Hazlitt presents excerpts from Eli Burnstein’s Dictionary of Fine Distinctions; here’s “Ethics vs. Morality”:
Ethics refers to intelligible principles of right and wrong.
Code of ethics
Workplace ethicsMorality refers to right and wrong as a felt sense.
Moral compass
Moral fibreOne is rational, explicit, and defined by one’s social or professional community; the other is emotional, deep-seated, and dictated by one’s conscience or god.
That’s why an immoral act sounds graver than an unethical one: One may get you fired, but the other could land you in hell.
The Fine Print
With characteristic sass, usage master H. W. Fowler notes that “The two words, once fully synonymous, & existing together only because English scholars knew both Greek & Latin [ethics being Greek in origin, morality Latin], have so far divided functions that neither is superfluous…ethics is the science of morals, & morals are the practice of ethics.”
While Fowler is here alluding to ethics as a branch of philosophy, the conceptual flavor of the word can be heard in its everyday sense as well: Whether theorized by Aristotle or spelled out in a code of conduct, ethics is morality, as it were, with glasses on.
He also discusses “Tights vs. Leggings vs. Pantyhose vs. Stockings” (“Less common today, stockings are detached undergarments that stop around the thigh”), “Maze vs. Labyrinth” (” A maze has many paths and challenges you to find the exit. A labyrinth has one path and draws you toward its centre.”), “Autocrat vs. Despot vs. Tyrant vs. Dictator” (“Tyrant, meanwhile, originally referred to usurpers but not necessarily bad ones—maybe they deposed a despot”), “First Cousin vs. Once Removed,” and “Modernity vs. Modernism” (“Modernity is a historical period. Modernism is a cultural movement.”). Sounds like a good book to start arguments with.
Some of these strike me as either dubious attempts to find denotation differences where the distinction is really one of register (or at most, of typical collocation), or inventing imaginary confusions just to resolve them. “Modernity” versus “modernism”? Really? That’s not a “fine distinction” at all. Who, exactly, is supposed to be confusing them? Apart from Mrs Malaprop or Constable Dogberry?
The etymological fallacy also seems to be in play. The specific historical meaning of the “tyrant” etymon in Greek has no bearing on its meaning in modern English, for example. You might as well claim that “idiot” really means “a person who takes no interest in politics or current affairs.”
Come, come, books like this aren’t actually about resolving significant differences — that’s what we have philosophy and linguistics for. These books are for amusement and, as I say, for starting arguments. And Mrs Malaprop deserves nice things too!
“Well, ACKCHULLY” would apparently be a good title for this work
Indeed it would!
and, as I say, for starting arguments
I’m sorry, I can’t agree with you there.
I have been told by American females of my approximate age that there is some demographic subset of American females (defined by some combination of geography and class) that use or at least formerly used “tights” as a literal synonym for “pantyhose” because they thought “pantyhose” sounded (in their specific sociolinguistic context) too lurid or sexualized or prone to provoke “nudge nudge wink wink” reactions.
I am reasonably sure that “pantyhose” is not a thing in the UK at all. (But then, we don’t wear anything under our kilts, either.)
I thought that tights in the US were some subset of what I would call leggings (not see through, no feet). But this is one of the things I can’t keep track of.
The book sounds kind of fun to me!
I thnk of tights as what ballet dancers wear. Also, Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
The absence of long johns is an ethical failure with moral implications.
Edited to add- And what of thermal u-trou?
I have heard that claim about the “true” meaning of labyrinth before (and the OED comments, “Sometimes distinguished from a maze as consisting only of one convoluted path to the centre and back, rather than containing a number of dead ends”), but there is no evidence that the word has ever been limited to that meaning, in Greek or English.
Yes, this sort of thing seems analogous to the imaginary rule that relative “which” must always be non-restrictive.*
“Hey, we’ve got alternatives here! Wouldn’t it be nice if they carried a meaning difference? Let’s invent one and tell people they’re uneducated if they don’t abide by it!”
* Says Geoffrey Pullum:
Brett: Indeed, if the labyrinth of Greek myth had been a single path, Theseus could have gone in clueless.
It’s true, though, that if I hear someone around Santa Fe has made a labyrinth that people can walk, I expect something like this. If I hear someone made a maze, if would be one where you could get lost.
I too was unclear about the distinction between tights and leggings. If there needs to be a distinction between the two then I’m happy to accept Burnstein’s explanation. Fortunately I don’t have to discuss those items frequently, so I’m not likely to be embarrassed in any case.
As for what’s worn under the kilt, I’m a Sassenach so I’m morally/ethically enjoined from wearing a kilt.
For this American, leggings are never joined at the top and are probably made of fairly heavy materia. Tights are always joined at the top and are made of light material.
I am reasonably sure that “pantyhose” is not a thing in the UK at all. (But then, we don’t wear anything under our kilts, either.)
