Abstract
Many people believe that law and ethics are entirely different practices. Law is a highly institutionalized system, strictly regulating human conduct and consisting of largely contingent rules that every individual has—under the threat of coercion—to follow. Ethics, in contrast, is primarily a personal matter, allowing for ad hoc reasoning and demanding existential decisions. On such a view, the task I set myself in this book seems to be odd and misguided from the start. This chapter aims at rebutting this worry by showing that the parallels between ethics and law are, in fact, so manifold that it actually is promising to compare the two with regards to their methods. There are obvious differences between law and ethics; but a fruitful comparison between two items does not presuppose identity, only similarity. As I shall argue, there are striking similarities between ethics and law, especially between applied ethics and law.
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cf. (Pfordten 2010, 34 ff.), who traces this distinction between ethics and morality back to Plato and Aristotle and is surprisingly confident that it is nowadays ‘beyond any doubt for philosophers.’ Not only do I not follow this suggestion; many philosophers use alternative distinctions: For (Blackburn 1994), for instance, ethics designates the kind of practical reasoning that we find in virtue ethics of the Aristotelian kind, whereas morality designates other kinds of practical reasoning; (Habermas 1991, 108 f.) understands ethics as addressing questions of ‘the good life’ for an individual and morality as the norms that regulate societal coexistence; (Williams 1986) holds a very similar view, according to which morality is much narrower in scope than ethics; (Fox and Demarco 2000, 5) take morality to mean certain customary practices and ethics to refer to those rules or principles that people explicitly endorse.
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An exception may be found in (<Author-Query><!----></Author-Query>Gert et al. 2006, 5 ff.), who explicitly make the distinction that morality is a particular system of rules and principles, and ethics the theory of morality. They nonetheless gave their book the title Bioethics and primarily use the term ‘morality’ in it. ‘Ethics’ is rarely mentioned within the book; instead they talk about ‘moral theory’ when referring to what they actually defined as ethics.
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cf. (Steinbock 2007, 2 ff.; Toulmin 1982; Düwell and Steigleder 2003, 15 ff.; Grimm 2010, 66). I am telling the story of the development of applied ethics as starting with medical ethics. Tom Beauchamp reminded me that it might even be possible to trace this development back to earlier discussions of race and gender issues. The problem with the latter two is, I suppose, that they have not been taken as seriously as medical ethics in academic philosophy, for they addressed problems that did not affect the—predominantly male and Caucasian—academics themselves.
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Paulo, N. (2016). Ethics, Applied Ethics, and Law. In: The Confluence of Philosophy and Law in Applied Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55734-6_2
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