A philosophical discipline that deals with moral matters, that is, our conduct (acts, habits, character, and life in general), from the point of view of good, duty, or value, qualifying it as good or bad, right or wrong, valuable or without moral value.
Ethics derives from the words:
êthos — residence, dwelling, place where one lives. It evolved to designate the metaphorical, interior place from which one lives. Someone's character.
éthos — custom, habit. Plato and Aristotle derived it from êthos, bringing the meaning closer to hexis (habit acquired through repetition). The character of custom.
Latin translation with the word mos, from which moral would derive → The sense of custom prevails. It shifts from moral life/someone's character to focusing on acts (good or bad) taken in isolation.
The point is that our habits and acts depend on our character, but character is forged through successive choices and decisions; therefore, the unitary object of morality would be life in its temporal unity (the moral life) of which acts and habits would constitute simple elements.
Here ethics and morality would be synonymous and would interweave both the lived morality (ethica utens) and the philosophical reflection upon it (ethica docens).
"Ethics is not enough to know and proclaim it, but one must try to have it and practice it." — Aristotle
The differences are marked later:
Morality — refers to human behavior and its qualification as good or bad, taking into account the various codes or principles that try to regulate human actions (Greek, Christian, Buddhist, Marxist morality, etc.)
Ethics — philosophy that thinks about moral life without proposing to prescribe or advise. It is a second reflexive level about the already existing moral judgments, codes, and actions. It is theoretical-practical knowledge → we are not investigating what virtue is just to know it, but to be good.
The usage is not regular among all authors, and the already noted interweaving of aspects, not always detrimental, serves as a counterpart to the ambiguities that arise, most of which can be resolved, however, through context.
The Constitutively Moral Structure of People
Considers human life in terms of its goodness or badness. The most usual meaning of moral (referring to good (Aristotle)/duty (Kant)/value (Scheler)) is that acquired by its oppositions: immoral, amoral, and demoralized.
Moral-Amoral
An amoral subject would not be one who chooses bad over good (that would be immoral) but one who does not question the alternative and pretends to place themselves beyond (or before) it.
Before it: Kierkegaard
The man of the aesthetic stage, one who makes their choices from a certain indifference. They place themselves at the mercy of whim, letting themselves be carried by impulses.
The man of the ethical stage is very conscious of their choices.
Beyond it: Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
He aims to end the hierarchy of values. Forgiveness is born of cowardice, the ideal of equality from fear of the superior. Christian morality = Platonism for the people, morality of decadence and resentment prolonged in democracy and socialism.
He proposes a morality of someone rough, powerful, planted in themselves, who wants to be master.
He aims to establish another good and another evil, a new hierarchy of values.
There have been no societies in which there is not a system of norms and preferences binding for the group → amorality is more of a psychopathological problem than an ethical one, if not a limit concept, which refers to an empty set, in which isolated cases of genuine deprivation of the sense of good and evil would be the exception that confirms the rule, without forcing a new categorization.
Moral-Demoralized
When we say that someone is demoralized or that their morale is low, we don't mean they are behaving badly. Moral life consists not only in acting well but also in maintaining, amid the difficulties that life brings, sufficient spirit to face it.
Tristitia (sadness) and dejection were considered by medieval theologians as the radical sin.
Joy is one of the highest forms of virtue, as Nietzsche and Spinoza pointed out.
They defend a temper that is maintained despite evil.
The sense that moral acquires in contrast is that of strength to live, spirit, courage.
"Morality is not a supplementary and luxurious performance that man adds to his being to obtain a prize, but it is the very being of man when he is on his own hinge and vital efficacy. A demoralized man is simply a man who is not in possession of himself, who is outside his radical authenticity and therefore does not live his life."
Moral as Structure
Animals → faced with similar stimuli, and in also similar circumstances, the animal's response can be predicted since its biological equipment provides instinctive responses, that is, genetically acquired and stereotyped.
Man → no aspect of reality is offered to him unambiguously. Being able to give different responses and make various proposals, he has to interpret reality and choose among the possibilities offered to him.
"A tiger is always a tiger while man is never Adam again."
"The life that is given to us is not given to us ready-made, but we need to make it ourselves, each one their own. Life is a task. And the most serious thing about these tasks that life consists of is not that they must be done, but, in a certain way, the opposite (I mean that we always find ourselves forced to do something, but we don't always find ourselves forced to do something specific, that this or that task is not imposed on us, as the trajectory is imposed on the star or gravitation on the stone. Before doing anything, each person must decide, at their own risk, what they are going to do." — Ortega
Man, a hominized animal, does not find himself directly humanized, and this task of finding his human face or humanity is a basically moral task.
