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"Normative" is sometimes also used, somewhat confusingly, to mean relating to a descriptive standard: doing what is normally done or what most others are expected to do in practice. In this sense a norm is not evaluative, a basis for judging behavior or outcomes; it is simply a fact or observation about behavior or outcomes, without judgment.
Descriptive ethics, also known as comparative ethics, is the study of people's beliefs about morality. [1] It contrasts with prescriptive or normative ethics , which is the study of ethical theories that prescribe how people ought to act, and with meta-ethics , which is the study of what ethical terms and theories actually refer to.
An example of a normative economic statement is as follows: The price of milk should be $6 a gallon to give dairy farmers a higher standard of living. This is a normative statement, because it reflects value judgments; this specific statement makes the judgment that the benefits of the policy outweigh its costs. [2]
This rendered all facts about human action examinable under a normative framework defined by cardinal virtues and capital vices. "Fact" in this sense was not value-free, and the fact-value distinction was an alien concept. The decline of Aristotelianism in the 16th century set the framework in which those theories of knowledge could be revised. [6]
Likewise, normative ethics is distinct from applied ethics in that normative ethics is more concerned with 'who ought one be' rather than the ethics of a specific issue (e.g. if, or when, abortion is acceptable). Normative ethics is also distinct from descriptive ethics, as descriptive ethics is an empirical investigation of people's moral beliefs.
There is an important difference between norms and normative propositions, although they are often expressed by identical sentences. "You may go out" usually expresses a norm if it is uttered by the teacher to one of the students, but it usually expresses a normative proposition if it is uttered to one of the students by one of his or her ...
Descriptive ethics also has a historical dimension by exploring how moral practices and beliefs have changed over time. [191] Descriptive ethics is a multidisciplinary field that is covered by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history. Its empirical outlook contrasts with the philosophical inquiry into normative ...
These two notions being granted, it can be said that statements of "ought" are measured by their prescriptive truth, just as statements of "is" are measured by their descriptive truth; and the descriptive truth of an "is" judgment is defined by its correspondence to reality (actual or in the mind), while the prescriptive truth of an "ought ...