Concept

Normative ethics

Overview

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 metaethics in that normative ethics examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, whereas meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts. Likewise, normative ethics is distinct from applied ethics in that normative ethics is more concerned with "what ought one be" rather than the ethics of a specific issue (e.g. if, or when, abortion is acceptable). 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. However, on certain versions of the view of moral realism, moral facts are both descriptive and prescriptive at the same time.

Most traditional moral theories rest on principles that determine whether an action is right or wrong. Classical theories in this vein include utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and some forms of contractarianism. These theories mainly offered the use of overarching moral principles to resolve difficult moral decisions.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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In their case, therefore, the moral law is an imperative, which commands categorically, because the law is unconditioned; the relation of such a will to this law is dependence under the name of obligation, which implies a constraint to an action, though only by reason and its objective law; and this action is called duty, because an elective will, subject to pathological affections (though not determined by them…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
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Henceforward we may allow the customary statement to stand. For it is generally difficult (if the distinction requires much reflection) for ordinary sound Understanding to distinguish from one another as heterogeneous the different principles which it confuses, and from one of which alone it actually draws conclusions with correctness. The moral ground of proof of the Being of God, properly speaking, does not merely…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
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The Real Criterion of Evolutionary Ethics. Mr. Spencer expressly recognizes that there exists (1) an ideal code of conduct, formulating the conduct of the completely adapted man in the completely evolved society. Such a code is called absolute ethics as distinguished from relative ethics--a code the injunctions of which are alone to be considered "as absolutely right, in contrast with those that are relatively right…
John Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics
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