Topics Ethics

Question On a TV program tonight, a legal show, the client was a clergyman accused of indecent exposure. He admitted his guilt to the barrister, but said that he was going to plead "not guilty". The barrister replied that under these circumstances he could no longer represent the clergyman. The latter replied "Oh, when did lawyers begin to occupy the high moral ground?" The barrister replied "Probably when the Church first began to confuse morality with ethics". I sort of understand the answer but am not really clear about the distinction, and why the reply was obviously a palpable hit. Could the duty philosopher help on this? David

Accepted:
November 29, 2007

Comments

Our department was having a meet-and-greet a few months ago. A man came up and said to me in a :you'd better get it right" tone of voice: "What is the difference between morality and ethics?" I told him that in my experience, philosophers don't make a sharp distinction in the way they use those words. I told him that some people seem to use the word "ethics" to talk about what we might call "descriptive morality" -- what people happen to think is right or wrong, and reserve the word "morality" for what really is right or wrong. But I reiterated that philosophers don't seem too worried about which word we use for what.

He told me I was wrong. The occasion called for stifling the urge to say "Then why the h*ll did you ask if you already know the answer?" and I behaved myself. But I never did figure out what he meant.

My guess about the putdown you describe is that it has to do with a curious association: in certain circles, there's a tendency to think of sex when the word "morality" comes up. Immorality ends up getting reduced to sexual shenanigans of one sort or another. We can add: there are various prohibitions around sexuality that some people extract from religion (e.g., condemnation of homosexuality), that people then think of as moral prohibitions, but that don't really stand up to scrutiny. (The religious arguments against homosexuality are pretty much uniformly bad, in my judgment.) And so perhaps the barrister was alluding to the tendency of some religious folk to mistake their religious scruples about sexual conduct for ethical canons that the rest of us have a reason to take seriously. But that's only a guess.