PhilosophyMemes

Personally I think the true nature of ethics is both of these. I'm not someone that believes that an objectively correct set of moral laws exist, but rather that ethics are ultimately just reflections of our evolution driving us to like and dislike certain things, and simply a tool we make up to analyze how our actions and the actions of others affect those desires.

Without moral rules being a measurable property of the universe, we cannot simply discover what we "should" do by experiment and reason, as we do for physical laws, but if you arbitrarily define a goal, you can then use reason and knowledge of the world's workings to analyze if a given action furthers or hinders that goal. Different ethical systems can be phrased as such a goal (generally one with no achievable "end condition" so you can use them indefinitely), for example "follow this set of rules in all circumstances" or "maximize the happiness of sapient beings in the universe".

But you cant do this without deciding what "goal" to further, and you cant decide which one of those you "ought" to use without already having some sense of what you ought to do, and this is where I think one's "moral intuition" (or really just the combination of one's evolved desires and cultural preferences and things taught by one's parents and similar) comes in. That kind of thing can give you a general sense of things being right and wrong, but without being codified into something consistent.

So, you use that to select goals and axioms so as to create a consistent and defined system that fits your existing moral preconceptions. Under most circumstances, you don't really need to use it, because it fits your general feeling of right and wrong anyway. If it ends up clearly conflicting with your intuition in some circumstance, you think through the implications of both and either modify the system to make it produce the guidance you feel is appropriate, or you conclude that your intuition is being undesirably inconsistent and try to follow what your system says until what "feels" right to you changes. The system becomes a useful tool to you in cases where your intuition does not come to a clear conclusion. Rather than suffer indecision or risk a choice you might later decide was wrong, you can apply your system, figure out what action it prescribes, and follow that.

If you make no attempt to codify your morals, you cant use them very well in cases where nothing "feels" right, or where multiple mutually exclusive paths do, and risk undermining yourself if you decide very different things in similar situations. But in most everyday matters, you won't need that formalized version of them to figure out what to do.