[Back to Morality]

Introduction

One difficulty when we try to talk about morality is the language: there are various terms we can use, but they are all ambiguous and problematic in various ways.  One the one hand, we can describe an action as 'moral', 'ethical', 'good' or 'right'; on the other hand, we can condemn it as being 'immoral', 'unethical', 'bad' or 'wrong'.

Discussion of the subject tends to focus mainly on the first two terms, 'moral' and 'ethical', mainly (I suspect) because the other two have such a wide range of meanings and applications: food goes 'bad' when it is no longer fit to eat; a sum is 'wrong' when the numbers don't add up correctly.  In neither case, are we talking about a moral issue.

Is there a difference?

In summary, it seems there is a difference between 'moral' and 'ethical', but the difference is not clear, it mainly depends on context and culture, and so there is no agreement about the nature of the difference.

According to Britannica ('What’s the Difference Between Morality and Ethics?'), "Generally, the terms ethics and morality are used interchangeably, although a few different communities will occasionally make a distinction."  It goes on to note that "most ethicists (that is, philosophers who study ethics) consider the terms interchangeable" but then observes (in agreement with the Google AI summary) that many people "think of morality as something that's personal and normative, whereas ethics is the standards of 'good and bad' distinguished by a certain community or social setting."

Another difference lies in the associations which the two terms bring with them.  It is sometimes said that, in the West, Christians and people of other faiths talk about 'morals', while secular people talk about 'ethics'; however objectively true this may be, many people may make those associations.  And once such a distinction is made, it is self-reinforcing as, in the absence of any explicit context, the use of 'moral' (or 'ethical') will be heard as a reference to a religious (or secular) idea.

Conclusion

If we understand 'morality' to be primarily about the personal and 'ethical' to be primarily about the social, this would fit very nicely into the distinction we make in the Introduction between the 'internal perspective' (morality) and the 'external perspective' (ethics).  But there is no agreed terminology here, and the two terms have very different meanings and associations for different people, so it would be optimistic to assume that we could simply define our usage here and expect everybody to understand these terms in the way we define them.

So we have chosen to talk consistently about 'morals', as we are mainly interested in the personal and internal perspective, and introduced new terminology - the 'internal perspective' and the 'external perspective' - in an attempt to make the distinction between them two clear.