Ethics, morals – what’s the difference? It’s a difference of scale, essentially. Morals apply to individual choices. If you, as an individual, are faced with any choice in your life, morality comes into play. There are always only two options. Do or do not. There may be multiple choices, but each choice can only ever have two outcomes, yes or no. 1 or 0. Decisions are always reducible to this binary choice and can be reduced no further. Sounds very black and white, absolutist and universal, but in fact, making decisions is genuinely that linear. Whether you choose to do or do not, the decision you make may be right or wrong when held against your own personal moral code. Do you personally believe something is right or wrong? Acceptable or unacceptable? One’s personal code is highly subjective and based on a number of factors including personal background, upbringing, current environment, perceived implications and consequences of the decision etc. Morality may also be considered as a spectrum. Some things are more right than wrong and vice-versa and the same decision may be more wrong than right given a different set of circumstances and parameters, such as time, location, people involved and so on. Personal moral codes are often largely passed down by parents and adjusted according to one’s own lived experience during the course of one’s life.
Ethics on the other hand apply to communities of people and wider society and are essentially ideas about how people should behave collectively. Ethics refers to collective personal moral codes – what’s best for the group to allow enough personal freedoms, so long as they do not infringe on other people’s rights. So ethics could be considered as a set of agreed upon rights and restrictions on behavior, i.e. acceptable or unacceptable personal choices, as agreed by a collective community or society. In most cases, these ‘rules’ for want of a better word, are put into writing by elected representatives of the people such as politicians and leaders of social agencies. What is ethical behaviour? Essentially, it is how well one can stick to the rules. These rules are very dynamic and subjective, however, tend to be perceived as fixed and permanent. A good example is the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament. God presents Moses with a set of ten rules of behavior that everyone should abide by in their daily lives, essentially so that everyone in the community can get on and have protection against infringement on certain fundamental rights and freedoms, by other people. The laws of countries are based on ethics. It is collectively decided that certain ethical rules are universal enough within a given society to be bound by law and anyone who disobeys the rule in question is punished accordingly. Tricky stuff this.