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Ethics vs. Morals: What's the Difference?

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What’s the Difference Between Morality and Ethics? | Britannica

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Written by

Cydney Grannan

Cydney Grannan was an Editorial Intern at Encyclopædia Britannica. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 2016.

Cydney Grannan

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Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.

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© Anatoli Styf/Shutterstock.com Generally, the terms ethics and morality are used interchangeably, although a few different communities (academic, legal, or religious, for example) will occasionally make a distinction. In fact, Britannica’s article on ethics considers the terms to be the same as moral philosophy. While understanding that most ethicists (that is, philosophers who study ethics) consider the terms interchangeable, let’s go ahead and dive into these distinctions. (Read Peter Singer's Britannica entry on ethics.) Both morality and ethics loosely have to do with distinguishing the difference between “good and bad” or “right and wrong.” Many people think of morality as something that’s personal and normative, whereas ethics is the standards of “good and bad” distinguished by a certain community or social setting. For example, your local community may think adultery is immoral, and you personally may agree with that. However, the distinction can be useful if your local community has no strong feelings about adultery, but you consider adultery immoral on a personal level. By these definitions of the terms, your morality would contradict the ethics of your community. In popular discourse, however, we’ll often use the terms moral and immoral when talking about issues like adultery regardless of whether it’s being discussed in a personal or in a community-based situation. As you can see, the distinction can get a bit tricky. It’s important to consider how the two terms have been used in discourse in different fields so that we can consider the connotations of both terms. For example, morality has a Christian connotation to many Westerners, since moral theology is prominent in the church. Similarly, ethics is the term used in conjunction with business, medicine, or law. In these cases, ethics serves as a personal code of conduct for people working in those fields, and the ethics themselves are often highly debated and contentious. These connotations have helped guide the distinctions between morality and ethics. Ethicists today, however, use the terms interchangeably. If they do want to differentiate morality from ethics, the onus is on the ethicist to state the definitions of both terms. Ultimately, the distinction between the two is as substantial as a line drawn in the sand.

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Difference Between Morals and Ethics (with Examples and Comparison Chart) - Key Differences

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Key DifferencesKnow the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Morals and Ethics

We greatly encounter moral and ethical issues, in our day to day life. Perhaps, these two defines a personality, attitude, and behavior of a person. The word Morals is derived from a Greek word “Mos” which means custom. On the other hand, if we talk about Ethics, it is also derived from a Greek word “Ethikos” which means character. Put simply, morals are the customs established by group of individuals whereas ethics defines the character of an individual.

While morals are concerned with principles of right and wrong, ethics are related to right and wrong conduct of an individual in a particular sitution. Many use the two terms as synonyms, but there are slight and subtle differences between morals and ethis, which are described in the article below.

Content: Morals Vs Ethics

Comparison Chart

Definition

Key Differences

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Examples

Conclusion

Comparison Chart

Basis for ComparisonMoralsEthics

MeaningMorals are the beliefs of the individual or group as to what is right or wrong.Ethics are the guiding principles which help the individual or group to decide what is good or bad.

What is it?General principles set by groupResponse to a specific situation

Root wordMos which means customEthikos which means character

Governed BySocial and cultural normsIndividual or Legal and Professional norms

Deals withPrinciples of right and wrongRight and wrong conduct

Applicability in BusinessNoYes

ConsistencyMorals may differ from society to society and culture to culture.Ethics are generally uniform.

ExpressionMorals are expressed in the form of general rules and statements.Ethics are abstract.

Freedom to think and chooseNoYes

Definition of Morals

Morals are the social, cultural and religious beliefs or values of an individual or group which tells us what is right or wrong. They are the rules and standards made by the society or culture which is to be followed by us while deciding what is right. Some moral principles are:

Do not cheat

Be loyal

Be patient

Always tell the truth

Be generous

Morals refer to the beliefs what is not objectively right, but what is considered right for any situation, so it can be said that what is morally correct may not be objectively correct.

Definition of Ethics

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the principles of conduct of an individual or group. It works as a guiding principle as to decide what is good or bad. They are the standards which govern the life of a person. Ethics is also known as moral philosophy. Some ethical principles are:

Truthfulness

Honesty

Loyalty

Respect

Fairness

Integrity

Key Differences Between Morals and Ethics

The major differences between Morals and Ethics are as under:

Morals deal with what is ‘right or wrong’. Ethics deals with what is ‘good or evil’.

Morals are general guidelines framed by the society E.g. We should speak truth. Conversely, ethics are a response to a particular situation, E.g. Is it ethical to state the truth in a particular situation?

The term morals is derived from a Greek word ‘mos’ which refers to custom and the customs are determined by group of individuals or some authority. On the other hand, ethics is originated from Greek word ‘ethikos’ which refers to character and character is an attribute.

Morals are dictated by society, culture or religion while Ethics are chosen by the person himself which governs his life.

Morals are concerned with principles of right and wrong. On the contrary, ethics stresses on right and wrong conduct.

As morals are framed and designed by the group, there is no option to think and choose; the individual can either accept or reject. Conversely, the people are free to think and choose the principles of his life in ethics.

Morals may vary from society to society and culture to culture. As opposed to Ethics, which remains same regardless of any culture, religion or society.

Morals do not have any applicability to business, whereas Ethics is widely applicable in the business known as business ethics.

Morals are expressed in the form of statements, but Ethics are not expressed in the form of statements.

Video: Morals Vs Ethics

Examples

If the son of a big politician has committed a crime and he uses his powers to free his son from legal consequences. Then this act is immoral because the politician is trying to save a culprit.

A very close friend or relative of an interviewer comes for an interview and without asking a single question, he selects him. This act is unethical because the selection process must be transparent and unbiased.