Nor in NZ — except from creeping U.S. influence.
What outdoor types wear under their kilts/shorts are ‘thermals’ or ‘polypro(p)s’. You might say ‘Long Johns’ or ‘leggings’ to distinguish from other apparel made from polypropylene. This nomenclature is not differentiated sexually.
There seems to be a disconnect in terminology here. Pantyhose must be a thing in the United Kingdom, since they show up as a joke in the British time travel comedy series Goodnight Sweetheart. The main character, Gary, discovers a portal back to World-War-Two-era London which only he can use, and sometimes he takes stuff back from the 1990s to his girlfriend in the Blitz. In one episode, she complains that she can’t get stockings any more. (I think she admits to rubbing powdered gravy mix on her legs to darken them.) Gary brings her back a set of pantyhose, and she finds them hilarious, having never seen them (as opposed to separate pairs of stockings) before.
For this American, leggings are never joined at the top and are probably made of fairly heavy materia[l].
However, those Americans at the American Heritage Dictionary disagree.
Two things that come to my mind:
Not sure about all this. To me it looks more like a thesaurus of fine distinctions …
Pullum? He’s obtusely fanatical (nay, quixotic) on which versus that. This completely optional clarity-yielding rule works brilliantly for those who adopt it – including for Pullum himself, in just about all his writing. “It largely failed, because in writing that [sic] hasn’t been altered by an American copy editor, ‘that’ and ‘which’ are very roughly level-pegging in integrated relatives.” Utterly beside the point.
One is rational, explicit, and defined by one’s social or professional community; the other is emotional, deep-seated, and dictated by one’s conscience or god
This is pretty silly once you start looking at it. False dichotomy much?
The basic idea seems to be ethics – external, morality – internal (a bit like the supposed shame/guilt thing.) That doesn’t correspond to how the words are actually used at all. Fowler’s distinction doesn’t, either (I think this is more of his ideas about how it would be nice if English were a bit tidier.)
The words do belong (partly) to different modes of discourse: philosophy dons tend to talk about ethics and preachers about morality, for example. But I would think that most people in both groups basically suppose themselves to be talking about the very same things, even if they come to different conclusions about them. (Leaving aside the obsessives who think that “morality” just means “having a dull sex life.”)
Can you offer an example where clarity is provided by observing the that/which rule? Ambiguity avoided, or resolved more easily, or something else?
My invented wrong/wrongly/wrongfully distinction:
If you do something wrong, you should have done it right.
If you do it wrongly, somebody else should have done it.
If you do it wrongfully, nobody should have done it.
Heh. This is more compelling, against Pullum’s assertion concerning which and that in AmE and BrE.
Can you offer an example where clarity is provided by observing the that/which rule? Ambiguity avoided, or resolved more easily, or something else?
Yep.
The words do belong (partly) to different modes of discourse: philosophy dons tend to talk about ethics and preachers about morality, for example. But I would think that most people in both groups basically suppose themselves to be talking about the very same things, even if they come to different conclusions about them.
I tend to think that professional associations (other than those of the clergy) talk about ethics, not morality, and they do mean a set of written rules.
On the other hand, quite a few people think their god or gods dictated “intelligible rules”, maybe quite detailed ones.
Large is objective. Big is subjective.
@Jerry Friedman:
Quite so. When Christians (at least those of a certain type) talk about “the Moral Law” they aren’t talking about having a bad conscience or something “emotional.”
https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/4284/how-can-i-tell-the-difference-between-the-moral-law-and-other-laws-in-the-old-te
(This is a very familiar question in such circles.) Note that some of the actual Ten Commandments get to be Moral Law.
(My own views, though informed by this background, are somewhat different. I’m just citing this to illustrate the linguistic point.)
Islam provides really quite detailed prescriptions for conduct, which are certainly supposed to be of divine origin, and are by no means to be thought of in some sort of fuzzy emotional way.
The formulation in the article is amazingly parochial.
What actions are ethical but immoral? What actions are unethical, but moral? I think that if one could provide a list of immoral actions that were ethical according to one’s pofessional organisation, it would be reasonable to question the ethics of the organisation.
A professional code may well address issues specific to that group alone in its “ethics”, but unless they overlap with lay morality they’re really no more than union rules. (The actual Hippocratic oath, about which much nonsense is talked, sternly forbids teaching anything about medicine to laypeople.)
And a professional code of ethics will not see any need to speciically include all of the ambient societies’ ethics/morality in its code. (There are usually vague getout clauses about bringing the game into disrepute instead.)
What actions are ethical but immoral?
Arguably, the Geneva conventions on the conduct of war enumerate actions which are immoral (killing of people, including civilians to a specified degree), but which are declared to be within the code, i.e. ethical.
