Morality or Ethics: Real Differences or Mere Semantics?

Hosted by CEVI at the University of Gent in association with CAPPE, University of Brighton

Anglophone philosophy began to supplant discussions of morals with deliberations on ‘ethics’ in the 1980s. In reaction to both assertions of a ‘primacy’ of morality by established interests and competing claims for either moral universalism or moral relativism, ‘morality’ fell out of favour, to be replaced by ‘ethics’. Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is the seminal text representing this shift. In a similar vein, critical theorists influenced by Habermas have used a distinction between ethics and morality to rethink the ethical limits of particular communities, a defence of moral universalism that has come to be widely questioned in recent years.

At the same time, however, these moves - whatever their original merits - have been made problematic as both the elusiveness of the concept of ‘ethics’ and the business of ‘doing ethics’ proliferate so wildly that they have arguably become uselessly empty. Ethics is everywhere - in the media, in politicians’ “policies” and even in the market; and codes of conduct and  organisational policies are replete with ethics. Consider for example the development of ‘professional ethics’, ‘research ethics’, ‘business ethics’, public service integrity and standards and ‘bio-medical ethics’. While these sound differently eccentric from ‘getting the morality right’, they constitute a contemporary mantra influencing political standards, policy and professional practice.

The result is that ‘ethics’ comes with as much baggage - different though that baggage is - as ‘morality’. The contemporary mantra of ‘getting the ethics right’ obscures and impedes thinking about the good, the right and the just no less effectively - perhaps more effectively? - than the moralism of ‘morality’.

This workshop thus seeks to:

• explore and describe the conceptual and linguistic distinctions between ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’; place the phenomena of the use of these two concepts in their context and explore the impasses they present in juxtaposition; and
• begin to find ways to move beyond these impasses to make possible a clear consideration of what it might mean to say something is an ethical or a moral problem that avoids both moralism and the empty formulae of ethics - or to make clear why this cannot be done.

A fee of 120 Euros will be charged for administration, conference pack, refreshments and lunches for both days. There may be a publication arising from this project but this is not a
primary intention of the workshop and will only be considered after the workshop has taken place.

All enquiries should be sent to all three of the organisers:

Prof. Bob Brecher, CAPPE, University of Brighton - [email protected]
Prof. Tom Claes, Director, CEVI, Ghent University - [email protected] 
Paul Reynolds, Edge Hill University - [email protected]