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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.
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. [2]
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 ...
Descriptive knowledge is knowledge that involves descriptions of actual or speculative objects, events, or concepts. Propositional knowledge asserts that a proposition or claim about the world is true. This is often expressed using a that-clause, as in "knowing that kangaroos hop" or "knowing that 2 + 2 = 4".
Normative propositions tend to evaluate some object or some course of action. Normative content differs from descriptive content. [3] Though philosophers disagree about how normativity should be understood; it has become increasingly common to understand normative claims as claims about reasons. [4] As Derek Parfit explains:
Universal prescriptivism (often simply called prescriptivism) is the meta-ethical view that claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable—whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts pertain.
In the philosophy of economics, economics is often divided into positive (or descriptive) and normative (or prescriptive) economics.Positive economics focuses on the description, quantification and explanation of economic phenomena, [1] while normative economics discusses prescriptions for what actions individuals or societies should or should not take.
Normative ethics is also distinct from descriptive ethics, as descriptive ethics is an empirical investigation of people's moral beliefs. In this context normative ethics is sometimes called prescriptive , as opposed to descriptive ethics .