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I think you may have these backwards, as I have often heard others on here refer to "morality" as something defined by governments and religious types (Moral majority, godly morals, etc), and "ethics" be something that is more objective and logical, without caring what someone's opinion of it is at the time.
It is the other way round.
Ethics is what is perceived good and noble by people living in a certain geographical area in a given specific time.
Morality is universal (independent of time and space), just like universal is law of gravity or Archimedes law. Morality is provable rationally (using logic) and empirically (using observations and experiments).
Yeah, I know it is a bit confusing; analogy:
- communists and other freaks acquired term ''anarchy''; during tens of years media convinced people that anarchy is (violent) chaos.
- politicians acquired scientific term ''law'' (laws exactly describe the world around us; laws are rationally and empirically provable) and convinced us that their coercive regulations are laws too, just by labeling their regulations as laws!
- religious freaks acquired term ''morality'' (we all heard BS phrases like ''religious morality'', etc in our lives) and deformed its universal meaning.
You are incorrect in your definitions of the terms "morality" and "ethics". Ethics is the larger subject within which morality is contained. Ethics is one of the four (or five, depending upon who you ask) main questions or structures of Philosophy.
Metaphysics = What is Real?
Epistemology = What is Truth?
Ethics = What is Good?
Aesthetics = What is Beauty?
The terms "morality" and "ethics" are often used interchangeably. While there are situations where the terms are close in meaning, in the truest and widest sense of the terms Ethics is the knife that divides "good" from "bad" whereas Morality is the interpretation of the results.
