Correction: What's the difference between "morals" and "ethics"? Answer: Morals define personal character, while ethics stress a social system in which those morals are applied. In other words, ethics point to standards or codes of behavior expected by the group to which the individual belongs.

no idea, as i don't have either

Well, people write whole books on the subject and they never seem to exhaust all the aspects of this dichotomy (how else could they satisfy the book prices, huh?). Anyway, for the purpose of learning a language, Jura already pretty much nailed the answer, so I will attempt a rather touchy-feely answer (interpretation of what she already stated). First, moral/ethical is the adjective pair corresponding to the morals/ethics noun pair. Then regarding the meaning, one can look at the difference between them in multiple ways: 1. Subjective/Objective: As Jura already suggested, morals have more to do with subjective choices, based on a personal outlook, originating from within; in contrasts, ethics are a sum of laws, if you want, that have been objectified by a collective agreement. In other words, ethics usually denote laws/guidelines of behavior that an entire community agrees upon, while morals come from within and are expressed (and they also determine) directly in the choices an individual makes. 2. Concrete/Abstract: Ethics are usually a matter of study in some dusty rancid academic halls, where old musty people debate them ad nauseam. They belong very much to the domain of intellectual pursuit, and if they eventually manage to influence our choices they make it indirectly through the intellectual layer: because I know what is good (after all, I studied it in the ethics class), I will obey the ethical rule and therefore make the right decisions (based on how close to those ethical rules these choices are). Morals are more concrete, down to earth. They live in the world of immediate choices and they have a close relationship to (lo and behold) our emotions. When one is amoral, we think that the person is weak or suffers from a character flaw, but when a person lacks ethics we think the person is either ignorant of what is ethical or they rebel against the commonly agreed upon ethical rules. One could go on and on about this, but I will stop here before I ruin everything (if I haven't already). I will just add that in normal daily usage, one can often see that the line between ethics and morals is blurred and we very often find one word used in the other's place (so much for the sharp distinction above).

I think that ethics should descend from moral principles. Of course where an agreed upon ethics (behavior) is reached things will go much smoother almost for everybody.