Ethics versus Morals

Today, on course COMP 3620, *Professional Practices in Computer

Science* (actually, or to be more precisely, the course name

should be Computer Ethics), we continue talking about the

concepts about ethics vs morals but much deeper.

To tell you the truth, I still can’t figure out how helpful of

this course to your ability of computer science. Just think about

our course topic today. It’s hard to believe that knowing the

difference between ethics and morals will promote your

programming techniques. But undoubtedly, this course will totally

wash my mind of perspective of computer science to our society.

For example, without this course, I may never think about the

differences between the two term. Anyway, thinking is not a bad

thing, right?

Really, it’s such a hard thing to tell them apart exactly that

even our instructor can’t do it. So, rather than trying to

defining the two term for us, he chose to tell some properties

about them.

Before he really did that, he showed us a transprency from a

book, which tells the different between the two term by a

picture. There are some balloons floating above a small viliage.

The words under the picture said that morals are like the

passages of the villiage, while ethics are like the balloons in

the sky. That’s even more abstract for us so we treated it like a

joke.

Other than the properties of ethics and morals, what impressed me

was the examples from our instructor. The most impressive one is

about abortion. A woman comes to a hospital for abortion. Without

doing this, she will be very hard for her life. Even she is going

to die. But the doctor is a Catholic (Catholic don’t allow

abortion). For the doctor, abortion is morally wrong. But as a

doctor, he has the obligation to serve the patient. So abortion

is ethical not wrong.

Well, with this example, I feel better for the differences. But

it’s still hard to describe the differences. Maybe it makes you

to think. As I said before, thinking is always a good thing. Do

you agree with that?

《Ethics versus Morals》有1条评论

发表评论

此站点使用Akismet来减少垃圾评论。了解我们如何处理您的评论数据