The language of right/wrong has been used for both ethics and morality and both enter into the realm of taboo concepts. Therefore, non-ethical conditions can be elevated to higher levels than they deserve, conflicting and perverting otherwise easy ethical dilemmas.
A good example of such confusion would be the ‘debate’ over gay marriage in the US and other regions around the globe. There is nothing unethical with gay marriage. Two gay people marrying does not cause harm to anyone. Not allowing two gay people to marry does cause them harm; it is a denial of a basic human right. This is unfair. Both are conditions of ethics. It is unethical for society to deny gays the opportunity of marriage; Period.
I recognize that the act of gay love may conflict with some religious and/or cultural concepts of purity/sanctity regarding human intimacy. If those who oppose gay marriage were honest with themselves, they would acknowledge their opposition is rooted in queasiness or possibly even disgust. Body piercing may make you queasy; seeing someone pop a squat and shit in the woods may disgust you; neither are unethical acts, in fact the latter is quite natural.
Marriage in the cultural sense is an acknowledgment of intimacy and a formal commitment to lifelong fidelity. Marriage in the legal sense is not concerned with intimacy; it is concerned with the contractual side of marriage. Two intimate people living with one another gain wealth, property, share leases, loans, etc – basically have shared finances and other shared obligations including children. If and when the intimacy ends and the partners want to separate; the marriage contract is used to allow the state to arbitrate the distribution of wealth and other related legal matters. Gay marriage is primarily a legal issue; the denial of gay marriage is an ethical issue. This ‘debate’ is easy to resolve and should not exist.
This debate does make me aware of just how poor our collective understanding of ethics are. The people who hold “Moral Authority” tend not to understand ethics very well. Understanding the difference between ethics and morality provides some insight into why there is such a disconnect.
This is almost exactly the same comment as Lira under the “Polarity” post; so my response will be almost the same: Please be more specific. You first statement is contradictory. The second statement does not seem to represent an ethical condition; please elaborate.
Gay marriage should not be the ethical question …. the idea of marriage should be the ethical question. Is the binding generally contractual between 2 people an ethical practice? If a contract is required the relationship should be questioned as ethical.
Marriage is very useful as a sort of announcement from 2 people to society to say, this is the person I trust. Because I am married, my husband can visit me if I am sick in the hospital and he can make decisions about my care. If I die, he will get my things, which is what I intend, because we consider them “our” things, not his things or my things. If we broke up, we would have to split “our” things in some way, which makes sense because we can’t just duplicate all of them and it would be unethical for one of us to keep all of what we both worked together for. Because we have no fault divorce, I’m not actually forced to stay with this person if I don’t want to. The contract isn’t required to keep us together, and it doesn’t perform that function.
I would agree that having marriage without no-fault divorce is probably unethical because it results in people being trapped in harmful relationships. There are reasons that people in marriages in areas with no-fault divorce feel trapped in relationships but I don’t think this is specifically due to the concept of marriage and more to do with the logistics of dividing up property, child custody, friends, and all the other parts of a shared life after it’s no longer shared. That would happen anytime two people shared a life and then decided not to share it anymore, and I don’t think there’s anyway to totally avoid that loss. The best you can hope for is that both parties figure it out relatively amicably with a split they find mutually acceptable and fair.
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“Seeing someone pop a squat and shit in the woods may disgust you; neither are unethical acts, in fact the latter is quite natural.”
I’m not sure if you picked this because you knew this, but this is actually a really controversial statement to a lot of people. Since poop contains foreign microbes, potentially parasites, etc., the argument is that it can have a negative impact on the ecosystem and potentially harm wildlife. If animals have moral value and pooping in the woods could harm animals, and we don’t have to poop in the woods, then isn’t there a reasonable argument there that it would be better not to poop in the woods, for the same kind of reason it would be better not to eat animals? On the other hand it’s quite possible that digging out any kind of septic/sewage system would cause more harm to the animals (especially in a certain municipality near me, where all of the sewage is dumped straight into the ocean). On the third hand, a lot of harm is caused to humans when you have a bunch of them together without adequate sewage systems — what is the relative moral value of a human to a wildlife creature of an unknown species? I must poop somewhere, and I’m uncertain how to quantify which option causes the least harm, because it feels like comparing kumquats to bicycles and I don’t even know how many I have of each. This is semi tongue in cheek because it’s a silly example but it illustrates a real problem I have in trying to figure out what the more ethical course of action is sometimes.
Oh man, you really dove down the rabbit hole with that one. If one person defecates in the woods, all will be well. The water, sun, insects, and bacteria will do their magic and cause that shit to disappear. If thousands of people all defecate in the same spot in the woods, then yes, that’s a problem because it would be harmful to the local ecosystem. That is not premise of the analogy I was making however.
Great post. I’m curious about your take on shop owners who refuse service to gay people. Like you mentioned, it may cause “queasiness” to certain customers or shop owners themselves, but oftentimes people just use religion as an ethical reason. Is the act (refusal of service) considered unethical? Thanks.
Yes, the act of refusal of service (to a gay couple for “religious” reasons) is considered unethical.
The basic question of ethics is, “How would I like it if that was done to me?” This should be asked within the spheres of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.
Holding religious beliefs (or any other irrational beliefs for that matter) that conflicts with proper ethical behavior is not an excuse to act unethically.