morals and ethics, how are they different?

A tabbo is a law... The moral norm is to love your mother; and the result of following that moral norm is social disaster... The good of society is the higher morality, but before that could be brought to bear people had to recognize a certain cause and effect relationship between incest and birth defects... In that sense, law represents the application of reason to emotional relationships...

Again; morals is the Latin word coined to mean Ethics... These have in time come to mean different qualities, and law has come to mean something completely other... There was one English Jurist who said it is not the job of a judge to consider justice, that parlement made the laws, and judges applied the law... Nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion... Law apart from justice has its strength in the enforcement of moral forms of which Justice is but one... All the virtues, and even all the vices are moral forms, and the most moral person has all the virtues in his character, and none of the vices... But there is a great difference between the man who is good because he is good, and one who acts good because he feels coerced to do so... Most people are good or else law would not be able to control the few who were not good... But the law conceives of all people as not good, and needing at a minimum, Guidence, and at the most: Control... Because of this, that the good are so often controled without necessity, and removed from their free will, and the sense of their free will, that the state makes itself obnoxious on the one hand, and tyranical on the other... It sets itself apart from the people, and in this sense demands its own destruction....Good, that is free moral behavior is a matter of choice...It is not possible for a slave to be good for he has no choice to be otherwise... One must be free to be moral, and law makes all people slaves....

BTW Fido I found your comment very informative:
"There is no essential difference... Cicero coined the word morals to translate the idea of Ethics into Latin... It is like the difference between Pagan and Heathen..."
The two are mere definitions. My only purpose in distinguishing them was to highlight the social, institutionalized, structural aspect of a normative system (morals, mores, norms, tabus, laws, statutes, and other rules) as opposed to the more dynamic, situational, processual, individually creative aspect of ethical behavior (ethics, subjective standards).
By the way, I believe that individuals in their creative use of morals, make a tacit distinction between "normative rules" (what one SHOULD do for social reasons, i.e, approval) and "pragmatic rules" (what one BEST do for practical gain, e.g.., a way to win a contest. (this distinction was made by the political anthropologist F.G. Bailey).

Rules and laws are the social forms we make out of our moral forms as all the virtues and vices are, as well as qualities like God, out of which we make religion...Or more properly: denominations...

One might make the distinction that morals address behavior in terms of how to get along with God, while ethics address behavior in terms of how to get along with other people

Nice distinction, something like the difference between crime, a violation of society's statutes, and sin, a violation of God's statutes.

...do u mean ethics is about "politics" while moral, as he described it, is the real deal ??? dangerous water there maybe you should read Nietzsche a bit more after all ...

You derived that from me? How creative.

You derived that from me? How creative.

though you would say that !

So far i've yet to see a proper distinction between the two so i hope this answers your question:
Morality: What is right or wrong.
Ethics: the methodology that we use to come to the conclusion of morality, or how we figure out what is good or bad.

ethics is not the same as morality, they arent interchangable terms, i would recmend realy looking into that area of study.

Ethics is the same as morality, and it is a mistake to think otherwise, and though people tend to use the words wrongly, and it is natural for words to evolve in their meaning any examination could easily show they are synonyms... Really wrong thought abound about morals and ethic, but as with all such moral forms or transendent concepts it is impossible to say in every instance what is right or correct or good...Knowing what should not be done in regard to ones community is not the same as knowing what should always be done...Imaginary cases, of hypothetical situations do not help in the least... Reason does not help either, because ethical behavior is not based upon reason no matter how many reasons may be found for acting morally... In the ideal, people learn to shape their charcater with their ideas of ethics, and it is out of who they are that they then act ethically... We can say that it is usually ethical to tell the truth, but not always rational... We can say that it is usually moral to rush into a burning building to save lives, but never rational... People are as rational as they are because the moral usully died for it and the rational escaped... The rational have a better chance at individual survival, and they bred...

One word is derived from Greek and the other has evolved from Latin. Undoubtedly, the meaning of each has changed minimally in the course of cultural shifts, but they largely refer to the same issues. Currently, although this is mostly an anecdotal observation, "ethical" seems to refer to more collective "moral assumptions", and "moral" seems to reference more personal "ethical assumptions"...

Does this help? Not at all...

The idea of ethics has evolved as well, so you are correct to say: currently... It is more important to ask why either should be a concern, currently... It is only when ethical relationships break down, and people begin to examine their state of demoralization that the subject comes up... Before Rome had even filled out its world Cicero was already in Greece trying to learn philosophy so he could misinterpret it for the Romans and it is he who is responsible for the word Morals, in our language...

Try to understand that ethical behavior is natural to natural relationships, and when Civilizations and Nation States work, when they are new, it is because these natual morals are carried over into all social relationships; but after a time, the basis for morality is destroyed... This always happens under economic pressure as one part of society begins to feed on the other, but in the example of Greece, women were reduced to a status just above common slaves, and so the ability of the woman to demand the respect of her child essential to the teaching of honor and ethics was lost... After morality is lost as a subjective but essential value to the population philosophers try to recapture the notion in objective ethics, and they always failed...And these failing societies came up with individualized philosophies geared toward the acceptence in inexorable fate, and aimed at individual happiness and honor...