A grocer sells adulterated products to his customers to earn more profit. This act is neither moral nor ethical because he is cheating his customers and profession at the same time.

Conclusion

Every single individual has some principles which help him throughout his life to cope up with any adverse situation; they are known as ethics. On the other hand, Morals are not the hard and fast rules or very rigid, but they are the rules which a majority of people considered as right. That is why the people widely accept them. This is all for differentiating Morals from Ethics.

Ethics | Definition, History, Examples, Types, Philosophy, & Facts | Britannica

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ethics

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ethics

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Introduction & Top QuestionsThe origins of ethicsMythical accountsIntroduction of moral codesProblems of divine originPrehuman ethicsNonhuman behaviourKinship and reciprocityAnthropology and ethicsThe history of Western ethicsAncient civilizations to the end of the 19th centuryThe ancient Middle East and AsiaThe Middle EastIndiaChinaAncient and Classical GreeceAncient GreeceSocratesPlatoAristotleLater Greek and Roman ethicsThe StoicsThe EpicureansChristian ethics from the New Testament to the ScholasticsEthics in the New TestamentSt. AugustineSt. Thomas Aquinas and the ScholasticsThe Renaissance and the ReformationMachiavelliThe first ProtestantsThe British tradition from Hobbes to the utilitariansHobbesEarly intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and ClarkeShaftesbury and the moral sense schoolButler on self-interest and conscienceThe climax of moral sense theory: Hutcheson and HumeThe intuitionist response: Price and ReidUtilitarianismPaleyBenthamMillSidgwickThe Continental tradition from Spinoza to NietzscheSpinozaLeibnizRousseauKantHegelMarxNietzscheWestern ethics from the beginning of the 20th centuryMetaethicsMoore and the naturalistic fallacyModern intuitionismEmotivismExistentialismUniversal prescriptivismLater developments in metaethicsMoral realismKantian constructivism: a middle ground?Irrealist views: projectivism and expressivismEthics and reasons for actionNormative ethicsThe debate over consequentialismVarieties of consequentialismObjections to consequentialismAn ethics of prima facie dutiesRawls’s theory of justiceRights theoriesNatural law ethicsVirtue ethicsFeminist ethicsEthical egoismApplied ethicsEqualityAnimalsEnvironmental ethicsWar and peaceAbortion, euthanasia, and the value of human lifeBioethics

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What is ethics?The term ethics may refer to the philosophical study of the concepts of moral right and wrong and moral good and bad, to any philosophical theory of what is morally right and wrong or morally good and bad, and to any system or code of moral rules, principles, or values. The last may be associated with particular religions, cultures, professions, or virtually any other group that is at least partly characterized by its moral outlook.How is ethics different from morality?Traditionally, ethics referred to the philosophical study of morality, the latter being a more or less systematic set of beliefs, usually held in common by a group, about how people should live. Ethics also referred to particular philosophical theories of morality. Later the term was applied to particular (and narrower) moral codes or value systems. Ethics and morality are now used almost interchangeably in many contexts, but the name of the philosophical study remains ethics.Why does ethics matter?Ethics matters because (1) it is part of how many groups define themselves and thus part of the identity of their individual members, (2) other-regarding values in most ethical systems both reflect and foster close human relationships and mutual respect and trust, and (3) it could be “rational” for a self-interested person to be moral, because his or her self-interest is arguably best served in the long run by reciprocating the moral behaviour of others.Is ethics a social science?No. Understood as equivalent to morality, ethics could be studied as a social-psychological or historical phenomenon, but in that case it would be an object of social-scientific study, not a social science in itself. Understood as the philosophical study of moral concepts, ethics is a branch of philosophy, not of social science.ethics, the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles.(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Peter Singer.)How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? And what of the more particular questions that face us: is it right to be dishonest in a good cause? Can we justify living in opulence while elsewhere in the world people are starving? Is going to war justified in cases where it is likely that innocent people will be killed? Is it wrong to clone a human being or to destroy human embryos in medical research? What are our obligations, if any, to the generations of humans who will come after us and to the nonhuman animals with whom we share the planet?Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong.The terms ethics and morality are closely related. It is now common to refer to ethical judgments or to ethical principles where it once would have been more accurate to speak of moral judgments or moral principles. These applications are an extension of the meaning of ethics. In earlier usage, the term referred not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of inquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral philosophy.Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics, history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and applying these sets of principles to practical moral problems.

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This article, then, will deal with ethics as a field of philosophy, especially as it has developed in the West. For coverage of religious conceptions of ethics and the ethical systems associated with world religions, see Buddhism; Christianity; Confucianism; Hinduism; Jainism; Judaism; Sikhism. The origins of ethics Mythical accounts Introduction of moral codes When did ethics begin and how did it originate? If one has in mind ethics proper—i.e., the systematic study of what is morally right and wrong—it is clear that ethics could have come into existence only when human beings started to reflect on the best way to live. This reflective stage emerged long after human societies had developed some kind of morality, usually in the form of customary standards of right and wrong conduct. The process of reflection tended to arise from such customs, even if in the end it may have found them wanting. Accordingly, ethics began with the introduction of the first moral codes. Virtually every human society has some form of myth to explain the origin of morality. In the Louvre in Paris there is a black Babylonian column with a relief showing the sun god Shamash presenting the code of laws to Hammurabi (died c. 1750 bce), known as the Code of Hammurabi. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) account of God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses (flourished 14th–13th century bce) on Mount Sinai might be considered another example. In the dialogue Protagoras by Plato (428/427–348/347 bce), there is an avowedly mythical account of how Zeus took pity on the hapless humans, who were physically no match for the other beasts. To make up for these deficiencies, Zeus gave humans a moral sense and the capacity for law and justice, so that they could live in larger communities and cooperate with one another. That morality should be invested with all the mystery and power of divine origin is not surprising. Nothing else could provide such strong reasons for accepting the moral law. By attributing a divine origin to morality, the priesthood became its interpreter and guardian and thereby secured for itself a power that it would not readily relinquish. This link between morality and religion has been so firmly forged that it is still sometimes asserted that there can be no morality without religion. According to this view, ethics is not an independent field of study but rather a branch of theology (see moral theology).