Determinism and Freedom
Kant said that however much our consciousness presents us as free, we cannot know whether that consciousness of freedom is not an illusion, an appearance that we are unable to unravel in its real meaning.
That is why freedom will be a matter of practical reason. Undemonstrable for the theoretical or speculative use of reason, it is, however, a condition of possibility for moral life, since it would not be possible to impute moral responsibility to someone who lacked freedom.
Facing the given and the order of being, governed by causality, man tries to establish that of ought to be.
We equally distinguish between deliberate and compulsive behaviors:
Actus hominis — acts without full deliberation
Actus humani — the only ones that really concern Ethics
When we excuse a person's conduct by virtue of a series of circumstances (their biography, their social condition, or similar ones), we excuse them at the cost of objectifying them, unable to elude the course imposed by causality (benefit of causality). It can be applied to others and even to oneself as long as we speak of the past, but we cannot use it in the first person and to refer to the future, for at that very moment we would abdicate our responsibility and our human condition.
"Without freedom, we simply cannot speak of moral subjects." — Sartre
Freedom and responsibility are not exercised in the absence of all conditioning. Far from thinking of freedom as a simple lack of limits. The renunciation of an imaginary fullness and omnipotence gives access to the human order of desire. The lack of limits does not allow our realization, but rather leads us astray and, as in the desert, lacking all kinds of references, we would not know where to go. On the other hand, the limit, the perspective, orients us and opens us to the world.
"The dove that, feeling the resistance of the air, dreams that without it it would fly faster, not realizing that, without air, it could not even fly." — Kant
Moral-Immoral: Moral as Content
Moral as content. The human being not only tries to adjust to reality in any way but to do so with rightness, in the preferable or better, due or good way. Contents of morality that are usually offered sociohistorically by religions, visions of meaning, and norms of coexistence (aka cultural codes).
Technique vs Practice
Kant vs Hegel. Hegel's critique insisted on the formalism of Kantian moral principles, their abstract universalism, the impotence of duty, and the rigorism of conviction, which does not take into account the circumstances and possible consequences of a decontextualized application of said principles.
Bonum and malum entail an ambiguity that makes them susceptible to a double sense → the good, the beneficial, the bad, the harmful, and the damaging.
Formal ethics: While some moral codes prescribe quite concretely what should be done, regulating in detail the content of our behavior, on other occasions the moral principles to which we think we should adhere are purely formal (ethics without code). E.g., Kant sought what conditions a precept must meet if it is to be considered moral.
From a psychological-anthropological point of view, we referred to the necessarily moral form of human life, insofar as it must seek mediations with reality that are not provided by our genetic equipment (moral as structure). When such mediations or adjustments are made in accordance with what is good (in the moral sense), what is due, or what is valuable, we speak of moral as content. But those principles that regulate the content of morality and that place us at the second level of morality from the first of the indicated perspectives can be, from an ethical point of view, purely formal.
Moral as Attitude
Conscience is the ultimate instance of morality.
Ethical individualism: individuals are the only thing that exists, but the individual is the only and irreplaceable protagonist of morality.
Individualization occurs through socialization. That moral decision is exercised ultimately in a solitary manner does not mean that it cannot be solidary.
Relationship between ethics and politics. Weber speaks of the ethics of responsibility where sometimes in politics decisions must be made that have negative collateral effects on society. Kant positions himself outside the ethics of success (Erfolgsethik) which defends that the results of your actions should be good and places intention as the protagonist: "it is not so because of what it produces or achieves, nor because of its suitability for achieving a proposed end, its will being the only thing that makes it good in itself."
Ethics and Metaethics
Normative Ethics tries to point out what is good or bad in human life. Being the mission of prudence (phrónesis) to apply it to the immense variability of particular cases.
The main models are:
Teleological (from télos, end), exemplified in Aristotelian ethics: "The Good is that to which all things tend," being eudaimonia (happiness) the good sought by humans.
Deontological (deón, duty)
Later came the utilitarians (J. Bentham and J.S. Mill) who promote the greatest good for the greatest number. This has its risks: the benefit that a majority would obtain from a group of exploited people would not legitimize such exploitation. It was then decided that the best overall result would be obtained through actions adjusted to certain norms (rule utilitarianism).
Kant, on the other hand, argues that ethics is not so concerned with happiness, a matter of our inclinations, but with making ourselves worthy of it. If the end that we can perhaps attribute to nature had been simply for man to be happy, we would only use the instinctive system that would not have erred either in the ends or in the means necessary for it; by endowing him with reason and freedom, it seems that man is distanced from true satisfaction, since the calculation relative to the enjoyment of life ends up leading many to a certain misology (or hatred of reason) by despairing of it as an adequate means for such enjoyment.