I am introducing two new post categories: “Reader Q&A” and “Ethics”. Periodically I’ll tackle reader questions that require an in-depth response. Ethics is my field of study; I hope to share insights from time to time out of what I’ve gleaned academically and experientially.
Which leads me to a question one reader had: Is there a difference between morality and ethics? Reader noted I tend to use the two terms interchangeably.
I still remember the day in a graduate seminar when one of my fellow students made a distinction between two words being discussed. I said it was all a bunch of semantics. Dr. Daniel B. McGee, my ethics professor, as soft-spoken as he was short and thin, roared back, “Semantics, you say!” I was relieved to see his subtle, playful smile. I was in no mortal danger.
But Dr. McGee really did want me to understand the value of learning to parse word meanings. Each word choice has unique value, regardless of how they might overlap. It was a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
However, when it comes to the words “moral” and “ethical,” Dr. McGee was quick to tell us that there was not as much a distinction as people tend to make of them.
What comes to mind when you speak of morality, or you say someone is a moral person? When I ask this question of students, they usually mention sexual behavior – or not lying, cheating, or stealing (those pesky Ten Commandments). While the meaning of “moral” is broader than those specific actions, the word does speak to behaviors, conduct, things we do that can have positive or negative impact on us or others.
We also refer to others (not us, of course) as having immoral thoughts. It is interesting how often in the Bible it is written that thinking something is as real as actually doing it. From the wisdom sayings of Solomon, we read, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”[1] In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that looking with lust at a woman is the same as committing adultery.[2] So, morality includes what we do and think.
Morality is not just isolated acts. Can a man who cheats on his wife be trusted in business matters, for example? I tend to think not.
One summer in college, I worked in a tiny shoe store on High Street, the narrow commercial street in my hometown. I don’t remember the store brand, but I did learn a lot about customer service that summer – and had a painful lesson in leadership and morality.
My manager and I were the only staff. She taught me the basics of doing my job and how to treat the customer. Within a few weeks, she was let go and a younger guy was brought in. Looking back, I suspect he was destined for corporate, and they sent him to that two-bit store to plump his resume.
He was quick to tell me his wife had just had a baby and he was “missing the action,” as he put it. A young woman working in a neighboring store started visiting our store and she and my manager disappeared into the back storage area. The enclosed back was where we kept surplus stock, so when the front didn’t have what a customer needed, we had to find it in the back. Bossman made it clear I was not to disturb them – even if a customer needed something.
His behavior and attitude upset me. The second time it happened, I walked straight home, leaving them in the back to their own devices. Not only was the guy cheating on his wife, he was also cheating on the store. I talked to my dad about it. He knew how to reach the corporate office, but he said I might have to leave my job. As I was going to have to quit in a couple weeks to take summer courses out-of-state, it wasn’t a total loss.
But what shocked me was when we called corporate. The higher-up said I either had to put up or quit. He was not going to accept a complaint that would tie his company in knots. I never went back.
We are quick to think of sexual issues when we talk about morality, but as with this story, it is difficult to separate the moral (or immoral) in one part of life from other areas of life. Bossman’s actions were impacting sales. To quote Jesus again, out of the heart the mouth speaks, I especially like how the NIV puts it: “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”[3]
The word integrity is closely related to morality. We use it in reference to being honest or having strong moral principles. But think of it in other contexts. If we say a bridge lacks structural integrity, we mean it might not hold up. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we said Ukraine’s territorial integrity had been compromised. In other words, integrity speaks of something as being whole or unified and when integrity is compromised, wholeness and unity are broken.
Morality is not just individual actions (or thoughts); it is the whole system of values and principles we live by. I have no idea what became of Bossman. I have a sense that, although he may have done very well in his career, maybe even made it to the top, he left a sordid trail of business and personal messes. He may well have become rich, but I doubt he ended happy or fulfilled.
In this whole or unified sense, ethics and morality are interchangeable. Sometimes people narrowly define morality as limited to sexual behavior or honesty, but as we have seen, morality embraces all of life. So too with ethics. When we speak of an ethical person, we mean they have a strong moral core. They are a person of integrity. That tells me the only way to be complete is to live wholly moral. We don’t say a person who is totally bad is a person of integrity.
