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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.
Statements of value (normative or prescriptive statements), which encompass ethics and aesthetics, and are studied via axiology. This barrier between fact and value, as construed in epistemology, implies it is impossible to derive ethical claims from factual arguments, or to defend the former using the latter.
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.
Social Psychologist Icek Azjen theorized that subjective norms are determined by the strength of a given normative belief and further weighted by the significance of a social referent, as represented in the following equation: SN ∝ Σn i m i , where (n) is a normative belief and (m) is the motivation to comply with said belief.
Descriptive theories are often investigated in empirical psychology while philosophy tends to focus more on normative issues. This division also reflects how different these two types are investigated. [6] [46] [16] [47] Descriptive and normative theorists usually employ different methodologies in their research.
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 ...
As an example, scientific "truths" are considered objective but are held tentatively, with the understanding that more careful evidence and/or wider experience might change matters. Further, a scientific view (in the sense of a conclusion based upon a value system) is a value judgment that is socially constructed based upon rigorous evaluation ...
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]