If your host asks you at his next dinner party, “What is the difference between ethics and morals?” don’t say, “That’s easy. Ethics is abstract and morals is concrete.”
He shakes his head and says, “Nonsense. They are the same.”
Someone asks you: “Can your behaviour be ethical but immoral?”
You say, “Of course. The code of ethics of the advertising agency for which my friend Joe works permits wild exaggerations and negative advertising. Joe considers both immoral. But he follows order. The code is abstract. His behaviour is concrete.”
Your host says “Nonsense. Concrete means tangible. You can’t touch behaviour.”
You don’t give in easily.
“What about this?” you say. “I have another friend, Bill, who is a journalist. His paper’s code of journalistic ethics forbids him to give his sources to the police. Bill thinks that rule is immoral. He believes his duty to society prevails over his duty to his paper’s code of ethics.”
Your host says, “You are playing with words. You can reverse the two terms and it will make no difference whatsoever to your meaning.”
You go home and consult your etymological dictionary. You discover that Cicero coined the word moralis when he wanted to translate the Greek ethikos. He got it from the Latin mos. “Aha,” you say. “Mos. French – moers, meaning customs. I was right. Customs relate to behaviour.”
You remember that Spinoza wrote The Ethics, written towards the end of the seventeenth century. He must have the answer, you say. You Google it and discover that the book is no help at all. It goes far beyond questions of morality. It is a treatise defining his entire philosophy. He believed in a completely ordered world where Good and Evil do not have any absolute meanings. To him, the world as it existed looked imperfect only because of our limited perception. He believed evil was a lack of good, and falsehood a lack of truth. Error and falsehood arose from inadequate knowledge of God. Knowledge of evil arose from ideas that did not adequately refer to God. Knowledge of good arose from ideas that adequately referred to God.
So you spend the next few weeks asking all your friends. They all say something different. In the end you do what you should have done in the first place. You consult the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995) which says “Ethics is the science of morals in human conduct.”
Hmm.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage interprets that to mean that “morals form the basis of abstract principles whereas ethics are the application of these principles in human activity, especially in specific areas of activity such as law and medicine (professional ethics).”
Satisfied?
Eric Koch’s new book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
How about this: morals is a set of judgments made, sometimes one-off, of specific behavior set in context (i.e., not abstract but particular or situational), and ethics, per Concise Oxford Dictionary, is the “scientific” distillation of principles underlying such behavior cum moralistic judgment. I.e., morals involves human judgment, whereas ethics involves ordered principles. Similarly, morals is human, ethics are academic. Apples and oranges. Obviously, I’ve just made this up, and am totally unqualified. But that’s what I’d say to my dinner host now that you’ve enlightened me with background.
Why not try this on your dinner host:
Morals is human, ethics divine.
I was most interested in the details of the Armenian massacre. That it took place is beyond doubt. Simply read the 40 days of Musa Dagh. I had some Armenian clients who talked about the atrocities. I doubt whether any German intervention would have made any difference in the long run of history. The Zurich Agreement is far from enacted, because of Azerbaijan. Another trip for Hillary ? RK
interesting question! I thought ethics and morals were different.