Panic!
Your friend sprints towards your house in a frenzy.
He pounds on your door like a gavel.
Alarmed, you pause watching Mr Cognito to investigate the disruption, knowing it’s
not girl-scouts selling cookies.
As you open the door, your friend tells you in short breaths that a madman has come to
kill him.
He asks if you can allow him shelter inside your house.
You allow him entry and slam the door.
For defense, you grab some old baseball bats from the garage and hide near the front door
in preparation.
All of a sudden, a thunderous boom invades your eardrums.
Impatiently, the bearer of the noise kicks down the door like an ape on steroids.
Seeing his gun pointed at your delicate figure, you drop both the bat and your urine.
In a booming yet scattered voice, he demands to know the whereabouts of your friend.
Knowing that he’s in your house, you lie and tell him he’s at his own house.
The madman leaves and makes his way towards your friend’s house.
You hear 3 gunshots and a scream that is unmistakably your friend’s.
Your friend is dead.
Now what happened here?
Not only did you lie to the murderer.
Your friend lied to you.
Your friend only lied to you because they assumed you would tell the murderer when threatened.
Did you make the right choice?
Ethics would say no, but morality might say yes.
What exactly is the difference between the two?
People claim this and that to be immoral, but do they really know what they’re talking
about?
If in a community of 10 people, 9 believe stealing is bad and 1 believes it’s no biggie,
is stealing moral, immoral, ethical, or unethical?
For the community as a whole, it has been democratically decided that it is unethical.
It goes against the philosophies of the group as a whole.
On the individual level, stealing is acceptable to one fraction and not acceptable to another.
In other words, it’s moral to one group and immoral to the other.
To put that into context, someone might say recreational cannabis is immoral, but it’s
only immoral to them.
Whether it’s ethical or not depends on the jurisdiction.
In Canada or the Netherlands, it would be ethical.
While in Singapore, it could warrant up to 10 years in prison, being beaten with a cane,
and up to $20 000 in fines.
That would make it unethical.
A community could be a country, a culture, a professional body, or a religious group.
Shared values among those groups constitutes ethics.
Doctors have an ethical responsibility to ensure the best interests of their patients.
Or to do no harm.
Cultures and countries have different values when it comes to things like gender roles,
marriage, drugs, crime, and punishment, like Sharia Law or the US constitution.
Religious groups have ethical beliefs about marriage, drugs, technology, and what’s
necessary to fulfill that religion’s doctrine.
Back to the problem at the beginning of the video.
You lying to the murderer and your friend lying to you would be unethical, as we as
a society have established lying to be wrong.
However, on the moral front, it depends on the person.
Some may believe they have a higher responsibility over telling the truth, making lying moral
to them.
For those who differ, it would be immoral.
Say a friend tells you in confidence that they are having relationship issues.
Obviously, it’s your ethical duty to keep the secret.
What if instead, the friend told you, again in confidence, that they were contemplating
committing suicide.
What would you do then?
Ethically, you wouldn’t want to break their trust.
Morally, different people have different ideas.
Would you break their trust because you feel morally obligated to save them?
That’s another conflict between ethics and morals.
Basically, morals are subjective and based on the individual, while ethics are more objective
and based on values established by a community.
From now on, I hope you are no longer confused about these two separate but connected concepts.
And until next time, thanks for watching.