Morals are innate and learned emotional responses to events, situations, and ideas. We often call it moral revulsion. As in, we are uneasy when we see a man beating his wife, a worker kicking a chicken, or when we see an entire population killed in genocide. Morals obviously exist. They exist for everybody, but they are not the same for everyone. As HP perceived, I do not believe in moral absolutism.

Ethics on the other hand are what Rushworth Kidder called the balances between “right versus right.” In other words, ethics are not behavioral, they are not theological, they are not cultural, but they are all these things. They are the balance between competing moral systems.

Wikipedia has a very good article entitled Simple View of Ethics and Morals.

Maybe the distinction is obvious to you guys, but for me it was revolutionary. Culture Jam gave me a lot to think about concerning rationality and morality. His posts convinced me that rationality and morality are both necessary when making policy. That without morality guys like Adolf and Benito can make appealing rational arguments for genocide.

Do I want genocide? I do not want genocide.

I think it’s fair to call World War II a moral war. We fought it because we were morally revulsed at the mass killing of the Jews and the prospect of what would follow.

And so I figured in my simple little brain that morality is just as necessary as rationality in setting policy.

But today I realize that Fascism is not morally wrong. It obviously wasn’t for the morals of all those who fought under Hitler and Mussolini. But it was ethically wrong because it did not accomodate human behavior, theological tradition, and cultural values.

So this is a very important distinction to me because I no longer believe that policy must take into consideration both rationality and morality, but rather rationality and ethics.

That makes an important foundation for my life-thesis: aruing for a transnational system of governance.

“The greatest question of our time is not communism versus individualism; not Europe versus America; not even the East versus West. It is whether men can live without God.” –Will Durant

PS: Your biases toward the relative side show through clearly since you seem to have a hard time spelling absolute (joking, of course).