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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • Neat! I’m gonna come back to this once I’ve finished work. I was using the OED definitions and understanding:

    Ethics – Rules of conduct in a particular culture or group recognised by an external source or social system. For example, a medical code of ethics that medical professionals must follow.

    Morals – Principles or habits relating to right or wrong conduct, based on an individual’s own compass of right and wrong.

    But this idea of an Aristotelian understanding of ethics vs morals is fascinating. Thank you for the link :-D

    Also it is not obvious from your original comment that English is a secondary language for you <3 French is on my bucket list, but I want to learn basic German first. Both for etymological reasons primarily


  • I’m gonna be a pedant here. I understand (I think) what you’re trying to express and differentiate. It’s just the words aren’t perfectly accurate.

    “Personal” ethics are morals. Ethics are community based standards or principles, morals are personal standards. Some people equate morals to religious guidelines or principles, but morals don’t have to be religious (nor do distinctions of good and evil, right and wrong). Personal understanding of what is right or wrong is a moral standing. It is possible to have morals (personal belief) based on ethics (community standard), but they are still morals.

    IMO, anyway.

    Morals can be principally driven, and often are even in people that don’t understand the principle that underlies an ethical standard. For instance, a conscientious objector might still defend themselves or others from personal violence. In this case the underlying principle is one of, say, political neutrality, or perhaps political opposition, not pacifism. And yet the person themselves might not be able to put into words why is okay to use violence one on one, but not militarily. I’m rambling

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  • So I got curious and went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Here’s the first paragraph from the apple butter article:

    The roots of apple butter lie in Limburg (Belgium and the Netherlands) and Rhineland (Germany), conceived during the Middle Ages, when the first monasteries (with large orchards) appeared. The production of the butter was a perfect way to conserve part of the fruit production of the monasteries[1] in that region, at a time when almost every village had its own apple-butter producers. The production of apple butter was also a popular way of using apples in colonial America, well into the 19th century.

    So yeah, apple butter has roots in Germany, at least for central Europe. However, other fruit butters have other origins, such as Lekvar and Powidi, as you mentioned. At the same time Latwerge and Apfelkraut were developing in Germany, monasteries in the British Isles were also developing apple butter as a preservation technique. It seems the tradition/technique developed in parallel as a communal way of preserving fruit.

    Since grandma’s recipe included a sweetener it likely has its roots in the British Isles, where honey would be added to the preserves as a sweetener. Her apple tree produced a fairly sour soft apple, which also would inform that decision. The pies were amazing