Morals & Ethics

Morality is whatever a particular culture at a particular time feels most comfortable with.

Laws are that morality codified by an authority with the muscle to back it up.  All laws ultimately end with a death penalty or else the society degenerates into nihilistic anarchy.  If a citizen receives a jaywalking ticket and refuses to pay it or come to court to challenge it, the authorities must make some effort to enforce the law when they next encounter the offender.  If the offender refuses to submit to police authority they will be overpowered and arrested; if they continue to resist they will be imprisoned; if they continue resisting and use force against the state, the state will claim justification in using lethal force against them.

Otherwise the state will demonstrate it can't enforce its laws and then nobody will obey them.

(This is a thought experiment exaggeration, of course, since the state often forgoes punishing minor offenses on the grounds it's simply neither cost nor resource effective, but the underlying principle remains:   Continue to disobey authority and either you destroy the authority or the authority destroys or banishes you.)

Morality and law both require elements of shame and retribution to be effective.

Not necessarily good mind you, merely effective re shaping public behavior.

Ethics, on the other hand, asks underlying values questions that challenge assumptions about the status quo, including questions about the validity of the authority backing same.  These questions may have answers that justify the status quo, but the point of ethics is not to change things so much as to change the way we think about things.

In short…
ethics = questions
morals = answers

© Buzz Dixon