Quote:
Originally Posted by rowhousepd
Morals are the principles on which one’s judgments of right and wrong are based. Ethics are principles of right conduct.
So the two nouns are related and sometimes interchangeable, but mostly they are not. The main difference is that morals are more abstract and often personal or religion-based or based on the notion of there being inherent "Truth" (with a capital T) out there, overarching our subjective points of view. Ethics, however, are more practical, conceived as shared principles promoting fairness in social, cultural, and economic interactions, among other things.
I'd be interested in what the OP thinks about all of this. You there, archimedes11?
Thanks for your input, I'm glad to be able to discuss this seriously and in depth with someone thoughtful like yourself. My understanding from your first post is that you've ultimately found this issue to be epistemologically intractable and so have found peace with it by way of an ethical code based in empathy, mutual benefit, and perhaps pluralism. In other words, because
morality seems to have no objective pivot point, ethics is more or less what we're left to work with (thanks also for distinguishing morality from ethics, I wasn't clear about the definitive difference either). Please clarify if I'm wrong in my paraphrasing of your outlook.
Also I'd like to add something that I forgot to mention in my OP: when I think about a situation like my thought experiment where the societal constraints and empathy are removed, it reminds me very much about Nietzsche's Ubermensch whereby the strong "impose meaning on a meaningless world". Although the question of "human meaning" is distinct from questions of morality, I think they are closely related, and frankly it bothers me that the Ubermensch's realpolitik seems to have no opposing moral counterforce, so to speak, other than an agreed code of ethics implemented within a society (whether explicitly or tacitly).
In other words, if I found myself as a third party on the island in my thought experiment, and the psychopath asked me to give him one good reason for why he shouldn't kill the stranger, I would have no good answer for him.