What study of ethics recommends what we ought to maintain as our standards for moral valuation

Study of people's beliefs about morality

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. The following examples of questions that might be considered in each field illustrate the differences between the fields:

• Descriptive ethics: What do people think is right?
• Meta-ethics: What does "right" even mean?
• Normative (prescriptive) ethics: How should people act?
• Applied ethics: How do we take moral knowledge and put it into practice?

What is descriptive ethics?

Descriptive ethics is a form of empirical research into the attitudes of individuals or groups of people. In other words, this is the division of philosophical or general ethics that involves the observation of the moral decision-making process with the goal of describing the phenomenon. Those working on descriptive ethics aim to uncover people's beliefs about such things as values, which actions are right and wrong, and which characteristics of moral agents are virtuous. Research into descriptive ethics may also investigate people's ethical ideals or what actions societies reward or punish in law or politics. What ought to be noted is that culture is generational and not static. Therefore, a new generation will come with its own set of morals and that qualifies to be their ethics. Descriptive ethics will hence try to oversee whether ethics still holds its place.

Because descriptive ethics involves empirical investigation, it is a field that is usually investigated by those working in the fields of evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology or anthropology. Information that comes from descriptive ethics is, however, also used in philosophical arguments.[2][3]

Value theory can be either normative or descriptive but is usually descriptive.

Lawrence Kohlberg: An example of descriptive ethics

Lawrence Kohlberg is one example of a psychologist working on descriptive ethics. In one study, for example, Kohlberg questioned a group of boys about what would be a right or wrong action for a man facing a moral dilemma (specifically, the Heinz dilemma): should he steal a drug to save his wife, or refrain from theft even though that would lead to his wife's death?[4] Kohlberg's concern was not which choice the boys made, but the moral reasoning that lay behind their decisions. After carrying out a number of related studies, Kohlberg devised a theory about the development of human moral reasoning that was intended to reflect the moral reasoning actually carried out by the participants in his research. Kohlberg's research can be classed as descriptive ethics to the extent that he describes human beings' actual moral development. If, in contrast, he had aimed to describe how humans ought to develop morally, his theory would have involved prescriptive ethics.

References

1. ^ "comparative ethics | philosophy | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 2022-01-19.
2. ^ Greene, Joshua D. (July 2014). "Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics". Ethics. 124 (4): 695–726. doi:10.1086/675875. S2CID 9063016.
3. ^ Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter; Wheatley, Thalia; Sugden, Sherwood J. B. (2012). "The Disunity of Morality and Why it Matters to Philosophy". Monist. 95 (3): 355–377. doi:10.5840/monist201295319.
4. ^ Kohlberg, Lawrence, (1971). "Stages in Moral Development as a Basis for Moral Education." In C.M. Beck, B.S. Crittenden, and E.V. Sullivan, Eds. Moral Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

Further reading

• Hämäläinen, Nora (2016). Descriptive Ethics: What does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality?. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9. ISBN 978-1-137-58617-9.
• Coleman, Stephen Edwin, "DIGITAL PHOTO MANIPULATION: A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF CODES OF ETHICS AND ETHICAL DECISIONS OF PHOTO EDITORS" (2007). Dissertations. 1304. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1304

See also

• Experimental philosophy
• List of ethics topics
• Meta-ethics
• Moral reasoning
• Moral psychology

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Knowing the difference and relationship between them is important though, because they can conflict with one another. If the law conflicts with our personal values or a moral system, we have to act – but to do so we need to be able to tell the difference between them.

Ethics

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that aims to answer the basic question, “What should I do?” It’s a process of reflection in which people’s decisions are shaped by their values, principles, and purpose rather than unthinking habits, social conventions, or self-interest.

Our values, principles, and purpose are what give us a sense of what’s good, right, and meaningful in our lives. They serve as a reference point for all the possible courses of action we could choose. On this definition, an ethical decision is one made based on reflection about the things we think are important and that is consistent with those beliefs.

While each person is able to reflect and discover their own sense of what’s good, right, and meaningful, the course of human history has seen different groups unify around different sets of values, purposes and principles. Christians, consequentialists, Buddhists, Stoics and the rest all provide different answers to that question, “What should I do?” Each of these answers is a ‘morality’.

Morality

Many people find morality extremely useful. Not everyone has the time and training to reflect on the kind of life they want to live, considering all the different combinations of values, principles, and purposes. It’s helpful for them to have a coherent, consistent account that has been refined through history and can be applied in their day to day lives.

Many people also inherit their morality from their family, community or culture – it’s rare for somebody to ‘shop around’ for the morality that most closely fits their personal beliefs. Usually the process is unconscious. There’s a challenge here: if we inherit a ready-made answer to the question of how we should live, it’s possible to apply it to our lives without ever assessing whether the answer is satisfactory or not.

We might live our whole lives under a moral system which, if we’d had the chance to think about, we would have rejected in part or in full.

Law

The law is different. It’s not a morality in the strict sense of the word because, at least in democratic nations, it tries to create a private space where individuals can live according to their own ethical beliefs or morality. Instead, the law tries to create a basic, enforceable standard of behaviour necessary in order for a community to succeed and in which all people are treated equally.

Because of this, the law is narrower in focus than ethics or morality. There are some matters the law will be agnostic on but which ethics and morality have a lot to say. For example, the law will be useless to you if you’re trying to decide whether to tell your competitor their new client has a reputation for not paying their invoices, but our ideas about what’s good and right will still guide our judgement here.

There is a temptation to see the law and ethics as the same – so long as we’re fulfilling our legal obligations we can consider ourselves ‘ethical’. This is mistaken on two fronts. First, the law outlines a basic standard of behaviour necessary for our social institutions to keep functioning. For example, it protects basic consumer rights. However, in certain situations the right thing to in solving a dispute with a customer might require us to go beyond our legal obligations.

Secondly, there may be times when obeying the law would require us to act against our ethics or morality. A doctor might be obligated to perform a procedure they believe is unethical or a public servant might believe it’s their duty to leak classified information to the press. Some philosophers have argued that a person’s conscience is more binding on them than any law, which suggests to the letter of the law won’t be an adequate substitute for ethical reflection.