Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
"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.
Normative ethics is the study of ethical behaviour and is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates questions regarding how one ought to act, in a moral sense. Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics in that the former examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, whereas the latter studies the meaning of moral ...
An example of such can include being kind to your parents, or giving up the seat for a pregnant lady on the bus. These all showcase what some people feel should be done. Descriptive social norms on the other hand are norms agreed upon mental representations of what a group of people actually think or feel.
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 farmers deserve a higher living standard and that family farms ought to be ...
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]
Descriptive moral relativism holds that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, without passing any evaluative or normative judgments about this disagreement. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that moral judgments contain an (implicit or explicit) indexical such that, to the extent they are truth-apt, their truth-value ...
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 ...