ratboy's anvil

Ethics vs Morality

a comment I just made:

G: The faith based reasoning of yours is as misleading as the lines you just posted about on your own blog. How about murder or adultery? Are they only wrong because the Ten Commandments make reference to them? Are they "faith based" too?

No. I think its important to draw a distinction between the term "ethical" and "moral", even though they are frequently used and defined in some places as equivolent. Murder is unethical in all social contracts because it is the foundation of the simplest agreement; namely, "I won't kill you if you don't kill me". The fact that religions also include that basic contract in their moral teachings only makes it a moral question in the context of that religious view.
However, even without the context of that religious or faith based view, murder can still be considered unethical in the context of the secular social contract.

Another example would be the Golden Rule adage: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." All cultures have some form of this adage as a basic premise of their social control irrespective of what religions those cultures may use for their moral teachings. It is a sort of "meta-ethic" because of its universality and strikes everyone everywhere as "self-evident".

My point is that it is possible to be ethical without a set of moral teachings. Adultery is a moral stance but not necessarily an ethical one. It has no ethical meaning for instance in a polygamous context.
There are many social situations where "moral" and "ethical" both apply. But there are others where they diverge. Within the contexts of some societie's religions it is considered the duty of a husband for instance to burn his wife to death if she is too annoying or unobedient within the context of that society's cultural and religious teachings. That does not mean the act of burning one's wife to death for such infractions is a universally accepted ethic.

One of the Bible's teachings is that parents should kill unobedient sons or that prostitutes or even women who wear mixed fabrics should be stoned to death.
Such acts were at one time considered moral and really for those who adhere to a literal interpretation and inerrancy of the Bible should be considered moral today. However, we would be hard pressed to find anyone in our present day culture espousing such behavior as ethical.

So when I speak of "faith based morality" I am talking about precepts that are not necessarily universal to the social contract we all pretend to live under in a secular democracy, but rather emanate from, and depend on, the context of a set of religious tenets in order to be considered "universally true".

The ethical propositions of our culture which murder and theft as unethical are based on the idea of "harm caused" as opposed to a moral judgment of "sinful". And even in the ethical context of "harm caused" there has to be proof of harm caused. Moralists will have no problem assigning "harm caused" to abortion because they are starting from a moral position in which human life is considered more sacred than all other life. There is no real proof of that supposition, it is simply "faithfully felt" to be true. It can be quite ethical on the other hand to question the validity of that view.

This separation of ethical and moral becomes particularly problematic and evident in arguments over abortion because so many of the moralities and ethics involved are at odds with one another and people understandably have a difficult time separating the two because there are so many instances in our culture where they overlap.

Posted by cul at July 10, 2004 02:00 PM