Sexual Relations and the Difference between an Ethic and a Morality
The pretty much universal standard of ethical behavior in sexual relations is whether it involves ‘consenting adults’ — more broadly, consenting people of appropriate relative ages. Consenting adults can do many sexual things that violate this or that moral rule.
Adultery is regarded as ‘immoral’ about as universally as consensual behavior is deemed to be ethical. Some people regard homosexual relations as immoral, but they still distinguish between conduct that involves appropriately aged people and consent and conduct that does not. So ethical sexual behavior can be moral or immoral.
Distinguishing between ethical conduct and morality can serve us well more broadly in society. Morality is purely a matter of belief. An ethic as a standard of conduct is informed by some other condition(s) of human existence. Ethical sexual conduct has two conditions: appropriate ages and mutual consent.
We can expand on “mutual consent” to arrive at an ethic of justice for society, distinguishing such behavior from both unjust behavior and morality in general. It is a more particular expression of a broader concept: mutual respect. The only condition necessary for mutual respect is that all the beings involved are humans. (Conduct involving animals gets us back to beliefs — morality.) Most broadly, mutual respect means taking one another into account in all of our relations with one another.
For any reader who might be unaware of it, I have developed an approach to justice that has mutual respect as its ethic, its standard of conduct. It is summarized in a “5 min read” here in Medium.
We need an ethic of justice. We don’t currently have one. We only have “contests of power” (M. Foucault) among competing moralities based on differing beliefs, whether secular (ideological) or religious (theological).