of right and wrong
So how did we get from “customs” to “general principles?”
To begin with, humans have no natural form of life; that is, human lives are not governed entirely by instinctive behavior
For all other animals, including primates, the lives of the young entirely duplicate those of their parents
Humans, by contrast, have to develop practices and rules for living; we have to create customs and forms of life
This creative process goes on at every level of life, from political and social patterns to the management of daily existence; you need only have traveled to any other country to have experienced some encounter with these differences
Here’s an example from my own travels: I was teaching in Germany in the early 1970s and early on went to the post office. The public space featured a counter with a grating above and windows where the clerks provided services. Only one window was staffed that morning and there was one person engaged in a transaction in front of it; there were others lined up to the right along the counter. What did I see? I saw one person in line. I got behind that person.
Then what happened? The person in front of me finished and, before I could move to the window, the person to the right moved in front of me!
You can guess my first reaction: “These Germans are rude!” How long do you think it took me to figure out what I was doing wrong? What was I doing wrong?
It took me another customer’s moving up to the window before I realized: I wasn’t in line!
Americans have copied the British custom of queuing: that is, lining up in a row behind one another
Germans “line up” by standing next to one another, shoulder-to-shoulder
Part of my point is that our first response is to treat our own customs as right and take other customs to be wrong
But this is never correct, or warranted: every form of human life creates its own customs and practices
The impulse to justify our own practices when confronted by contrasting behavior is “moralizing:” treating differences as failures to act rightly
So the first thing to emphasize about morality is that it varies by culture; so does what is regarded as “ethical”
I’ve focused so far on what we might call the “personal” quality of moral and ethical life: culture as we experience it in everyday life, including when we travel
There’s much more to analyze concerning the public and historical character of ethical and moral practice, especially the way in which cultures seek to perpetuate their practices
This will be the focus of the next installment on “ethics” and “morality” (Part Two)
To close: the joke in the photo above is that Julius Caesar was stabbed to death—on the 15th of March, 44BCE—in the 2nd year of his “dictatorship” of Rome, a status that had been given him by the public representatives called the Senate; the Senators suspected Caesar of planning to seize greater power and conspired to kill him
The founders of the United States of America copied the forms for our Constitution from the Roman polity, especially the senior representative body: the Senate…