Newton 1.3 Doing Good and Avoiding Evil Part I. Principles and Reasoning by Lisa Newton 3. We can live moral lives without knowing ethics, but we cannot discuss the morality of our lives, defend it, put it into historical context, without the intellectual tools to do so. Ethics provides those tools.
Morality is a precondition for ethics, in two ways.
First, morality, as a shorthand way of referring to all our transactions with each other, is the subject matter of ethics, just as our transactions with the physical world form the subject matter of science. Second, ethics is an activity, and any activity requires certain moral commitments of those who take part in it. We cannot do anything well without moral commitments to excellence, or anything for any length of time without the moral virtue of perseverence. The doing of ethics also has moral commitments appropriate to it. These commitments, to reason and to the moral point of view, can rightly be demanded of any person who would take ethics seriously.