Morals, Manners, Ethics, and the Law

• Morals - Morals are those things between me and my creator, universe, or conscience that I feel are right and wrong for me. Immanuel Kant had the idea that things that are moral should be those things that you would make required for all mankind. I like this idea as a starting point to talk about morals -- but the point isn't to actually make a law for all mankind, it's to keep your morals in line with those things that would be best for everybody if everybody acted that way. If you are a follower of some religion, then you've got a quick guide for morality. After all, if religions are good for anything they're good for telling you what's right and wrong.

  
  But to me, at least, these religious instructions are just shortcuts to help you out until you can think for yourself. Because it's critically important to understand why things are right or wrong in order to be able to incorporate morals into your everyday life. When you're a child, you need baby food fed to you -- you need morals given to you in sort of a dummy's guide. When you are an adult, you have to work in a more complex environment where the easy rules don't always apply. When your wife asks you if she looks fat in that dress, and you say yes, you'll understand what I mean. Or when somebody asks you how we can execute serial killers when all killing is bad. The list goes on and on. You can either choose to let somebody else do your thinking for you or think for yourself. I choose to think for myself.

• Ethics - Ethics are those things deemed appropriate or not by the profession or social class that I am in. Ethics usually have some sort of qualifier -- ethical for whom? So, for instance, when somebody says that a politician is acting unethically, they mean the politician is acting in an unethical manner for politicians. They might be acting in a totally ethical manner for mobsters. Ethics can be codified by a formal ethics body, or they can be informal.
• Manners - Manners are those social rules that everybody follows in order to maintain civil discourse, especially about contentious issues. You can violently disagree with somebody about a moral issue, but as long as you both have manners the conversation does not have to get into a fistfight. Manners are a critical part of social life. They're not required or anything, they just make things a lot easier. There are certainly people with little or no manners, and there are those with a highly developed sense of manners. Usually the latter do very well in life, while the former make enemies and earn distrust sometimes without even realizing it. When I was younger I thought manners were kind of silly, but as I've grown older I realize how vitally important manners are to any kind of relationship.
• Law - The law is the minimal set of rules which are required in society so that we do not hurt one another. It's different from manners because while manners are concerned with maximizing conflict resolution and civil progress, the law is simply concerned with protecting us from each other. That's why it's perfectly okay to say things that are very offensive to other people -- people do not have a right not to be offended. It's also common for things that are moral to be illegal, like perhaps allowing people to smoke pot (if you believe that marijuana prohibition is immoral) or allowing blacks to ride in the front of the bus during the 1960s. Likewise, some things that are immoral are also legal, like lying to people or cheating people out of money for shoddy products. Of course, what these things are depends on your morals.

People get really mixed up with these concepts, assuming that everything that is moral should also be legal, or vice-versa. Assuming that ethics and morality are the same thing. Assuming that manners are pointless. Assuming that everything that is immoral should be outlawed. Unfortunately, politicians and religious figures do not help very much. There are lots of little traps here to fall into.

Additionally there are some interesting combinations of these ideas that should make you think. If something is gravely immoral yet legal, do you have an obligation to support the law? Do you have an obligation to your fellow man to demonstrate to change the law? What about things that are moral yet illegal? How about things that are simply rude and legal, like the shabby commercials I was talking about the other day? Should a lawyer take a case for somebody he thinks is actually guilty of a crime? It might be the ethical thing to do, but is it moral? Should the law reflect the common morality of some religion or another? Is the law based on religion? Are ethics based on morality? If polluting the planet is immoral, should it also be illegal too? What happens if the law tries to be an enforcer of morality and not a minimum baseline?

By understanding the subtle differences between these terms, you can begin to work your way through them. There are no right and wrong answers to the questions above, they depend on your judgment of a lot of intangibles. But the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms, right?