Ética ou Moral, ou Ética e Moral? | Ethics or Morals, or Ethics and Morals?

Abstract

Ethics and morals are concepts simultaneously immersed today in two phenomena that contradict each other. On the one hand, the scientific literature assumes a total separation and distinction between them. On the other hand, they remain, currently but indiscriminately, used as synonyms. Now, what we defend in this exercise of reflection is that both this contradiction and the separation itself constitute the most explicit result of a truly profound and thus crucial crisis — or inversion — of values, adding that the contradiction derives from the separation itself engineered in the intellectual world; which, in turn, has as its ultimate manifestations the social turmoil and the set of demands for justice that multiply in the various fields of activity throughout society. In this sense, always resorting to classical authors and contributions distant from the modernists and postmodernists who commit this fracture, the thesis is concluded by suggesting that, in order to assume and resolve what turns out to be a psychosocial tension, it will always be, somehow, necessary to recover the civilizational pillars that bring together the various dimensions rooted in the complexity of reality; logic which is embodied, after all, in the very etymological genetics that fuse ethics and morals.

Keywords

• classical authors; crisis of values; ethics; modernists; morals; postmodernists