I agree with this critique. Basically, the problem with PhilGoetz’s view is that we do need a word for the kind of informal dispute resolution and conflict de-escalation we all do within social groups, and in our language we use the word ethics for that, not morality.
“Morality” connotes either the inner “moral core” of individuals, i.e. the values PhilGoetz talks about in this post, or social “moral codes” which do proscribe “socially good behavior” everyone is expected to follow, but are pretty much unrelated to the kind of dispute resolution which concerns ethics.
Yes, there is a weird inversion in etymology, with morality being connected with a word for “custom” and ethics with “character”. But etymology does not always inform the current meaning of words.
I’m rather curious where the whole ethics-morality distinction came from. It seems to be a rather recent and non-specialist usage. I remember being dimly aware of such a distinction before college and then it sort of disappeared once I started studying philosophy where ethics is just the name of the subfield that studies moral questions. I’m really thrown off when people confidently assert the distinction as if were obvious to all English speakers. I’m guessing the usage as something to do with the rise of professional codes of ethics—for lawyers, doctors, social workers etc. So you now have dramatic depictions of characters violating ‘ethical codes’ for the sake of what is right (recently Dr. House, any David E. Kelley legal drama, though I’m sure it goes farther back than that). As a result ‘code of ethics’ sometimes refers to a set of pseudo-legal professional restrictions which has given the word ‘ethics’ this strange connotation. But I don’t see any particular reason to embrace the connotation since the specialist vocabulary of philosophers doesn’t regularly employ any such distinction. I’m all for fiddling with philosophical vocabulary to fix confusions. Philosophers do lots of things wrong. But I don’t think a morality-ethics distinction clarifies much—that usage of ethics just isn’t what we’re talking about at all.
Phil’s usage is totally consistent with the specialist vocabulary here (though definitely his use of “meta-ethics” and “normative ethics” is not).
I’m rather curious where the whole ethics-morality distinction came from. It seems to be a rather recent and non-specialist usage.
Indeed, the distinction is not at all clear in language. Most philosophers of ethics I’ve talked to prefer to 1) use the words interchangeably, or 2) stipulatively define a distinction for the purposes of a particular discussion. In the wild, I’ve seen people assume distinctions between ethics and morality in both directions; what some call “ethics” others call “morality” and vice-versa.
ethics is just the name of the subfield that studies moral questions.
The distinction is needed precisely because “moral philosophy” studies ‘moral’ questions (“how should we live?”) from a rather peculiar point of view, which does not quite fit with any descriptive morality.
Real-world moralities are of course referenced in moral philosophy, but only as a source of “values” or “rights” or “principles of rational agency”. Most philosophers are not moral absolutists, by and large: they take it for granted that moral values will need to be balanced in some way, and perhaps argued for in terms of more basic values. However, in actual societies, most of that “balancing” and arguing practically happens through ethical disputes, which also inform political processes (See George Lakoff’s Moral Politics, and works by Jane Jacobs and by Jonathan Haidt for more on how differences in moral outlook lead to political disputes).
I agree that the usage of “ethics” in the sense of “ethical code” (for a specialized profession) can be rather misleading. In all fairness, using “ethics” here sort of makes sense because the codes are (1) rather specialized—given the complexity of these professions, non-specialists and the general public cannot be expected to tell apart good decisions from bad in all circumstances, so “ethical” self-regulation has to fill the gap. (2) with limited exceptions (say, biological ethics) they are informed by generally agreed-upon values, especially protecting uninformed stakeholders. More like a case of “normative ethics” than a contingent “code of morality” which could be disagreed with.
The distinction is needed precisely because “moral philosophy” studies ‘moral’ questions (“how should we live?”) from a rather peculiar point of view, which does not quite fit with any descriptive morality.
What peculiar point of view?
Real-world moralities are of course referenced in moral philosophy, but only as a source of “values” or “rights” or “principles of rational agency”.
I don’t know what this means.
Ethics is divided into three subfield: meta-ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics. Meta-ethics addresses what moral language means, this is where debates over moral realism, motivational internalism, and moral cognitivism take place. Normative ethics involves general theories of how we should act, utilitarianism, Kantianism, particularism, virtue ethics etc. Applied ethics involves debates over particular moral issues: abortion, euthanasia, performance enhancing drugs etc. Then there is moral psychology and anthropology which study descriptive questions. Political philosophy is closely related and often touches on moral questions relating to authority, rights and distributional justice. Obviously all of these things inform one another. What exactly is the conceptual division that the proposed ethics-morality distinction reveals?
Ethics is divided into three subfield: meta-ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics. Meta-ethics addresses what moral language means, this is where debates over moral realism, motivational internalism, and moral cognitivism take place. Normative ethics involves general theories of how we should act, utilitarianism, Kantianism, particularism, virtue ethics etc. Applied ethics involves debates over particular moral issues: abortion, euthanasia, performance enhancing drugs etc.
