Today, our idea of right and wrong is rooted in one fundamental idea: Never interfere in another person’s life. Many people see ethics as more or less reducible to this idea. Your only duty to other is to avoid causing them harm or inconvenience.

The ‘Eendracht’ and Other Ships of the Dutch Fleet, by Willem van de Velde II. Image via Glasgow Life Museums.

Many people draw a particular distinction between morality and ethics. Both of them have broadly the same goal—doing the right thing—but they each seem to be applied to different parts of life.

The Division of Ethics and Morality

Most people who see a difference between the two argue that ethics govern how we relate to each other, while morality is a sort of personal code of right and wrong. Ethics would tell you things like you can’t steal from someone or you can’t lie to people.

In general, people seem to think that ethics covers those rules that everyone must follow, while morality covers those rules that we can ignore. Nobody is allowed to kill or steal as they please, so nobody can break those ethical laws. Few, however, would argue that it’s an ethical violation for someone to be an alcoholic spending all their time drunk at home. So long as that person doesn’t hurt anyone else by their alcoholism, it’s not an ethical violation, even if most people would say it’s a moral one.

It seems, then, that ethical standards are those universal rules that we all have to follow to keep society functioning, while moral laws are what you personally see as important for life. Ethics are necessary because they are essential as a practical way to keep people together in society.

What Role Does Morality Have?

From this perspective, morality is more or less inessential. It’s something that you’re free to choose if you would like and free to ignore otherwise. What someone does in their own life isn’t your business, so long as you’re not impacted by their choices.

Importantly, in this view, ethics is almost exclusively about what you can’t do. Ethics can prohibit a lot of things, but it struggles to say that there’s anything you have to do. Most people would agree that we can’t demand that everyone be charitable or go out of their way to help others, though we can easily demand that people not hurt others.

The oughts of what you should do are more often reserved to morality. We might say that everyone ought to be charitable or kind, but we struggle to say that this is strictly required of people. We’re not comfortable with enforcing these oughts as demands.

The Limited Scope of Morality

In most cases, morality concerns itself with virtue. Things like wisdom, charity, or self-control are all regarded as problems for morality and not ethics. It’s good for people to pursue these things, but we can’t give them the same importance that we give basic ethical laws.

What should we make of a moral landscape like this? What happens when we can only take ethics to be a matter of prohibiting harmful actions without necessarily encouraging good behavior?

The Analogy of the Ships

The author CS Lewis once offered an analogy to try to understand how it is that what we’d call morality and ethics are united. He compared people in society to a fleet of ships all sailing beside each other. Naturally, it’s imperative to keep these ships in order to stop them from crashing or throwing each other off course. What’s the best way to do this?

The simplest thing to do would be to issue orders to the whole fleet. You can tell each of them to try to maintain a certain distance from all other ships, to follow certain routes and directions, or to signal each other in a certain way when changing course.

In this analogy, the commands for the whole fleet are like ethical standards. They can tell the ships what to avoid and give them a broad direction: Don’t make a sudden change of course without informing others, remain in communication with the ships close to you, try to sail to this destination, and so on.

The Internal Order of the Ships

However, none of these orders can be carried out if the ships are in disarray. A crew that can’t send or receive communications, can’t chart their course properly, or can’t keep up with the mechanical repairs and maintenance necessary to keep the ship on track will inevitably fail to keep to these orders.

If all these ships lack internal order and coherency, they’re doomed to crash and lose their way. No number of orders can stop poorly run ships from throwing each other off course and colliding. There has to be a well-run crew putting these orders into action.

This internal order of a ship is analogous to virtue. A crew that excels at all the duties of their ship, from communications to engineering, will no doubt carry out the admiral’s orders without any issue. Such a ship will remain on course perfectly and even keep other ships on course even if their crews are out of order.

The Need for Ethical Restrictions

Now, this analogy should make it clear why we can’t ignore virtues and personal morality when talking about ethics. The only way we can hope to carry out those ethical orders is if we’re all in solid internal order ourselves. Otherwise, we’re just letting fate decide whether these laws will be upheld.

Lewis did add another important qualification to this analogy: It becomes much more difficult to keep the fleet in order when everyone has a different direction. If we’re all in one group headed to one destination, a few orders might be enough to get things along. But in real life, there’s a great deal of disagreement and difference about how we should act and what we should pursue.

A good crew, then, must be capable of navigating the ocean even as other ships go in different directions. And there must be rules in place to help these different ships deal with each other—these are analogous to our own ethical standards. There must be a good mix of internal order and standards for society as a whole if we’re to navigate safely alongside each other.

Ethics and morality, then, are not two separate things, but two necessary tools to help us find our way through the world. One without the other will simply fall apart. We need both to find our way across the wide seas of the happy life.