Mind your language | 6 May 2006

On BBC television’s Newsnight they have got one of their reporters to live for a year ‘ethically’. By this they do not mean that he must remain faithful to his wife, eschew false expenses claims, be patient with his children and observe a strict adherence to the truth, though no doubt these virtues already come second-nature to him. They mean he should be green.

This ethicality entails low-energy lightbulbs, cycling, recycling and the forswearing of aeroplane travel. What Aristotle’s opinion would be of this notion of ethics I leave to my neighbour Dr Jones, but it was certainly to the Greek philosopher that we owe the term. Aristotle’s book Ethics, ethika in Greek, using the plural of ethikos, derived from ethos, meaning ‘character’ or ‘manners’. Like other such plural terms — physics, maths, metaphysics, measles — we now use ethics as singular.