I see what you mean, but I don’t think that people who are not hardcore pacifists would say that it was “immoral” to kill enemy combatants, or even immoral to kill civilians in certain narrowly defined circumstances. What this is about is trying to draw a distinction, even in wartime, between moral/ethical acts and immoral/unethical acts, rather than between morality and ethics.
I suspect that the Geneva conventions were not actually ever conceived of as moral codes, but as a kind of moral damage-limitation exercise. If you can’t be good, at least don’t do that …
But I wouldn’t at all deny that people have different ideas of how to apply the words “ethics” and “morality”, or that the differences are interesting and capable of being described. My beef is with the idea that the words have significantly different referents. That seems to be a characteristic error in the book’s approach: reifying what are basically simply different linguistic usages and imagining that the usages therefore have distinct real-world referents. Sure there’s a difference, but these are not the differences you’re looking for.
Admittedly (as Hat rightly pointed out) I’m kinda breaking a butterfly upon a wheel here, but this book looks rather as if it’s in The Meaning of Tingo territory to me.
In the context of so-called “legal ethics,” many of the rules binding on lawyers (which in the U.S. may vary in matters of detail from state to state) deal with situations where moral intuitions might be variable and unpredictable because the situations they address are ones where various moral principles seem to be in conflict. So the rule sometimes tells you which of the competing desiderata prevails in the given situation rather than letting your own Protestant conscience make some sort of private judgment as to how to resolve the trade-offs presented. The lawyer’s general obligation to never reveal information told him in confidence by the client, for example, frequently creates at least apparent tension with other moral impulses.
Some lawyers (including me) like to call the so-called “ethics rules” the “disciplinary rules” since the point is that these are the rules that you can get in disciplinary trouble (with the disciplinary authorities who can in a sufficiently grave case take away your license) if you disregard.
There’s an old joke that if you don’t know the answer to a question on the MPRE (the “Multi-State Professional Responsibility Examination,” a multiple-choice question thing testing knowledge of the disciplinary rules* that most U.S. states require you to pass before you can be admitted to practice) you should pick the second-most-moral-sounding option. This is either a joke about the second-best quality of lawyers’ morality or a shrewd observation that the option that superficially sounds most plausible is often a red herring put there by the test designer as a distraction and a trap for the unwary (and is not actually the most moral option if read carefully enough to note some subtle glitch or catch).
*Actually a theoretical set of such rules, since it needs to be a national test and the actual rules are subject to regional variation. Yeah, I know.
The confidentiality thing (which also applies to medics, though in a very much less absolute way – unfortunately) is a very well chosen case.
However, even there, I don’t think there is a radical dissociation between professional “ethics” and lay “morality” – it is (as you know better than me) a question of choice between different and potentially conflicting ethical/moral desiderata – lawyers get a derogation from their immediate moral duty of candour to the whole community because in the long run that benefits the community. It’s analogous to saying that it’s moral/ethical for soldiers to kill people because that will benefit the community more than forbidding it.
If it were not the case that there was a “greater good” moral justification, lawyers would indeed be acting immorally in such cases (though “ethically.”) As things are, that’s not so.
It’s not the case that “ethical” is only applicable to complex cases involving competing goods while “moral” applies only to clearcut black-and-white issues. (Or Jesuits would be famed for their straightforwardness.)
Technically, everything the army of an imperialist invader does is immoral from the start, and none of its killings are justified. And yet, it could theoretically do its evil mission in a way that scrupulously follows the ethical rules of the Geneva Convention.
A high-priced lawyer might get unquestionably guilty people off the hook by wearing the prosecution down, without ever risking the least censure from the Bar.
What actions are ethical but immoral? What actions are unethical, but moral? I think that if one could provide a list of immoral actions that were ethical according to one’s pofessional organisation, it would be reasonable to question the ethics of the organisation.
Some self-righteous folk, wielding their holy books as weapons, would declare prostitution immoral. And then they would debate whether it is unethical to deny payment to a sex worker for services rendered.
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.” —H.L. Mencken
Civilization is uncertainty in a top hat.
@brett –
the cretans had a one-path labyrinth on their coins, if you don’t know it, google it – it’s a famous symbol that looks a bit like brains or entrails. one path. chartres’s labyrinth is a direct descendant. i think it’s definitely a thing?
That seems to be a characteristic error in the book’s approach: reifying what are basically simply different linguistic usages and imagining that the usages therefore have distinct real-world referents.
Quite so, which is why it’s an excellent argument-starter. People like nothing better than disputing meaningless distinctions!
this book looks rather as if it’s in The Meaning of Tingo territory to me.
I see what you mean, but for me there’s a definite difference between peddling bullshit about “exotic” foreign words and exaggerating or inventing semantic differences between native ones. In the former case, the only result can be more bullshit; in the latter, people can make salient points about meanings they actually know, as is evidenced in this very thread.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority
Grandiose sweeping statements with obvious counterexamples ignored are always a sign of H L Mencken.
