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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.
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.
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 ...
Prescriptivity is a term used in meta-ethics to state that when an evaluative judgment or decision is made it must either prescribe or condemn. The word implies that these judgments (and the prescription and condemnation) logically commit us to certain ways of living.
Another example is descriptive business ethics, which describes ethical standards in the context of business, including common practices, official policies, and employee opinions. Descriptive ethics also has a historical dimension by exploring how moral practices and beliefs have changed over time. [191] Descriptive ethics is a ...
"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.
In general, the word prescriptive refers to refer to normative judgments, i.e. judgments about what is good or bad, such as: Prescriptive analytics, third and final phase of business analytics; Linguistic prescriptivism, the laying down of normative language rules; Prescriptive (normative) economics, branch of economics that incorporates value ...