Ethics is a transendent concept to begin with, considered objectively, that is: As no object at all... I would call all such quasi concepts: Moral Forms because they represent a meaning without a being... The only place to truly understand ethics is in its milieu, that is, in ethical and honorable societies... Now; Greece, for an example, had some examples of more moral societies, because they were surrounded by them to the North, and showed a lot of interest in them; but also in the past, in the examples of the Iliad, and the Odyssey... And you can see Socrates in the hands of Plato rejecting the example because of their own prejudices in favor of wealth, and the wealthy...

These people knew enough to act morally, and the morals that they did possess as a people where inherited... The sad fact is that morals are like an egg that once cracked will not hatch nor be mended.. It will be used, or it will rot, and most people seeing the situation chose to use that egg for all it is worth, and that is what people in religion and politics do... And business for that matter... Many people use the ethical feeling of the people to use them, but in the process they teach people immorality is the key to success and happiness since their morality only led to unhappiness...

There is no such thing as a demoralized society... Before any society reaches the point of total demoralization it falls apart under some other pressure, internal or external...People think they can live without morals and this is a mistake because even the effort to do so means they are living in a doomed society...Yet, no one understands that what seems an objective choice to us was never an objective choice to the most moral of people... Primitive peoples, living without technology, and surrounded by enemies had no choice but to be moral or one and all of them would have died... We have ideas like honor, and justice, and liberty, and morality because at one point in human prehistory, people could not have lived without them... And we still cannot, but people who think we can live without them endanger every ones existence...

Your post was addressed to me, so let me be the first to respond publicly (but probably not the first to react privately) with , "whuuuuuu.......?"

What on earth does this have to do with my post or the thread topic generally?

So far, this thread seemed to be about, or perhaps I have extremely misread the OP, the semantic difference between "ethics" and "morality". You have raised the stakes of this debate dramatically by referencing the basic moral fiber of "society" qua broad and virtually fictitious cultural/historical generalizations...i don't even have an adequate response to that. The only thing i can say is that i'm not opposed to the idea of the meaning of the term "ethics" evolving...i just used the term "develop" instead of "evolve" to change up the vocabulary.

i never argued that a civilization could be entirely "demoralized", although i think that we would benefit from some demarcations set up between what is "moral" (or "ethical") and the normative and quotidian responses of most people to satisfy their sense of the status quo...

Um...now you go. i wouldn't engage in this debate if i weren't curious regarding your crazy response...

Simple actually, and quite complex. If something is moral, you feel good after doing it, if it is immoral you feel bad after doing it. Hardly would you see two people sharing the same morals. However Ethics is how SOCIETY thinks you should act in accordance to the conformity rule we all seem to have not been taught about. Ethics would say stealing is wrong, because we said so. Morals would say it is wrong for infinite reason and perhaps right, for just as many reasons.

Again; Ciceror got many things wrong about Greek philosophy in his translation of it into Latin, but when he coined the word the word morals, he meant Ethics even if he did not understand Ethics, and took it to mean something similar in his own society, such as duty...

And I would say again that it is only societies who have lost their natural Ethical relations who talk about the subject... When ethical behavior is expected, and natural, no one thinks about it... Just so with Justice as an element of Ethics... Where people have it in their lives they do not talk of it, but when they find they need it, they find they must first define it to find it...

The problem is that each of these qualities are infinite moral forms, what are by others called: transendent concepts... We reason about their existence based upon our own... Because we see people die for the lack of justice we can conclude it is essential to life... When we see people further death because they have no sense of Ethics we can conclude that Ethics are essential to social life... We can hardly say what morals and Ethics are, but we can very often say what they ain't, and see what their want does to a society, but since those societies which most considered them also died, we can feel certain that what one may have as a spiritual form, an infinite moral form, an inate sense of the Ethical- may be had without a word for it, but that no amount of words in relation to a gone quality in our lives is sufficient to invoke it...

Morals has the suffix -al meaning of or pertaining to ( Latin mor; custom more at MOOD); M is mostly a masculine letter from Rome, and M plus oral may refer to a king or God's dictation of what is the law and therefor right. M orals would be dictated by the Emperor or leaders oral decrees, which today we have the technology to record in writing less you forget them. The 10 commandments according to legend were given to Moses as M oral commands, as well as recorded on stone, less you forget them. According to patriarchal convention that has worked well for thousands of years, Morals or M oral commands would be made by your father or God. Eg Do not beat your sister or mother. Do not sleep with a dog, a goat, or your mother; etc. It is understood morals promote well being and avoid unhealthy or evil (infertile) conditions.

Ethics usually is a system or a set of morals. So the Ten Commandments is a system of morals; ethics. Social workers have codes of ethics, but they often contradict other codes of ethics, for example they may ask social workers to ignore the 10 Commandments, or the 5 Training Principles of Buddha. Some Social Codes of Ethics, might contradict some of the Ethics of say, the Boy Scouts of America. Laws like the Privacy Act, offer more contradiction, as in a diverse society, overlapping Ethics Codes exist, while usually the Law of the Land is a reflection of the ultimate complete code of ethics in a given place. If there is a state religion, the Law is often complicated. Ethics, and morals, are often ideals, and in some places, like LA, may be abnormal. The recent Honest Tea Survey found people in LA are highly likely to steal. Since stealing is universally seen as BAD, even though being a dishonest thief in LA is NORMAL, it is still unethical and immoral to steal, so neither morals or ethics are necessarily norms. Often abnormal ethical behavior is rewarded.

Where did you get your "education?"

Someone joins socialist party believes in ethics for right reasons but screws public out of money claiming it expenses and adds few more pennies knowing it wrong.That one example I think