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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread May 16 - May 22, 2016 - Less Wrong
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One very important question a moral system has to answer is: how do you deal with people who won't adopt the moral system? Here are three basic answers:
Are there others? Which one of these options seems the best to you?
I think you mean ethics and not morals.
There are many ways to persuade people. You can control information flow. You can nudge people and optimize the nudging.
There are physical changes that affect moral behavior. A lot of variables from temperature to diet have effects on moral decision making in certain instances.
You can convince people through arguments.
Those terms are synonymous under standard usage.
Depends on your standards. Under my standard usage they are not synonyms. Morals specify the value systems (what you believe) and ethics specify practical decisions in real life (what you do).
Morals is definitely the right word here! The generally-recognized difference between morality and ethics is that the first implies either some kind of inner tendency in individuals (a 'moral core') or an expressly-given 'moral code'. By contrast, ethics refers to the problem of how moralities can play out in practical settings and even interact with each other - ethics does not pit "right versus wrong", but balances "right versus right", as Rushworth Kidder would put it. Although people will also use "ethics", or more properly "normative ethics", as an easy way of referencing values that are so widely shared among human societies that they can be considered near-universal - such as the values of honesty, fairness, good knowledge and a fully thriving life. But this is a derivative meaning and theoretically a less important one. (Anyway, yes, ethical argument is definitely one key way of balancing values, so you're on the right track there.)
Thus, OP's question is itself one of the key problems in ethics; on a larger scale, it also explains the origin of politics itself, as dispute resolution in complex societies becomes reliant on government-like institutions and broadly-acknowledged formal rules of 'fairness'.