Ethics is not the same as feelings.
Feelings provide important
information for our ethical
choices.

Ethics is not religion.
Many people are not religious,
but ethics applies to everyone.

Ethics is not following the law.
A good system of law does incorporate
many ethical standards, but law can
deviate from what is ethical.

Ethics is not following culturally
accepted norms. Some cultures are
quite ethical, but others become
corrupt -or blind to certain
ethical concerns.

Ethics is not science. Social and natural
science can provide important data to
help us make better ethical choices.

On Jan 23, 5:32 pm, "Immortalist" yahoo.com> wrote:

Five examples of what 'ethics' is not; which one thinks would be

Simply stated, ethics refers to standards of behavior that tell us how
human beings ought to act in the many situations in which they find
themselves-as friends, parents, children, citizens, businesspeople,
teachers, professionals, and so on.

It is helpful to identify what ethics is NOT:

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/framework.html

Immortalist wrote:

I don't remember having done an ethical thing in my life if I didn't expect
either punishment or reward, in that following order.
So there's your answer. Either punishment or reward.

The field of ethics seems to be particularly relevant to the people in the
very specialised circumstance of being rewarded (paid) IN ADVANCE to be
ethical, usually even in a particular flavour. Like priests, politicians,
diplomats, judges, short everyone in public offices, and the ombudsman. It
seems to be rather impracticle if not hypocritical to pose ethics as
universal laws that would go for other people in other circumstances, let
alone anyone in any circumstance. They are the professional assets of peope
who are to make decisions in (semi) public cases, but no rules that govern
general philosophy, as far as I can see.

"Immortalist" yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1169591535.738554.317270@v45g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...

As to non-professional ethics, to cut a long story short, they would be
relative to the question if I, or somebody else, were likely to kill you in
case you were to apply them, and in which way.

But that would be plain to a two-year old after it would have had its first
spanking, for having lit matches in the bedroom. It's definitely unethical
to set fire to the house.

There's hardly anything universal about non-professional ethics. In fact,
it's completely empirical.

If we were to involve how many people were likely to kill you in a
particular way, that would return us to the (im)balances in a particular
society that I've just mentioned.

And how economically interesting it would be to have a useful model
describing, in full detail, the likeliness of such repercussions in case any
hypothetical marketing strategy were to be applied.

That's the rub with ethics, they are the ultimate trade secret.

Quite redundantly, in a typical group setting, someone would communicate an
ethical framework with particular key-figures in the group, and keep
everybody else uninformed, and wait for any adversary to offend against that
framework to an extent that would justify, to the key-figures, stabbing him
or her, quite legitimately, in the back. They are game rules, but by no
means public. So much ethics for the day.

This is not the way the wicked man applies ethics. It is the way ethics ARE
applied.

So long as they remain secret, ethics are the ultimate threat and a very
powerful weapon.

And that is probably the only universal thing there is to be said on ethics.

This is where the pillar of Hammurabi comes in. With 3 ft. in diameter, it
was the first instance of (cuneiform) written law in history.