There is some difficulty, already known to Plato, with the view that morality was created by a divine power. In his dialogue Euthyphro, Plato considered the suggestion that it is divine approval that makes an action good. Plato pointed out that, if this were the case, one could not say that the gods approve of such actions because they are good. Why then do they approve of them? Is their approval entirely arbitrary? Plato considered this impossible and so held that there must be some standards of right or wrong that are independent of the likes and dislikes of the gods. Modern philosophers have generally accepted Plato’s argument, because the alternative implies that if, for example, the gods had happened to approve of torturing children and to disapprove of helping one’s neighbours, then torture would have been good and neighbourliness bad.

Morality | Definition, Ethics, Comparative Ethics, Ethical Relativism, & Facts | Britannica

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morality

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Moral Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Moral TheoryFirst published Mon Jun 27, 2022

There is much disagreement about what, exactly, constitutes a moral

theory. Some of that disagreement centers on the issue of

demarcating the moral from other areas of practical

normativity, such as the ethical and the aesthetic. Some

disagreement centers on the issue of what a moral

theory’s aims and functions are. In this entry,

both questions will be addressed. However, this entry is about moral

theories as theories, and is not a survey of specific

theories, though specific theories will be used as examples.

1. Morality

1.1 Common-sense Morality

1.2 Contrasts Between Morality and Other Normative Domains

2. Theory and Theoretical Virtues

2.1 The Tasks of Moral Theory

2.2 Theory Construction

3. Criteria

4. Decision Procedures and Practical Deliberation

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1. Morality

When philosophers engage in moral theorizing, what is it that they are

doing? Very broadly, they are attempting to provide a systematic

account of morality. Thus, the object of moral theorizing is morality,

and, further, morality as a normative system.

At the most minimal, morality is a set of norms and principles that

govern our actions with respect to each other and which are taken to

have a special kind of weight or authority (Strawson 1961). More

fundamentally, we can also think of morality as consisting of moral

reasons, either grounded in some more basic value, or, the other way

around, grounding value (Raz 1999).

It is common, also, to hold that moral norms are universal

in the sense that they apply to and bind everyone in similar

circumstances. The principles expressing these norms are also

thought to be general, rather than specific, in that they are

formulable “without the use of what would be intuitively

recognized as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions”

(Rawls 1979, 131). They are also commonly held to be

impartial, in holding everyone to count equally.

1.1 Common-sense Morality

… Common-sense is… an exercise of the judgment unaided

by any Art or system of rules : such an exercise as we must

necessarily employ in numberless cases of daily occurrence ; in which,

having no established principles to guide us … we must needs

act on the best extemporaneous conjectures we can form. He who is

eminently skillful in doing this, is said to possess a superior degree

of Common-Sense. (Richard Whatley, Elements of Logic, 1851,

xi–xii)

“Common-Sense Morality”, as the term is used here, refers

to our pre-theoretic set of moral judgments or intuitions

principles.[1]

When we

engage in theory construction (see below) it is these common-sense

intuitions that provide a touchstone to theory

evaluation. Henry Sidgwick believed that the

principles of Common-Sense Morality were important in helping us

understand the “first” principle or principles

morality.[2]

Indeed, some theory construction explicitly appeals to puzzles in

common-sense morality that need resolution – and hence, need to

be addressed theoretically.

Features of commons sense morality are determined by our normal

reactions to cases which in turn suggest certain normative principles

or insights. For example, one feature of common-sense morality

that is often remarked upon is the self/other asymmetry in morality,

which manifests itself in a variety of ways in our intuitive

reactions. For example, many intuitively differentiate morality

from prudence in holding that morality concerns our interactions with

others, whereas prudence is concerned with the well-being of the

individual, from that individual’s point of view.

Also, according to our common-sense intuitions we are allowed to

pursue our own important projects even if such pursuit is not

“optimific” from the impartial point of view (Slote

1985). It is also considered permissible, and even admirable, for

an agent to sacrifice her own good for the sake of another even though

that is not optimific. However, it is impermissible, and outrageous,

for an agent to similarly sacrifice the well-being of another under the

same circumstances. Samuel Scheffler argued for a view in which

consequentialism is altered to include agent-centered prerogatives,

that is, prerogatives to not act so as to maximize the good (Scheffler

1982).

Our reactions to certain cases also seem to indicate a common-sense

commitment to the moral significance of the distinction between

intention and foresight, doing versus allowing, as well as the view

that distance between agent and patient is morally relevant (Kamm

2007).

Philosophers writing in empirical moral psychology have been working

to identify other features of common-sense morality, such as how prior

moral evaluations influence how we attribute moral responsibility for

actions (Alicke et. al. 2011; Knobe 2003).

