Differentiate between ethics and morality and explain the determinants of ethical actions.

Ethics and morality distinguished

• Morality is the set of habits, taboos, and duties a group already treats as binding — a family’s honour code, a village’s custom, a faith’s precept.
• Ethics is the reflective discipline that asks why those duties bind, whether they conflict, and what a free person ought to do when custom is silent or cruel.
• Morality can be unexamined: “this is how we have always treated a daughter-in-law.” Ethics must give reasons that another citizen can share.
• In administration, morality is the officer’s inner compass; ethics is the public standard — Constitution, service values, and a speaking order — against which that compass is checked.
• A person can be moral in a narrow circle (loyal to kin) and still unethical in office (the same loyalty becomes nepotism).
• Ethics is more universal in aspiration; morality is more local and historical. Kant’s kingdom of ends and a caste panchayat’s izzat are not the same scale.

Why the distinction matters for public life

• Laws can freeze a community’s morality (a discriminatory custom) or lift it (abolition of untouchability). Ethics is the tool that judges which freeze is just.
• Professional ethics (medical, judicial, civil service) is a second morality of the role, not a private piety.
• When two moralities clash — personal faith versus the file — ethics ranks them by public reason, not by volume.

Determinants of ethical actions

• Intention and motive: whether the act aims at a right end or only at applause, fear, or a cut; Kant treats a good will as the inner determinant.
• Consequence and harm: Mill’s utility asks who is helped or hurt; a clean motive that wrecks a widow’s pension is still a failed act.
• Means: an ethical end does not license a fabricated FIR, a communal rumour, or a tortured confession.
• Principle and duty: the rule one is willing to universalise — truth-telling, promise-keeping, non-injury — is a determinant independent of mood.
• Character and virtue: Aristotle’s habit of courage, temperance, and justice makes the right act more likely when the clock is short.
• Conscience: the inner court that resists a silent wrong; it is a determinant, not a complete law, because conscience can be tribal.
• Social and cultural context: family, caste, faith, and peer norms press the choice; ethics names them so they can be resisted when they injure dignity.
• Law, role, and institution: Conduct Rules, the Constitution, and the file’s mandate determine what an officer may do that a private person need not.
• Situation and facts: incomplete information, emergency, and power asymmetry change the ethical weight; a crowd lynching is not a seminar.
• Empathy and the worst-off: Rawls’s gaze and the Gita’s nishkama karma both ask whether the weak person in the scene is used as a means.

How the determinants work together

• No single determinant is enough: a legal act can still be cruel; a kind act can still be ultra vires.
• The public servant ranks them: Constitution and truth first, custom last when custom humiliates.
• Ethical action is the intersection of a right will, a right means, a justifiable consequence, and a role that can own the file in daylight.