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A quick search of morals vs ethics: First result claims morals are your sense of right and wrong, ethics are the good and evil agreed upon by your community. [

by fwlr 3y ago

A quick search of morals vs ethics: First result claims morals are your sense of right and wrong, ethics are the good and evil agreed upon by your community. [1] Second and third results claim “morals” and “ethics” are used interchangeably. The second says even philosophers of ethicists consider them interchangeable. Both of them then add that if a distinction is to be drawn, they agree with the first. [2][3] The fourth result says the opposite, that ethics is an “individual assessment” while morality is an “intersubjective community” evaluation. I don’t think the terms are as cleanly separated as your comment suggests. I also firmly disagree with this other claim that the “mere concept of ethics is utterly foreign and unknown” to software as an industry. 1: https://www.verywellmind.com/morality-vs-ethics-what-s-the-difference-5195271 https://www.verywellmind.com/morality-vs-ethics-what-s-the-d... 2: https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-morality-and-ethics https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee... 3: https://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals https://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals 4: https://theconversation.com/amp/you-say-morals-i-say-ethics-whats-the-difference-30913 https://theconversation.com/amp/you-say-morals-i-say-ethics-...

eikenberry 3y ago
You are mistaking pop-ethics for ethics. Ethics has a technical terminology (which the GP presents) that doesn't 100% align with pop-usage, as is very common in many fields. If you want to talk in detail about a subject matter it is usually best to align your thoughts with the specialists to avoid having to re-hash things they have already sorted out. This is in comparison to talking to a general audience where these sorts of details aren't important (and this is reflected in your references) where even the specialists won't differentiate.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Technical terms sometimes have definitions, but the definitions are highly context-dependent. Philosophy is particularly notorious for people not agreeing on the terminology and definitions, or even on whether there is any value in having definitions. Historically, "morals" was more or less Cicero's translation for "ethics". That's probably the clearest distinction between the terms you can find.
  - eikenberry 3y ago
    I haven't dipped my toe into academic ethics in a number of years, but I very clearly remember it was a big thing among ethics philosophy people of the time to stress that ethics in philosophy was the study of ethical systems (differing from morality in the way the previous post described). Perhaps this was a dominant school of thought at the time, but the profs and literature we studied both where pretty clear about this.
- fwlr 3y ago
  I do appreciate there can be such a distinction! The article was using them interchangeably and therefore so was I. The reply to my comment hewed to the technical version, so I replied with the pop-ethics version. Perhaps I should have made it more clear that I was not saying “there isn’t a technical version”, but rather “there is also a popular version, and that’s what seems to be in use here”.

by fwlr 3y ago

eikenberry 3y ago

You are mistaking pop-ethics for ethics. Ethics has a technical terminology (which the GP presents) that doesn't 100% align with pop-usage, as is very common in many fields. If you want to talk in detail about a subject matter it is usually best to align your thoughts with the specialists to avoid having to re-hash things they have already sorted out. This is in comparison to talking to a general audience where these sorts of details aren't important (and this is reflected in your references) where even the specialists won't differentiate.

jltsiren 3y ago
Technical terms sometimes have definitions, but the definitions are highly context-dependent. Philosophy is particularly notorious for people not agreeing on the terminology and definitions, or even on whether there is any value in having definitions. Historically, "morals" was more or less Cicero's translation for "ethics". That's probably the clearest distinction between the terms you can find.
- eikenberry 3y ago
  I haven't dipped my toe into academic ethics in a number of years, but I very clearly remember it was a big thing among ethics philosophy people of the time to stress that ethics in philosophy was the study of ethical systems (differing from morality in the way the previous post described). Perhaps this was a dominant school of thought at the time, but the profs and literature we studied both where pretty clear about this.
fwlr 3y ago
I do appreciate there can be such a distinction! The article was using them interchangeably and therefore so was I. The reply to my comment hewed to the technical version, so I replied with the pop-ethics version. Perhaps I should have made it more clear that I was not saying “there isn’t a technical version”, but rather “there is also a popular version, and that’s what seems to be in use here”.