Reading this piece and considering the role of ethics in media made me wonder about ethics and morality, and whether they are the same thing? Looking up the terms on www.dictionary.com ethics is described as “a system of moral principles”, and morals as “the distinction between right and wrong”. Sounds simple. They both seem to mean the same thing. However, this doesn’t quite hold true with me.
Following an ethical code suggests that the code is created by an institution, such as the ethical code of doctors or lawyers. However, morality is driven by what the individual has learnt to be right and wrong, and the teaching of this code would be down to society through education or from parents. Therefore it is possible for morality and ethics to clash in certain circumstances. For example, during my day job I work with a lot of defence lawyers and I often ask myself how they can do the job they do. Their professional code of ethics demands that the defence lawyer performs to the best of their ability to mitigate legal recourse against their client, and try to ‘get them off!’. However, the lawyer is also an individual with their own moral code and sense of right and wrong. They may be aware that their client is guilt of the most heinous acts, and possibly a continuing danger to the public. Their moral code would say that to support the client was wrong and that they should pay for their crimes and be prevented from re-offending, but their ethical code says that they must defend that client to the best of their ability.
In this case ethics and morality clash! In this sense, ethic are a set of rule that come with the force of regulation, and with that a threat of retribution from the institution if they are broken – for example, disbarring. However, morality is more of a question of conscience, and therefore the retribution comes from a spiritual centre.
Could we say that with the internet, the ethics is ‘netiquette’ because it is a set of rules set down by the institution? If this is the case, then this could explain why internet relations sometime degenerate to ‘flaming’ and ‘cyber bullying ‘because there is basically no redress for rule breaking. The virtual nature of the medium by its very nature means that the individual transgressor cannot be punished (except possibly by exclusion from offended groups, though the individual can simply ‘reinvent’ themselves and start all over again). If morality and ethics are different, and ethics can easily be overturned by the virtual nature of the internet, isn’t the same true of morality? Can we ignore our ‘inbuilt’ programming of what is right and wrong to misbehave on the internet and truly turn it into dystopia?