And most people who claim to follow some sort of morality in the real world would care little or not at all about these subdivisions. Sure, you could pidgeon-hole some of them as “moral absolutists”, and others as following a “divine command theory”. But really, most people’s morality is constantly informed by ethical debates and disputes, so even that is not quite right. Needless to say, these debates largely occur in the public sphere, not academic philosophy departments.
Conflating “morality” and “ethics” would leave you with no way to draw a distinction between what these common folks are thinking about when they reason “morally”, vs. what goes on in broader ethical (and political) debates, both within academic philosophy and outside of it. This would seem to be a rather critical failure of rationality.
They’re not “different things”, in that public ethical debate (plus of course legal, civic and political debate as well) is often a matter of judging and balancing disputes between previously existing “rights”. Moreover, inner morality, public ethics and moral philosophy all address the same basic topic of “how we should live”. But this is not to say that either “morality” or “ethics” mean nothing more than “How should we live?”. Indeed, you have previously referred to ethics as ‘the… stud[y of] moral questions’, implying some sort of rigorous inquiry. Conversely, philosophers routinely talk about “descriptive morality” when they need to refer to moral values or socially-endorsed moral codes as they actually exist in the real world without endorsing them normatively.
Basically, the problem with PhilGoetz’s view is that we do need a word for the kind of informal dispute resolution and confict de-escalation we all do within social groups, and in our language we use the word ethics for that, not morality.
I’m interested, but skeptical that English makes this clear distinction. I’d really appreciate references to authoritative sources on the distinction in meaning between morality and ethics.
The SEP article on the definition of morality seems fairly clear to me. Yes, the article tries to advance a distinction between “descriptive” and “normative” morality. But really, even descriptive morality is clearly “normative” to those who follow it in the real world. What they call “normative” morality should really be called “moral philosophy”, or “the science/philosophy of universalized morality” (CEV?), or, well… ethics. Including perhaps “normative ethics”, i.e. the values that pretty much all human societies agree about, so that philosophers can take them for granted without much issue.
Why? I’m not trying to rely on SEP as an authority here. Indeed, given your own findings about how the terms are used in the philosophical literature, no such authority could plausibly exist.
What I can hope to show is that my use of the terms is more meaningful than others’ (it “carves concept-space at its joints”) and that it’s at least roughly consistent with what English speakers mean when they talk about “morality” and “ethics”. AFAICT, the SEP entry supports my argument: it exemplifies a meaningful distinction between “descriptive” and “normative” morality, which most English-speaking folks would readily describe as a distinction between “morality” and “ethics”.
I don’t use these terms because they have undesirable connotations and are unfamiliar to most English speakers. Calling morality as it is actually reasoned about in the real world “descriptive” only makes sense as a way of emphasizing that you seek to describe something as opposed to endorsing it. OK for philosophers (and folks working on CEV, perhaps), not so much for everyone else.
I agree with this critique. Basically, the problem with PhilGoetz’s view is that we do need a word for the kind of informal dispute resolution and conflict de-escalation we all do within social groups, and in our language we use the word ethics for that, not morality.
“Morality” connotes either the inner “moral core” of individuals, i.e. the values PhilGoetz talks about in this post, or social “moral codes” which do proscribe “socially good behavior” everyone is expected to follow, but are pretty much unrelated to the kind of dispute resolution which concerns ethics.
Yes, there is a weird inversion in etymology, with morality being connected with a word for “custom” and ethics with “character”. But etymology does not always inform the current meaning of words.
I’m rather curious where the whole ethics-morality distinction came from. It seems to be a rather recent and non-specialist usage. I remember being dimly aware of such a distinction before college and then it sort of disappeared once I started studying philosophy where ethics is just the name of the subfield that studies moral questions. I’m really thrown off when people confidently assert the distinction as if were obvious to all English speakers. I’m guessing the usage as something to do with the rise of professional codes of ethics—for lawyers, doctors, social workers etc. So you now have dramatic depictions of characters violating ‘ethical codes’ for the sake of what is right (recently Dr. House, any David E. Kelley legal drama, though I’m sure it goes farther back than that). As a result ‘code of ethics’ sometimes refers to a set of pseudo-legal professional restrictions which has given the word ‘ethics’ this strange connotation. But I don’t see any particular reason to embrace the connotation since the specialist vocabulary of philosophers doesn’t regularly employ any such distinction. I’m all for fiddling with philosophical vocabulary to fix confusions. Philosophers do lots of things wrong. But I don’t think a morality-ethics distinction clarifies much—that usage of ethics just isn’t what we’re talking about at all.
Phil’s usage is totally consistent with the specialist vocabulary here (though definitely his use of “meta-ethics” and “normative ethics” is not).
Indeed, the distinction is not at all clear in language. Most philosophers of ethics I’ve talked to prefer to 1) use the words interchangeably, or 2) stipulatively define a distinction for the purposes of a particular discussion. In the wild, I’ve seen people assume distinctions between ethics and morality in both directions; what some call “ethics” others call “morality” and vice-versa.