What many ethicists agree upon is that common-sense is a bit of a

mess. It is fairly easy to set up inconsistencies and tensions

between common-sense commitments. The famous Trolley Problem

thought experiments illustrate how situations which are structurally

similar can elicit very different intuitions about what the morally

right course of action would be (Foot 1975). We intuitively

believe that it is worse to kill someone than to simply let the person

die. And, indeed, we believe it is wrong to kill one person to

save five others in the following scenario:

David is a great transplant surgeon. Five of his patients need new

parts—one needs a heart, the others need, respectively, liver,

stomach, spleen, and spinal cord—but all are of the same,

relatively rare, blood-type. By chance, David learns of a healthy

specimen with that very blood-type. David can take the healthy

specimen's parts, killing him, and install them in his patients, saving

them. Or he can refrain from taking the healthy specimen's parts,

letting his patients die. (Thomson 1976, 206)

And yet, in the following scenario we intuitively view it entirely

permissible, and possibly even obligatory, to kill one to save

five:

Edward is the driver of a trolley, whose brakes have just failed. On

the track ahead of him are five people; the banks are so steep that

they will not be able to get off the track in time. The track has a

spur leading off to the right, and Edward can turn the trolley onto it.

Unfortunately there is one person on the right-hand track. Edward can

turn the trolley, killing the one; or he can refrain from turning the

trolley, killing the five. (Thomson 1976, 206).

Theorizing is supposed to help resolve those tensions in a

principled way. Theory construction attempts to provide

guidance in how to resolve such tensions and how to understand

them.

1.2 Contrasts Between Morality and Other Normative Domains

1.2.1 Morality and Ethics

Ethics is generally understood to be the study of “living well

as a human being”. This is the topic of works such as

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which the aim of

human beings is to exemplify human excellence of character. The sense

in which we understand it here is that ethics is broader than morality,

and includes considerations of personal development of oneself and

loved ones. This personal development is important to a life well

lived, intuitively, since our very identities are centered on projects

that we find important. Bernard Williams and others refer to

these projects as “ground projects”. These are the

sources of many of our reasons for acting. For Williams, if

an agent seeks to adopt moral considerations, or be guided by

them, then important ethical considerations are neglected,

such as personal integrity and authenticity (Williams 1977; Wolf

1982). However, Williams has a very narrow view of what he

famously termed “the morality system” (Williams 1985).

Williams lists a variety of objectionable features of the morality

system, including the inescapability of moral obligations, the

overridingness of moral obligation, impartiality, and

the fact that in the morality system there is a push towards

generalization.

There has been considerable discussion of each of these features of

the morality system, and since Williams, a great deal of work on the

part of standard moral theorists on how each theory addresses the

considerations he raised. Williams’ critique of the

morality system was part of a general criticism of moral theory in the

1980s on the grounds of its uselessness, harmfulness, and even its

impossibility (Clarke 1987). This anti-theory trend was prompted

by the same dissatisfaction with consequentialism and deontology that

led to the resurgence of Virtue Ethics.

A major criticism of this view is that it has a very narrow view of

what counts as a moral theory. Thus, some of these approaches

simply rejected some features of William’s characterization of

the morality system, such as impartiality. Others, however,

Williams’ included, attacked the very project of moral

theory. This is the ‘anti-theory’ attack on moral

theorizing. For example, Annette Baier argued that

morality cannot be captured in a system of rules, and this was a very

popular theme amongst early virtue ethicists. On this view, moral

theory which systematizes and states the moral principles that ought to

guide actions is simply impossible: “Norms in the form of

virtues may be essentially imprecise in some crucial ways, may be

mutually referential, but not hierarchically orderable, may be

essentially self-referential” (Baier 220).

Robert Louden even argued that the best construal of virtue ethics

is not as an ethical theory, but as anti-theory that should not be

evaluated as attempting to theorize morality at all. (Louden

1990). According to Louden, moral theories are formulated

to a variety of reasons, including to provide solutions to problems,

formulas for action, universal principles, etc. Louden notes that this

characterization is very narrow and many would object to it, but he

views anti-theory not so much as a position against any kind

of moral theorizing, but simply the kind that he viewed as predominant

prior to the advent of Virtue Ethics. This is a much less severe

version of anti-theory as it, for example, doesn’t seem to regard

weightiness or importance of moral reasons as a problem.

Some of the problems that Williams and other anti-theorists have

posed for morality, based on the above characteristics, are:

Morality is too demanding and pervasive: that is, the view that

moral reasons are weighty indicates that we should be giving them

priority over other sorts of reasons. Further, they leach into

all aspects of our lives, leaving very little morally neutral.

Morality is alienating. There are a variety of ways in which

morality can be alienating. As Adrian Piper notes, morality might

alienate the agent from herself or might alienate the agent from others

– impartiality and universality might lead to this, for example

(Piper 1987; Stocker 1976). Another way we can understand

alienation is that the agent is alienated from the true justifications

of her own actions – this is one way to hold that theories which

opt for indirection can lead to alienation (see section 4 below).

Morality, because it is impartial, makes no room for special

obligations. That is, if the right action is the one that is impartial

between persons, then it does not favor the near and dear. On this

picture it is difficult to account for the moral requirements that

parents have towards their own children, and friends have towards each

other. These requirements are, by their nature, not

impartial.

Morality is committed to providing guides for action that can

be captured in a set of rules or general principles. That is, morality

is codifiable and the rules of morality are general.

Morality requires too much. The basic worry is that the morality

system is voracious and is creeping into all aspects of our lives, to

the detriment of other important values. The worry expressed by 4 takes

a variety of forms. For example, some take issue with a

presupposition of 4, arguing that there are no moral principles at all if we

think of these principles as guiding action. Some argue

that there are no moral principles that are complete, because morality

is not something that is codifiable. And, even if

morality was codifiable, the ‘principles’ would be

extremely specific, and not qualify as principles at all.

