What term best describes principles and standards that influence our behavior towards others?

Consistency—the absence of contradictions—has sometimes been called the hallmark of ethics. Ethics is supposed to provide us with a guide for moral living, and to do so it must be rational, and to be rational it must be free of contradictions. If a person said, "Open the window but don't open the window," we would be at loss as to what to do; the command is contradictory and thus irrational. In the same way, if our ethical principles and practices lack consistency, we, as rational people, will find ourselves at a loss as to what we ought to do and divided about how we ought to live.

Ethics requires consistency in the sense that our moral standards, actions, and values should not be contradictory. Examining our lives to uncover inconsistencies and then modifying our moral standards and behaviors so that they are consistent is an important part of moral development.

Where are we likely to uncover inconsistency? First, our moral standards may be inconsistent with each other. We discover these inconsistencies by looking at situations in which our standards would require incompatible behaviors. Suppose, for example, that I believe that it is wrong to disobey my employer, and also believe that it is wrong to harm innocent people. Then suppose that one day my employer insists that I work on a project that might cause harm to innocent people. The situation reveals an inconsistency between my moral standards. I can either obey my employer or I can avoid harming innocent people, but I cannot do both. To be consistent, I must modify one or both of these standards by examining the reasons I have for accepting them and weighing these reasons to see which standard is more important and worth retaining and which is less important and in need of modification.

A more important kind of inconsistency is that which can emerge when we apply our moral standards to different situations. To be consistent, we must apply the same moral standards to one situation that we apply to another unless we can show that the two situations differ in relevant ways. I might believe, for example, that I have a right to buy a home in any neighborhood I wish, because I hold that people should be free to live wherever they choose. Yet, I am among the first to oppose the sale of the house next door to a group of mentally retarded persons. But what is the difference between the two situations that justifies this difference in treatment? What is the difference that makes it all right for me to buy a home in any neighborhood, but not them?

There is another sense in which the need for consistency enters into ethics. We might hold consistent moral standards and apply them in consistent ways, but we may fail to be consistent in who we are as individuals. We often use the word "integrity" to refer to people who act in ways that are consistent with their beliefs. Here consistency means that a person's actions are in harmony with his or her inner values. Polonius, a character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, points out--perhaps with some exaggeration--how critical such integrity is to the moral life when he says to his son, Laertes:

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Consistency in our lives also implies an inner integrity. It may be the case that a person's inner desires are allowed to conflict with each other. For example, a desire to be courageous or honest may be contradicted by a desire to avoid the inconvenience or pain that courage or honesty often requires. Allowing such a conflict is self-defeating because these desires are contradictory. To achieve consistency, we must work to shape our desires to produce a kind of internal harmony.

So central is consistency to ethics that some moralists have held that it is the whole of ethics. They have argued that if people consistently treat all human beings the same, they will always act ethically. Ethical behavior, they argue, is simply a matter of being consistent by extending to all persons the same respect and consideration that we claim for ourselves. The Bible itself seems to imply that ethics consists of nothing more than consistency with the words: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you: this is the whole Law and the prophets." (Matt. 7:12) This biblical verse sometimes has been interpreted as meaning that all of morality can be summed up in the requirement to avoid contradictions between what one thinks is appropriate for others and what one thinks is appropriate for oneself.

But is consistency all there is to ethics? We may be perfectly consistent with respect to our moral principles and values, yet our principles may be incorrect and our values misplaced. We may even be consistent in treating others as we treat ourselves, but this kind of consistency would hardly be the mark of a moral life if we happen to treat ourselves poorly.

We might say that while consistency is surely not sufficient for ethics, it is at least necessary for ethics. Ethics requires that there be consistency among our moral standards and in how we apply these standards. Ethics also requires a consistency between our ethical standards and our actions, as well as among our inner desires. Finally, ethics requires that there be consistency between how we treat ourselves and how we treat others.

Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer

Ethics is based on well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.

Some years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, "What does ethics mean to you?" Among their replies were the following:

"Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong.""Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs.""Being ethical is doing what the law requires.""Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts."

"I don't know what the word means."

These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the views many people have about ethics are shaky.

Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical.

Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the devout religious person. Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion.

Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical.

Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in society can deviate from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good example of a morally corrupt society.

Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then conform my beliefs to whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an ethical issue by doing a survey. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist.

What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons.

Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.

This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics IIE V1 N1 (Fall 1987). Revised in 2010.