Ethics is not morality. Morality defines actions and inactions
and thresholds between - it is more or less binary. But when two
entities of different morality interact, there is a need for the
systems known as ethics. This private resolution of conflict is
the protocols of etiquette, up to the rigor of those used in the
process of diplomacy - at increasingly public levels. According
to Bernard Crick, the British political scientist, politics is
just ethics conducted in public with increasing numbers of other
less-interested players (http://hubley.com/cite/crick-1982.htm).
This points to a fuzzy boundary between abstraction and relation
as the basis of ethics, the subject of debates between Kohlberg
and Gilligan (summarized in http://hubley.com/cite/reed-1998.htm).
This also points back to Crick's point that "a free government
makes decisions politically, not ideologically" which I think is
another way of stating the relationship-based ethics. This point
was totally missed in the Principia Cybernetica entry on politics
and totalitarian government (which I critiqued in another
refutation http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/Annotations/TOTALFRE.0.html).
This linkage between ethics and politics needs to be made deeply,
as the first task of definition, else ideology prevails and the
party who is not capable of arguing within the abstraction must
be held more and more powerless as the abstractions mount... a
poor model for what *really* happens: the poor just shoot back.
One moralist, one bullet. Are Jesus, Gandhi, King, Rabin, and
all the many others not evidence that those who practice moral
behavior and relationship ethics become targets of the Beast of
abstractions? The ideological view of ethics must be revised...