Since Williams’ work, philosophers have tried to respond to

the alienation worry by, for example, providing accounts of the ways in

which a person’s reasons can guide without forming an explicit

part of practical deliberation. Peter Railton, for example,

argues in favor of a form of objective consequentialism,

Sophisticated Consequentialism, in which the rightness of an

action is a function of its actual consequences (Railton 1984).

On Railton’s view, one can be a good consequentialist without

being alienated from loved ones. Though not attempting to defend moral

theory per se, other writers have also provided accounts of

how agents can act on the basis of reasons – and thus perform

morally worthy actions, even though these reasons are not explicitly

articulated in their practical deliberations (Arpaly 2002; Markovits

2014). Deontologists have argued that autonomous action needn’t

involve explicit invocation of, for example, the Categorical Imperative

(Herman 1985). Generally, what characterizes these moves is the

idea that the justifying reasons are present in some form in the

agent’s psychology – they are recoverable from the

agent’s psychology – but need not be explicitly articulated

or invoked by the agent in acting rightly.

One way to elaborate on this strategy is to argue that the morally

good agent is one who responds to the right sorts of reasons, even

though the agent can’t articulate the nature of the response

(Arpaly 2002). This strategy makes no appeal to codifiable principles,

and is compatible with a wide variety of approaches to developing a

moral theory. It relies heavily on the concept, of course, of

“reason” and “moral reason,” which many writers

on moral issues take to be fundamental or basic in any case.

There has also been debate concerning the proper scope of morality,

and how moral theories can address problems relating to

impartiality. Kant and the classical utilitarians believed that moral

reasons are impartial, what others have termed agent-neutral. Indeed,

this is one point of criticism that virtue ethics has made of these

two theories. One might argue that moral reasons are impartial, but

that there are other reasons that successfully compete with them

– reasons relating to the near and dear, for example, or

one’s own ground projects. Or, one could hold that morality

includes special reasons, arising from special obligations, that also

morally justify our actions.

The first strategy has been pursued by Bernard Williams and other

“anti-theorists”. Again, Williams argues that

morality is a special system that we would be better off without

(Williams 1985). In the morality system we see a special sense of

“obligation” – moral obligation – which

possesses certain features. For example, moral obligation is

inescapable according to the morality system. A theory

such as Kant’s, for example, holds that we must act in

accordance with the Categorical Imperative. It is not

optional. This is because morality is represented as having

authority over us in ways that even demand sacrifice of our personal

projects, of the very things that make our lives go well for us.

This seems especially clear for Utilitarianism, which holds that we

must maximize the good, and falling short of maximization is

wrong. A Kantian will try to avoid this problem by

appealing to obligations that are less demanding, the imperfect ones.

But, as Williams points out, these are still obligations, and

as such can only be overridden by other obligations. Thus, the

theories also tend to present morality as pervasive in that

morality creeps into every aspect of our lives, making no room for

neutral decisions. For example, even decisions about what shoes

to wear to work becomes a moral one:

Once the journey into more general obligations has started, we may

begin to get into trouble – not just philosophical trouble, but

the conscience trouble – with finding room for morally

indifferent actions. I have already mentioned the possible moral

conclusion that one may take some particular course of action.

That means that there is nothing else I am obliged to do. But if we have

accepted general and indeterminate obligations to further various moral

objectives…they will be waiting to provide work for idle

hands… (Williams 1985, 181)

He goes on to write that in order to get out of this problem,

“…I shall need one of those fraudulent items, a duty to

myself” (Williams 1985, 182). Kantian Ethics does supply

this. Many find this counterintuitive, since the self/other

asymmetry seems to capture the prudence/morality distinction, but

Kantians such as Tom Hill, jr. have made strong cases for at least

some moral duties to the self. In any case, for writers such

as Williams, so much the worse for morality.

Other writers, also concerned about the problems that Williams has

raised argue, instead, that morality does make room for our partial

concerns and projects, such as the norms governing our relationships,

and our meaningful projects. Virtue ethicists, for example, are

often comfortable pointing out that morality is not thoroughly

impartial because there are virtues of partiality. Being a good

mother involves having a preference for the well-being of one’s

own children. The mother who really is impartial would be a very

bad mother, lacking in the appropriate virtues.

Another option is to hold that there are partial norms, but those

partial norms are themselves justified on impartial grounds. This

can be spelled out in a variety of different ways. Consider

Marcia Baron’s defense of impartiality, where she notes that

critics of impartiality are mistaken because they confuse

levels of justification: “Critics suppose that

impartialists insisting on impartiality at the level of rules or

principles are committed to insisting on impartiality at the level of

deciding what to do in one’s day-to-day activities” (Baron

1991). This is a mistake because impartialists can justify

partial norms by appealing to impartial rules or principles. She

is correct about this. Even Jeremy Bentham believed, for example,

that the principle of utility ought not be applied in every case,

though he mainly appealed to efficiency costs of using the principle

all the time. But one can appeal to other considerations.

Frank Jackson uses an analogy with predators to argue that partial

norms are strategies for maximizing the good, they offer the best

chance of actually doing so given our limitations (Jackson 1991).

Similarly, a Kantian such as Tom Hill, jr., as Baron notes, can argue

that impartiality is part of an ideal, and ought not govern our

day-to-day lives (Hill 1987). Does this alienate people from

others? The typical mother shows the right amount of preference

for her child, let’s say, but doesn’t herself think that

this is justified on the basis of promoting the good, for

example. A friend visits another in the hospital and also does

not view the partiality as justified by any further principles.

But this is no more alienating than someone being able to make good

arguments and criticize bad ones without a knowledge of inference

rules. Maybe it is better to have an awareness of the underlying

justification, but for some theories even that is debatable. For

an objective theorist (see below) it may be that knowing the underlying

justification can interfere with doing the right thing, in which case

it is better not to know. For some theorists, however, such as

neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists, a person is not truly virtuous

without such knowledge and understanding, though Rosalind Hursthouse

(1999) does not make this a requirement of right action.

