[ClarityGuy]

You could argue that in a corrupt system, ethics tends to work against the interests of that system... but I'd say at the civilizational level they're indispensable, and going back to Aristotle ethics is rooted at the civilizational level (or some would say at the God-and-man level with necessary implications for civilization).

A lot of our relatively new institutions are set up to run like perpetual-motion machines with voracious appetites constrained only by positive law -- so much for those institutions. What we really need is to recognize the many ways in which we've lost our bearings plus a cooling-off period that allows us to search for them again.

[FlyingBears]

This is a conjecture that ethics emanates from the whole of society and somehow keeps the things from falling apart and then explains it to have cyclical nature. I don't think ethics exists anywhere other than impressionate minds and words on paper.

[bigbadfeline]

> I don't think ethics exists anywhere other than impressionate minds and words on paper.

Same as law. The only difference is enforcement.

> This is a conjecture that ethics emanates from the whole of society and somehow keeps the things from falling apart

If something doesn't emanate from the whole of society and doesn't keep it from falling apart - the society will fall apart and seize to exist as a whole. We may call that "something" ethics just to give a clear meaning to that word and repair some of the immeasurable damage done to it by modern philosophy. Only then ethics can be used as one of the foundations of law.

> and then explains it to have cyclical nature.

The hopes of self-repairing cyclical nature are a coping mechanism that seeks to avoid the reality of self-destructive cycles - the repairs are never complete, destruction accumulates until repairs are no longer possible.