[adrianmonk]

You're probably thinking like a consequentialist[1], but they're thinking like deontologists[2]. They are two totally different philosophical viewpoints on how you determine what is ethical.

Consequentialism says you look at something's effects and work backward from there. Deontology says you do it by interpreting some moral code. (Usually one received by divine revelation from a source wiser than you, which is why you'd believe you should do it that way.)

Obviously you're free to reject deontological ethics, but It's more accurate to say "I disagree with how they do ethics" than to say "what they're doing is not ethics".

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology

[LegitShady]

if any arbitrary rule becomes ethics, then everything is ethics and nothing is ethics. Don't read outside becomes ethics, don't eat while standing becomes ethics, anything you can think of becomes ethics, and thus loses all meaning as ethics.

So I think its fair to say "random rules aren't ethics" instead of your qualification, which is what you get when you're so mired in the names of things you don't think that people can make statements on whether something is ethics or not, which is outright not true.

[adrianmonk]

> you don't think that people can make statements on whether something is ethics or not

Ethics are subjective, not objective. I think people can make statements on whether something fits within their definition of ethics.

If you can think of an objective way to define ethics, one that all reasonable people operating in good faith would agree with once they heard it, then you'll have done something no philosopher has ever achieved.

Ethics are a function of values. First you place values on different things, like happiness or virtue or the preservation of life or obedience to god (if you think there is one). Then you work out the implications of how those values influence the decisions you make, and then you have ethics.

As long as you're doing this process, it's ethics. It's somewhat analogous to math in that once you define some axioms, then you can do math. Different people might choose different axioms, after which they won't agree on everything, but they're both still doing math.

[antibasilisk]

Except that religious rules aren't 'random rules', they're believed to be of divine origin, there's no meaningful distinction between 'divine rules' and 'divine ethics', but there is a distinction between 'rules' and 'ethics'.

[LegitShady]

I was referring to deontology