Recently consequentialists have been approaching this issue through

the theory of value itself, arguing that there are agent-relative forms

of value. This approach is able to explain the intuitions that

support partial moral norms while retaining the general structure of

consequentialism (Sen 2000). Douglas Portmore, for example,

argues for a form of consequentialism that he terms “commonsense

consequentialism” as it is able to accommodate many of our

everyday moral intuitions (Portmore 2011). He does so by arguing

that (1) the deontic status of an act, whether it is right or wrong, is

determined by what reasons the agent has for performing it – if

an agent has a decisive reason to perform the act in question, then it

is morally required. Combined with (2) a teleological view of

practical reasons in which our reasons for performing an action are a

function of what we have reason to prefer or desire we are led to a

form of act-consequentialism but one which is open to accepting that we

have reason to prefer or desire the well-being of the near and dear

over others.

Though much of this is controversial, there is general agreement

that moral reasons are weighty, are not egoistic

– that is, to be contrasted with prudential reasons, and are

concerned with issues of value [duty, fittingness].

1.2.2. Morality and Aesthetics

Moral modes of evaluation are distinct from the aesthetic in terms

of their content, but also in terms of their authority. So, for

example, works of art are evaluated as “beautiful” or

“ugly”, and those evaluations are not generally considered

as universal or as objective as moral evaluations. These

distinctions between moral evaluation and aesthetic evaluation have

been challenged, and are the subject of some interesting debates in

metaethics on the nature of both moral and aesthetic norms and the

truth-conditions of moral and aesthetic claims. But, considered

intuitively, aesthetics seems at least less objective than

morality.

A number of writers have noted that we need to be cognizant of the

distinction between moral norms and the norms specific to other

normative areas in order to avoid fallacies of evaluation, and much

discussion has centered on a problem in aesthetics termed the

“Moralistic Fallacy” (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000).

One challenge that the anti-theorists have raised for morality was

to note that in a person’s life there will be certain norm

clashes – including clashes between types of norms such

as the moral and the aesthetic. It is giving too much prominence

to the moral that judges a person’s life as going well relative

to the fulfillment or respect of those norms. Can’t a

human life go well, even when that life sacrifices morality for

aesthetics?

This sort of debate has a long history in moral theory. For

example, it arose as a form of criticism of G. E. Moore’s Ideal

Utilitarianism, which treated beauty as an intrinsic good, and

rendering trade-offs between behaving well towards others and creating

beauty at least in principle justified morally (Moore

1903). But the anti-theorists do not pursue this method of

accommodating the aesthetic, instead arguing that it is a separate

normative realm which has its own weight and significance in human

flourishing.

2. Theory and Theoretical Virtues

There is agreement that theories play some kind

of systematizing role, and that one function is to examine

important concepts relevant to morality and moral practice and the

connections, if any, between them. For example, one very common view

in the middle of the 20th century, attributed to John

Rawls, was to view moral theory as primarily interested in

understanding the ‘right’ and the ‘good’ and

connections between the two (Rawls). Priority claims are often a

central feature in the systematizing role of moral theory. Related to

this is the issue of explanatory, or theoretical, depth. That

is, the deeper the explanation goes, the better.

Theories also strive for simplicity, coherence,

and accuracy. The fewer epicycles the theory has to postulate

the better, the parts of the theory should fit well together. For

example, the theory should not contain inconsistent principles, or have

inconsistent implications. The theory should cover the phenomena

in question. In the case of moral theories, the phenomena in

question are thought to be our considered moral intuitions or

judgements. Another coherence condition involves the theory cohering

with a person’s set of considered judgments, as well.

One last feature that needs stressing, particularly for moral

theories, is applicability. One criticism of some normative

ethical theories is that they are not applicable. For example,

Virtue Ethics has been criticized for not providing an account of what

our moral obligations are – appealing to what the

virtuous person would do in the circumstances would seem to set a very

high bar or doesn’t answer the relevant question about how we

should structure laws guiding people on what their social obligations

are. Similarly, objective consequentialists, who understand

“right action” in terms of actual consequences have been

criticized for rendering what counts as a right action in a given

circumstance unknowable, and thus useless as a guide to action.

Both approaches provide responses to this worry, but this supports the

claim that a desideratum of a moral theory is that it be

applicable.

2.1 The Tasks of Moral Theory

One task (though this is somewhat controversial) of a moral theory

is to give an account of right actions. Often, this will involve

an explication of what counts as good – some theories then get

spelled out in terms of how they approach the good, by maximizing it,

producing enough of it, honoring it, etc. In addition, some

theories explicate the right in terms of acting in accordance with

one’s duties, or acting as a virtuous person would act. In

these cases the notions of ‘duty’ and ‘virtue’

become important to the overall analysis, and one function of moral

theory is to explore the systematic connections between duty or virtue

and the right and the good.

Moral theories also have both substantive and formal aims.

Moral theories try to provide criteria for judging actions. It

might be that the criterion is simple, such as right actions maximize

the good, or it may be complex, such as the right action is the one

that gives adequate weight to each competing duty.

Sometimes, in recognition that there is not always “the”

right action, the theory simply provides an account of wrongness, or

permissibility and impermissibility, which allows that a range of

actions might count as “right”.

