Morals and Ethics

To say that a man lives a moral or ethical life means that he lives the way he ought in light of what he is.

When I talk about what a man ought I'm alluding to his nature as the moderate realists define it. Man in his nature possesses:
* the vegetative powers of reproduction, growth, and nutrition common to all living things;
* the appetitive and knowing powers shared with animals; and
* the rational powers of intellect and will.

Man is not a spiritual soul trapped in a material body, he is a composite creature that is both soul and body. The soul is the animating principle of the body; what's more, the soul is immortal and lives on after the death of the body.

That's where the philosopher leaves off and the theologian takes over to say that the body and soul will be reunited at the consummation of the world, when everyone who ever lived will be raised from the dead and their bodies rejoined with their souls* -- that, and the two will either share eternal happiness in Heaven or unending suffering in Hell. Miserere nobis.

A proper moral system, then, accounts for these points when determining how a man ought to live.

The terms "morals" and "ethics" can be used interchangeably -- they mean the same thing. The Latin word mos (moris) means custom, and the Greek word ethos means pattern of conduct.

Some years back I'd picked up the notion that morals meant what made for right and wrong in one's conduct while ethics was the systematic study of morals. That notion wasn't accurate -- there is no such distinction justified by the history of the terms themselves -- but I don't think it did any harm.

I did once come across a notion that did do harm, however. I was in graduate school taking a class that touched on statistical validity in surveys, and we were having a discussion about how to ethically acquire information about individuals. One student seriously proposed the idea that an appeal to morals was actually an invocation of religion, whereas an appeal to ethics was merely an appeal to doing what was right and avoiding what was wrong.

There are a number of problems with that formulation -- for starters, the line of demarcation between what is and is not religious is not so clear as my former fellow student implied; it also assumes knowledge of right and wrong without attention to how we know something is right or not.

But those are really minor points. The real motivation behind the argument was that it served as a mechanism for dismissing out of hand anything but contemporary and novel criteria in discussions about ethical conduct.

How so? Simple: the modern accepted wisdom is that all old standards are steeped in religion, and therefore can be passed over; only modern, secular values uncontaminated by religious notions need be considered. Naturally there were no criteria offered for what was a moral vs. an ethical standard, which left the door wide open for dismissing any position one didn't like as moral and therefore religious and therefore irrelevant.

If people really are their own self-referential authors of right and wrong then everything really is relative, which means there is no God, which also means that there is no reason to submit to any constraint of my conduct unless I feel like it. It is the ultimate in worship of one's own ego.

Which, in fact, is what the serpent told Eve in the Garden: eat of the forbidden fruit, and you shall be like God, knowing right from wrong. He didn't hiss "you will be like God in that you can perform miracles and even create whole worlds," but "you will replace God as the supreme moral arbiter."


As Eve's reply shows, even a preternaturally perfect intellect can have a bad day.

* This belief in the resurrection of the body is an act of Faith, and is why Christians put a stop to the pagan practice of cremation (except in emergencies -- e.g. war, plague). Cremation did not make a comeback until the atheists of the Enlightenment dusted it off and re-introduced it to spite the Christians. My own estate plan paperwork makes absolutely clear that I am not to be burned. I would also never consent to assist at someone else's cremation -- naturally, on moral grounds.