Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is lesson 259. Today we are going to look at the difference between morals and ethics. Okay. Let's take a look at the note here.
Morals focuses on personal principles or beliefs of right and wrong.
Ethics focuses on the behavior of a particular person in a particular situation. And this is one
where students often ask me what's the difference between morals and ethics ?
Because both of them do have something to do with right and wrong. But morals
again, this focuses on personal principles or beliefs. Somebody's, what
somebody personally believes. This focuses more on behavior of people in
certain situations. So let's continue. So we can show some examples. Ethics is
often used in regard to the practices of business, medicine, and law. Yeah. We often
might hear this as unethical business practices. Or medicine, sometimes doctors
have to study the ethics of medicine basically. You never really hear them say
that they study the morals of medicine. It's usually the ethics of medicine. The same thing in
law, they might study the ethics of it. .Let's continue. Morals can vary from one
society to another or even within the same society. For example, many
conservatives the US. may consider abortion to be immoral, but the liberals may consider it to be okay . So this is
even within the same society you have you may have different people have
different morals of what they believe is right and what they believe is wrong. And
of course, in other countries like for example maybe in in India, they think
cows are sacred. You can't eat a cow. So they might think that if you, or somebody
else ate a cow that might be immoral. So clearly in different countries, they have sometimes
have varying morals. But even within the same country, you could have varying
morals. So morals is more related to your personal beliefs of what you think is
right and wrong. All right. Let's continue here ethics focuses more on correct
conduct. Conduct is a more formal word for behavior. Of someone in a professional situation, for example many
people would consider it to be unethical for a psychiatrist to start a romantic
relationship with his or her patient. Yeah now, in this situation, If, as long as the
psychiatrist or the patient is not married, it may not be considered immoral. If they're
both consenting adults, you may not consider it immoral but you would
consider it to be unethical. Why is it unethical ? Well, for a number of reasons. You
don't know if a psychiatrist can really treat the patient the way he's supposed
to treat the patient if he's having a romantic relationship. It would probably
interfere with his judgment, and there's a very good chance that you might really
mess up or screw up the patient even more. So this would really be something
that's considered unethical to do. Or I mean, you could think of it the same way
in a university teacher was having an affair with one of these students. Again
who's maybe above 18 or 19 years old so they might be considered an adult. But
because he's in the class and, and he has to give her a grade, this would
definitely be considered unethical. Again, assuming that both were consenting
adults and neither one was married. Some people might not consider it immoral.
Let's continue here. It would also be considered unethical for a doctor to not try to save a critical
patient or I should say a patient that's in critical condition. Just so he could
use his body parts for other patients waiting for donated organs.
Yeah I remember I listened to an interview once of a doctor who said
sometimes doctors do this. If you know they came in with a
patient using critical condition and they think well you know maybe there's
only 30% chance you could save this patient for example. They think well you
know maybe don't try so hard. Maybe it might be easier to sell those organs
give his organs to somebody else. In this sort of sense, we might say that the the
doctors playing God. This would definitely be considered to be unethical. I don't
know maybe some people might even consider it immoral at the same time. So
sometimes it could you could cross the line for both. But like the other
examples I gave it might just be unethical but may not be immoral. Or
let's take the last one. If a company knowingly had poisonous
substances in their food products and they still produce them and sold them,
that would be unethical. Definitely. That would be unethical business practices. Probably it would also cross the line
into illegal. Some of these may be illegal some of these may not be illegal.
This, this one could possibly be immoral at the same time. But again, we usually
use unethical really in reference to conduct, especially a conduct of
professional people, in businesses or in law, in medicine where you know this is
their. this is their decisions that they have to make and morals focuses more on
your personal belief of what you think is right and wrong. And like they say, morals can vary but even some people
that may like here, where You might have conservatives and liberals they may have
different ideas about what's immoral, Both of them may consider it unethical
for a psychiatrist to have a romantic relationship with their patient. So they
may even agree on that. Anyway, I hope this kind of clarifies it for you. I hope
you can kind of clearly see more of a difference of how we might use the two.
Okay. Anyway I hope it's informative. Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.