this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
44 points (90.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43397 readers
621 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Morality is the evolutionary selection pressure that human societies place on themselves.
Ethics is an attempt to calculate the optimal response to an event, for some definition of "optimal".
It's kinda like the difference between natural language and formal language. One is not designed, not static, and often not self consistent, but consistency isn't the goal. The other is a rigorously defined system that is scrutinized for inconsistencies, because consistency is the goal.
If I were to concisely put it with a fews word each, would it be a close approxmation to say morality is an automatic response and ethics is a rational response?
Hah, I felt I was already trimming it down to be as concise as I could get it. Maybe ethical systems are always rational, but I wouldn't take that to mean automatic responses are not rational.
I think the important part is that morality doesn't have a central goal and isn't designed, and ethics does and is.