Morality and ethics

This blog post is about the words “morality” and “ethics”.

The common root

Due to the long history of these words, and the continuing influence of old texts on their use, it is not irrelevant to begin with their etymology, which I will take from Wiktionary without bothering to check another source.

There we find that the word ethics comes, through French and Latin,

from Ancient Greek ἠθική (ēthikḗ), from ἠθικός (ēthikós, “of or for morals, moral, expressing character”), from ἦθος (êthos, “character, moral nature”).

A second definition of ἦθος given by the same website is “custom, habit”, as the LSJ also gives.

We also find that morality comes, through French, from Latin, that is, from

mōrālis (“relating to manners or morals”), from mōs (“manner, custom”).

Again, we find at the root a reference to “custom, habit, practice, usage, wont”.

Besides the fact that these Greek and Latin words were historically widely used to translate each other, then, we find that both of them relate ultimately to the same idea of “habits” or “customs”. This supports their common usage as synonyms of each other. Distinguishing them may have its merits, but the usage as synonyms is unimpeachable; I tend to follow it.

Habit, or custom

The fact that the idea at their root is as broad as “habits” or “customs” also explains, first, the very broad senses which the terms “ethics” and “moral philosophy” used to have up until early modernity. To cite just one source for this well-known fact:

To the modern reader the term ‘moral philosophy’ denotes the branch of philosophy that deals with ethics: a relatively small part of only one of the many departmental units in the modern university’s curriculum. In the eighteenth century the term was very much broader, embracing not only the whole of what we today classify as ‘philosophy’ but most of the subjects now included in a modern university’s divisions of social sciences and humanities.

Second, it explains why both terms are often thought to refer to something subjective, arbitrary, and positive, as opposed to universal, necessary, and normative. That is, to refer to any rules or methods of conduct that merely happen to be adopted by a person or a society. That is simply what custom is. This sense is best preserved in some related words: the word “mores” often refers to custom, and the word “ethic” often refers to any adopted principles of conduct.

This is why persons who believe in an “objective morality” often move away from either word and toward using the idea of law, as in the phrases “natural law” and “moral law”. However much the idea of law may be confused with arbitrary legislation, it certainly can never be confused with custom.

Suffixes

Obviously, using the terms as synonyms can only happen regarding a particular sense, referring to the set of moral rules which someone adopts. The different suffixes of these terms make them differently appropriate for use in other senses.

Ethics ends in -ics, which, in words from a Greek root, tends to form the name of a science. This is also seen in the words physics, genetics, economics, and aesthetics, for instance.

Since morality lacks such a suffix, the science of morality has to be either “moral philosophy” or “moral science”, and the length of these terms, as well as their variety, makes ethics the privileged term for the ethical science.

Morality ends in -ality, which often indicates a quality. And while both “moral” and “ethical” can refer to something being virtuous, the word ethicality does not see much use, unlike morality. So morality has a privileged use to refer to the quality of something’s being good or right, while ethics lacks the proper suffix for this.