Comment where I enumerate some common definitions
The distinction is needed precisely because “moral philosophy” studies ‘moral’ questions (“how should we live?”) from a rather peculiar point of view, which does not quite fit with any descriptive morality.
Real-world moralities are of course referenced in moral philosophy, but only as a source of “values” or “rights” or “principles of rational agency”. Most philosophers are not moral absolutists, by and large: they take it for granted that moral values will need to be balanced in some way, and perhaps argued for in terms of more basic values. However, in actual societies, most of that “balancing” and arguing practically happens through ethical disputes, which also inform political processes (See George Lakoff’s Moral Politics, and works by Jane Jacobs and by Jonathan Haidt for more on how differences in moral outlook lead to political disputes).
I agree that the usage of “ethics” in the sense of “ethical code” (for a specialized profession) can be rather misleading. In all fairness, using “ethics” here sort of makes sense because the codes are (1) rather specialized—given the complexity of these professions, non-specialists and the general public cannot be expected to tell apart good decisions from bad in all circumstances, so “ethical” self-regulation has to fill the gap. (2) with limited exceptions (say, biological ethics) they are informed by generally agreed-upon values, especially protecting uninformed stakeholders. More like a case of “normative ethics” than a contingent “code of morality” which could be disagreed with.
I don’t understand this comment.
What peculiar point of view?
I don’t know what this means.
Ethics is divided into three subfield: meta-ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics. Meta-ethics addresses what moral language means, this is where debates over moral realism, motivational internalism, and moral cognitivism take place. Normative ethics involves general theories of how we should act, utilitarianism, Kantianism, particularism, virtue ethics etc. Applied ethics involves debates over particular moral issues: abortion, euthanasia, performance enhancing drugs etc. Then there is moral psychology and anthropology which study descriptive questions. Political philosophy is closely related and often touches on moral questions relating to authority, rights and distributional justice. Obviously all of these things inform one another. What exactly is the conceptual division that the proposed ethics-morality distinction reveals?
And most people who claim to follow some sort of morality in the real world would care little or not at all about these subdivisions. Sure, you could pidgeon-hole some of them as “moral absolutists”, and others as following a “divine command theory”. But really, most people’s morality is constantly informed by ethical debates and disputes, so even that is not quite right. Needless to say, these debates largely occur in the public sphere, not academic philosophy departments.
Conflating “morality” and “ethics” would leave you with no way to draw a distinction between what these common folks are thinking about when they reason “morally”, vs. what goes on in broader ethical (and political) debates, both within academic philosophy and outside of it. This would seem to be a rather critical failure of rationality.
Why should we think that what common folks are reasoning about and what gets argued about in the public sphere are different things?
They’re not “different things”, in that public ethical debate (plus of course legal, civic and political debate as well) is often a matter of judging and balancing disputes between previously existing “rights”. Moreover, inner morality, public ethics and moral philosophy all address the same basic topic of “how we should live”. But this is not to say that either “morality” or “ethics” mean nothing more than “How should we live?”. Indeed, you have previously referred to ethics as ‘the… stud[y of] moral questions’, implying some sort of rigorous inquiry. Conversely, philosophers routinely talk about “descriptive morality” when they need to refer to moral values or socially-endorsed moral codes as they actually exist in the real world without endorsing them normatively.
I’m interested, but skeptical that English makes this clear distinction. I’d really appreciate references to authoritative sources on the distinction in meaning between morality and ethics.
The SEP article on the definition of morality seems fairly clear to me. Yes, the article tries to advance a distinction between “descriptive” and “normative” morality. But really, even descriptive morality is clearly “normative” to those who follow it in the real world. What they call “normative” morality should really be called “moral philosophy”, or “the science/philosophy of universalized morality” (CEV?), or, well… ethics. Including perhaps “normative ethics”, i.e. the values that pretty much all human societies agree about, so that philosophers can take them for granted without much issue.
It does not really help your case to simultaneously lean on SEP as an authority and claim that it is wrong.
Why? I’m not trying to rely on SEP as an authority here. Indeed, given your own findings about how the terms are used in the philosophical literature, no such authority could plausibly exist.
What I can hope to show is that my use of the terms is more meaningful than others’ (it “carves concept-space at its joints”) and that it’s at least roughly consistent with what English speakers mean when they talk about “morality” and “ethics”. AFAICT, the SEP entry supports my argument: it exemplifies a meaningful distinction between “descriptive” and “normative” morality, which most English-speaking folks would readily describe as a distinction between “morality” and “ethics”.
Then it was a particularly bad choice as a response when asked for an authoritative source.
Then just use “descriptive” and “normative”… The concept space is already carved the way you like it, get your hand out of the cake.
I don’t use these terms because they have undesirable connotations and are unfamiliar to most English speakers. Calling morality as it is actually reasoned about in the real world “descriptive” only makes sense as a way of emphasizing that you seek to describe something as opposed to endorsing it. OK for philosophers (and folks working on CEV, perhaps), not so much for everyone else.