WP:
Journalists (even very good ones) are prone to this lapsing into oracular mode. I once made the mistake of citing Chesterton’s confident dicta on the attitude of the Roman authorities to the Jews to a historian who actually knew about the subject. It was instructive (if somewhat chastening.) He was very polite about it, though.
Yeah, Mencken was a messy guy, and admirers of Nietzsche are always suspect if the admiration lasts past adolescence.
admirers of Nietzsche are always suspect if the admiration lasts past adolescence.
This business of “admiring” or detesting writers has always puzzled me. When I re-read books by certain authors, it is not because I admire the authors or the books. It is because I “get something” out of the printwork – not always something I like, but even that is instructive.
When I choose to eat a banana, it is not out of admiration for the banana plant.
It is not by accident that I read Nietzsche, Luhmann, Dickens and dozens of other writers, over and over again. I sometimes read biographies of them. I am never inclined to bend the knee – for what, after all ?
I admire Nietzsche myself, up to a point; in much the same way as I admire Karl Marx (I like to think that the comparison would greatly annoy both of them.)
Both saw real problems clearly where others had simply seen matters as being just part of the inevitable natural order; and both proposed solutions that have remarkably little to recommend them.
Groundbreaking diagnosticians; not so good on the therapeutics.
Yes, “admire” was the wrong word — I too admire him in DE’s sense. Perhaps “take as a moral/intellectual guide” is more what I meant.
Groundbreaking diagnosticians; not so good on the therapeutics.
I’ll subscribe to that, on a trial basis, out of goodwill. But I prefer lighting engineers – diagnosticians with no pretensions to therapy. Makers of diapositives without the gnosis.
@AG: I didn’t mean to suggest that a labyrinth couldn’t be of the single path type, and the most common classicsl Cretan coins featuring labyriths do depict a single path. However, there were coins minted in Crete that showed just about every variation on the labyrinth theme. Some showed branching mazes (with or without actual dead ends); some were just stylized Greek fret patterns that would not work as actual mazes; and some of the single-path labyrinths showed paths from entrances to exits, rather than leading toward their centers.
See
https://www.math.stonybrook.edu/~tony/mazes/
for a distilled account of mazes and labyrinths.
Maybe some British manufacturers used the term ‘pantyhose’ when such things were a novelty – I don’t remember – but certainly ‘tights’ has always been our everyday word for them. ‘Leggings’ are joined together but don’t cover the feet.
I ran into one slightly surprising connotation of ‘labyrinth’ in Berlin 11 years ago. There was a business labeled ‘Labyrinth’ two blocks from my hotel, and it took me a little while to figure out what that implied with my defective German. It was a gay bar of the BDSM variety, and ‘labyrinth’ seemed intended to imply that it offered more than just a dungeon or two, probably (I did not inquire) a whole series of interconnected dungeons. Was inability to find one’s way out a special extra for submissives and masochists?
Looking for it on Google Maps just now, I could not find it, or anything but restaurants on that particular street corner. Whether it has moved, or shut down, or just avoids unwanted publicity by somehow staying off Google Maps, I do not know. I tried searching ‘Labyrinth Berlin Germany’ and got only the ‘Labyrinth Kindermuseum’ in a whole different neighborhood. I hope no prospective customer of either business ever ended up at the other by mistake.
@Kate Bunting: Oh, I must have misunderstood. I thought the Brits were saying that pantyhose* the product, rather than pantyhose the word, did not exist in the U. K.
* My phone tried to autocorrect this to a “pantihose” spelling.
I’m afraid that was my fault. Subkilt sartorial arrangements are not, in fact, a good parallel to female Brit underwear choices. Even in Scotland.
I imagine that an ethical compass would be more expensive than a moral compass. And it would probably have extra dials to tell you the ethics in New York, London and Beijing.
Speaking of hosiery, Burnstein’s absolutist and essentialist claim that “Tights cover the feet” does not survive contact with reality. For example, a simple online FAQ would have explained to Burnstein that “Ballet tights come in different variations, footed, footless, and convertible. Convertible tend to be the most popular version of ballet tights as it allows dancers to quickly change from footed to footless.” If he then asked “What are convertible ballet tights?” he would have been told “Convertible ballet tights are the most popular option for ballet tights. They have an opening at the bottom of the foot which allows dancers to quickly switch from footed tights to footless.”
@Noetica: The which/their distinction only works brilliantly if both the writer and the reader adopt it. If you are writing a private letter to an individual whom you know to follow the distinction, then yes, nothing further is required to ensure understanding. But for a broader audience where the reader cannot be assumed to follow the distinction, a careful writer will take further steps to prevent ambiguity. These further steps in turn render the which/their distinction irrelevant.