In addition to simply providing criteria for right or virtuous

action, or for being a virtuous person, a given moral theory, for

example, will attempt to explain why something, like an action

or character trait, has a particular moral quality, such as rightness

or virtuousness. Some theories view rightness as grounded in or

explained by value. Some view rightness as a matter of

reasons that are prior to value. In each case, to

provide an explanation of the property of ‘rightness’ or

‘virtuousness’ will be to provide an account of what the

grounding value is, or an account of reasons for action.

In addition, moral theories may also provide

decision-procedures to employ in determining how to act

rightly or virtuously, conditions on being good or virtuous, or

conditions on morally appropriate practical deliberation. Thus,

the theory provides substance to evaluation and reasons. However,

moral theories, in virtue of providing an explanatory framework, help

us see connections between criteria and decision-procedures, as well as

provide other forms of systemization. Thus, moral theories will

be themselves evaluated according to their theoretical virtues:

simplicity, explanatory power, elegance, etc. To evaluate moral

theories as theories, each needs to be evaluated in terms of

how well it succeeds in achieving these theoretical goals.

There are many more specialized elements to moral theories as

well. For example, a moral theory often concerns itself with

features of moral psychology relevant to action and character, such as

motives, intentions, emotions, and reasons responsiveness. A

moral theory that incorporates consideration of consequences into the

determination of moral quality, will also be concerned with issues

surrounding the proper aggregation of those consequences, and

the scope of the consequences to be considered.

2.2 Theory Construction

There’s been a long history of comparing moral theories to

other sorts of theories, such as scientific ones. For example, in

meta-ethics one issue has to do with the nature of moral

“evidence” on analogy with scientific evidence.

On what Ronald Dworkin terms the “natural model” the

truths of morality are discovered, just as the truths of science are

(Dworkin 1977, 160). It is our considered intuitions that provide the

clues to discover these moral truths, just as what is observable to us

provides the evidence to discover scientific truths. He compared

this model with the “constructive model” in which the

intuitions themselves are features of the theory being constructed and

are not analogous to observations of the external world.

Yet, even if we decide that morality lacks the same type of

phenomena to be accounted for as science, morality clearly figures into

our normative judgments and reactions. One might view these

– our intuitions about moral cases, for example – to

provide the basic data that needs to be accounted for by a theory on

either model.

One way to “account for” our considered intuitions would

be to debunk them. There is a long tradition of this in moral

philosophy as well. When scholars provided genealogies of

morality that explained our considered intuitions in terms of social

or evolutionary forces that are not sensitive the truth, for example,

they were debunking morality by undercutting the authority of our

intuitions to provide insight into it (Nietzsche 1887 [1998], Joyce

2001, Street 2006). In this entry, however, we consider the ways in

which moral theorists have constructed their accounts by taking the

intuitions seriously as something to be systematized, explained, and

as something that can be applied to generate the correct moral

decisions or outcomes.

Along these lines, one method used in theory construction would

involve the use of reflective equilibrium and inference to the best

explanation. For example, one might notice an apparent inconsistency

in moral judgements regarding two structurally similar cases and then

try to figure out what principle or set of principles would achieve

consistency between them. In this case, the theorist is trying to

figure out what best explains both of those intuitions. But one also

might, after thinking about principles one already accepts, or finds

plausible, reject one of those intuitions on the basis of it not

cohering with the rest of one’s considered views. But full

theory construction will go beyond this because of the fully

theoretical virtues discussed earlier. We want a systematic account

that coheres well not only with itself, but with other things that we

believe on the basis of good evidence.

3. Criteria

Consider the following:

Malory has promised to take Chris grocery shopping. Unfortunately, as

Malory is leaving the apartment, Sam calls with an urgent request:

please come over to my house right now, my pipes have broken and I

need help! Torn, Malory decides to help Sam, and thus breaks a promise

to Chris.

Has Malory done the right thing? The virtuous thing?

Malory has broken a promise, which is pro tanto wrong, but Sam

is in an emergency and needs help right away. Even if it is clear

that what Malory did was right in the circumstances, it is an

interesting question as to why it is right. What can we appeal to in

making these sorts of judgments? This brings to light the issue

of how one morally justifies one’s actions. This

is the task of understanding what the justifying reasons are for our

actions. What makes an action the thing to do in the

circumstances? This is the criterion of rightness (or

wrongness). We will focus on the criterion of rightness, though

the criterion issue comes up with other modes of moral evaluation, such

as judging an action to be virtuous, or judging it to be good in some

respect, even if not right. Indeed, some writers have argued that

‘morally right’ should be jettisoned from modern secular

ethics, as it presupposes a conceptual framework left over from

religiously based accounts which assume there is a God (Anscombe

1958). We will leave these worries aside for now, however, and

focus on standard accounts of criteria.

The following are some toy examples that exhibit differing

structural features for moral theories and set out different

criteria:

Consequentialism. The right action is the action that

produces good amongst the options open to the agent at the

time of action (Singer). The most well-known version of this

theory is Classical Utilitarianism, which holds that the right action

promotes pleasure (Mill).

Kantian Deontology. The morally worthy action is in

accordance with the Categorical Imperative, which requires an agent

refrain from acting in a way that fails to respect the rational nature

of other persons (Kant).

Rossian Deontology. The right action is the action that best

accords with the fulfillment and/or non-violation of one’s

prima facie duties (Ross).

Contractualism.An action is morally wrong if it is an act that

would be forbidden by principles that rational persons could not

reasonably reject (Scanlon).

Virtue Ethics.The right action is the action that a virtuous

person would characteristically perform in the circumstances

(Hursthouse 1999).

These principles set out the criterion or standard

for evaluation of actions. They do not necessarily tell us

how to perform right actions, and are not, in themselves,

decision-procedures, though they can easily be turned into decision

procedures, such as: you ought to try to perform the action that

maximizes the good amongst the options available to you at the time of

action. This might not be, and in ordinary circumstance probably

isn’t, a very good decision-procedure, and would itself need to

be evaluated according to the criterion set out by the theory.