Where we can distinguish between the words morality and ethics is how we use each in specific contexts. To this point, we speak of the study of ethics. By that, we mean that ethics is the study of moral principles. We also speak of ethical systems of thought.
My street-level definition of ethics is “living out what you believe.” My value system is based on what I perceive or believe about life and God. My worldview – the way I see the world – informs my value system which in turn informs my thoughts and actions.
As I mentioned, ethics is what I studied in graduate school. When I lived in China, I found it easier to explain my academic field to the average Chinese person than to the average Jane or Joe here in the U.S. The Chinese word for ethics can be translated as the study of human relations – and when people in China hear the Chinese word for ethics, they immediately identify it with Confucius, China’s great moral scholar.
Public Domain Photo by Vmenkov: Statue of Confucius Yun’an, China
I remember when I was in grad school in Texas, a fellow student wanted to know what I was studying. When I said “ethics,” he asked me why I was getting a Ph.D. in table manners. Couldn’t I just read Miss Manners in the newspapers? (We had such things back then.) No, my friend, that is etiquette, not ethics. Though you could make a connection, because the focus of etiquette at its heart is how we treat others.
I was interested in how we treat others from a very young age. As I teenager I was beginning to ponder issues like racism and integrity in government and in the church. By the time I started exploring grad school options, I was aware that, in universities, ethics sometimes sits in philosophy departments and sometimes it sits in religion departments. Each has their own orientation.
My interest was in religion and ethics – as I said, I wanted to explore the relationship between what we believe and how we live. Call it applied ethics. You could also call it applied theology.
I discovered that even on the religion side of the ethics divide, there are distinctions. In the ‘70s only a handful of universities in the U.S. had doctoral programs in ethics. One of those schools was Princeton University. I am not saying I had the wherewithal to get in. I am just saying I applied. I made a trip to meet with an ethics prof at Princeton and it became readily apparent I was not going to be one of the six new ethics students they would admit that year.
He quickly informed me that they defined religion much more broadly than I did. Not that I wasn’t interested in how different faiths tackle ethical questions. But he judged my mind too parochial for his program. I also sensed that what they taught was more along the lines of philosophical ethics than the theological ethics I preferred. A bit too esoteric for me. So, Princeton and I parted ways before we started dating.
I have studied comparative religions and I have lived in a variety of faith cultures – Buddhist, Muslim, and especially Atheist. Each has something unique to contribute to ethical thought. While not avoiding the broad, I wanted to go deep. I wanted to understand ethics in a specifically Christian context. How does faith in Jesus Christ inform how we are to live?
By the way, there are other types of applied ethics. Most notably, business ethics and medical ethics. My major professor, Dr. McGee, was an early scholar in the field of medical ethics. In my graduate research, I focused on how ethical thought is applied in the faith community, the church. I wanted to understand how my own denomination, the Assemblies of God, has lived out what it believes.
I remember my dad introducing me to one denominational college president who, upon hearing of my major, asked if I could teach anything else. I sensed his school didn’t have much in the way of ethics classes.
Several years later as I was finishing my graduate studies, the denomination was wracked by scandals involving three of its most famous preachers – Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker, and Marvin Gorman. The scandals, particularly of a sexual nature, also involved financial mismanagement and organizational power struggles. It brought down or compromised their own ministries and even led to prison time for Baker. But it also left the denomination wrestling with the need for greater ethical training for its ministers.
But again, ethical training involves – or should involve – much more than just dos and don’ts of good individual behavior. Ethical training should connect the dots between what we believe and how we are to live and include what it means to live out collectively what we believe collectively.
By that I mean, ethics has much more to say than just about individual behavior. How is the church itself to act in the world? How are societies and civic institutions to behave? Ironically, Dr. McGee said there were two major institutions in our society woefully underserved by ethical study – the church and higher education. I concentrated on the church.
It is in realizing that we as individuals are part of larger organizations such as churches and society itself that we come to understand that morality is systemic. We are not just individuals. As John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” We not only act individually; we act collectively – and it is even easier to act wrong collectively than individually.
We’ll follow that “individual vs. collective” track on another day. For now, remember that morality and ethics are two sides of the same coin.
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[1] Proverbs 23:7
[2] Matthew 5:27-28
[3] Matthew 12:34
Excellent. Even though I have read parts of your thesis, this gave me a fresh perspective. Very well written. Thank you.