Ethics vs morality

This blog is obviously about advocacy, but another constant underlying theme will be what I call ethics. It's ethics that got me into advocacy, and ethics that keeps me going. This needs some explanation.

Originally ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning character, or way of living, and I want to recall this sense of the word when I use it. Morality came from similar roots (in Latin), but to me over the years even though both words have become confused, morality has become much more associated with an idea of 'moral law'.

In talking about ethics I want to remember both that it means our way of life, and to distinguish it from laws and rules.

How can you see this in the blog?

1. I will write about things like humility, independence, violence, etc. We need to think about these things rather than make rules about them; we need to explore how we use these ideas in our lives and in our working practices. These ideas and others like them are the ground where an ethical practice can grow.
   
2. We need to understand these ideas in terms of stories, and we will never learn their lessons in the real world unless our bodies experience some kind of incorporeal transformation (you may well have already gone through this, I'm not trying to preach). Learning a definition of humility as an objective fact is not going to be any use, and I won't present ideas in these terms.
3. Laws are relatively closed - they can be changed, but it's not easy to do. This blog will on the contrary try to remain especially open. It is published openly, and its contents are openly reusable. It is also published 'on the fly', without much editing, warts and all. I'm not trying at all to say everything, just to open up conversations. I will inevitably make mistakes and say things that I will clarify or correct later.
4. You will see an interplay between ethics, practice and methodology: these all mean basically the same thing, but in slightly different contexts. Ethics is more about the way we live our lives; practice is more about how we act, what we do; and methodology is more about planning, tactics and strategy.

Is this a new way of looking at ethics?

No. Firstly, having learnt from some books about this way of thinking about ethics, I've noticed that actually this really is the way many people live their lives. This is especially true of people who haven't been too much damaged by education, or people who have been excluded from normal society for one reason or another. I think many of my readers will recognise what I'm saying, it's not that strange.

Secondly, I'm not an academic, but I have found that this approach is similar to the work of some of the very early pre-Socratic Greek philosophers as well as later writers including Lucretius (Roman), the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and people like Foucault and Deleuze and others more recently.

More down to earth, I recently saw a section in the Barefoot Doctor's Handbook for the Urban Warrior subtitled 'Morals make the moron' - this coming from a sort of modern Taoist perspective.