These theories can be divided, roughly, into the deontological,

consequentialist, and virtue ethical categories. There has been a

lively debate about how, exactly, to delineate these categories.

Some have held that deontological theories were just those theories

that were not consequentialist. A popular conception of

consequentialist theories is that they are reductionist in a particular

way – that is, in virtue of reducing deontic features of actions

(e.g. rightness, obligatoriness) to facts about an agent’s

options and the consequences of those options (Smith 2009). If

that is the case, then it seems that deontological approaches are just

the ones that are not reductive in this manner. However, this

fails to capture the distinctive features of many forms of virtue

ethics, which are neither consequentialist nor necessarily concerned

with what we ought to do, our duties as opposed to

what sorts of persons we should be.

One way to distinguish consequentialist from deontological theories

is in terms of how each approaches value. Philip Pettit has

suggested that while consequentialist theories required

promotion of value, deontological theories recommend that

value be honored or respected. On each of

these views, value is an important component of the theory, and

theories will be partially delineated according to their theory of

value. A utilitarian such as Jeremey Bentham believes that hedonism is

the correct theory of value, whereas someone such as G. E. Moore, a

utilitarian but a pluralist regarding value, believes that hedonism is

much too narrow an account. A Kantian, on the other hand, views

value as grounded in rational nature, in a will conforming to the

Categorical Imperative.

Because of the systematizing function of moral theory discussed

earlier, the simplest account is to be preferred and thus there is a

move away from endorsing value pluralism. Of course, as intuitive

pressure is put on each of the simpler alternatives, a pluralistic

account of criteria for rightness and wrongness has the advantage of

according best with moral intuitions.

Reasons-first philosophers will delineate the theories somewhat

differently. For example, one might understand goodness as a

matter of what we have reason to desire, in which case what we have

reason to desire is prior to goodness rather than the other way

around. Value is still an important component of the theories, it

is simply that the value is grounded in reasons.

Another distinction between normative theories is that between

subjective and objective versions of a type of theory. This

distinction cuts across other categories. For example, there are

subjective forms of all the major moral theories, and objective

versions of many. An objective standard of right holds that the agent

must actually meet the standard – and meeting the standard is

something ‘objective’, not dependent on the agent’s

psychological states – in order to count as right or

virtuous. Subjective standards come in two broad forms:

Psychology sensitive: are the justifying reasons part of

the agent’s deliberative processes? Or, more weakly, are they

“recoverable” from the agent’s psychology [perhaps,

for example, the agent has a commitment to the values that provide the

reasons].

Evidence sensitive: the right action isn’t the one

that actually meets the standard, but instead, is the action that the

agent could foresee would meet that standard. [there are many

different ways to spell this out, depending on the degree of evidence

that is relevant: in terms of what the agent actually foresees, what

is foreseeable by the agent given what the agent knows, is foreseeable

by someone in possession of a reasonable amount of evidence, etc.]

Of course, these two can overlap. For theorists who are

evaluational internalists, evidence-sensitivity doesn’t

seem like a plausible way of spelling out the standard, except,

perhaps, indirectly. The distinction frequently comes up in

Consequentialism, where the Objective standard is taken to be something

like: the right action is the action that actually promotes the

good and the Subjective standard is something like: the right

action is the action that promotes the good by the agent’s own

lights (psychology sensitive) or the right action is the action that

promotes the foreseeable good, given evidence available at the time of

action (evidence sensitive standard). It is certainly possible

for other moral standards to be objective. For example, the right

action is the action that the virtuous person would perform, even

though the agent does not realize it is what the virtuous agent would

do in the circumstances, and even if the person with the best available

evidence couldn’t realize it is what the virtuous person would do

in the circumstances.

We certainly utter locutions that support both subjective and

objective uses of what we ‘ought’ to do, or what is

‘right’. Frank Jackson notes this when he writes:

…we have no alternative but to recognize a whole range of

oughts – what she ought to do by the light of her beliefs at the

time of action, …what she ought to do by the lights of one or

another onlooker who has different information on the subject, and,

what is more, what she ought to do by God’s lights…that

is, by the lights of one who knows what will and would happen

for each and every course of action. (Jackson 1991, 471).

For Jackson, the primary ought, the primary sense of

‘rightness’ for an action, is the one that is “most

immediately relevant to action” since, otherwise, we have a

problem of understanding how the action is the agent’s.

Thus, the subjective ‘ought’ is primary in the sense that

this is the one that ethical theory should be concerned with (Jackson

1991). Each type of theorist makes use of our ordinary language

intuitions to make their case. But one desideratum of a theory is that

it not simply reflect those intuitions, but also provides the tools to

critically analyze them. Given that our language allows for

both sorts of ‘ought,’ the interesting issue becomes which,

if either, has primacy in terms of actually providing the standard by

which other things are evaluated? Moral theory needn’t only

be concerned with what the right action is from the agent’s point

of view.

There are three possibilities:

neither has primacy

the subjective has primacy

the objective has primacy

First off we need to understand what we mean by

“primacy”. Again, for Frank Jackson, the primary

sense of ‘right’ or ‘ought’ is subjective,

since what we care about is the ‘right’ that refers to an

inward story, the story of our agency, so to speak. On this view,

the objective and subjective senses may have no relationship to each

other at all, and which counts as primary simply depends upon our

interests. However, the issue that concerns us here is whether or

not one sense can be accounted for in terms of the

other. Option 1 holds that there is no explanatory

connection. That is not as theoretically satisfying. Option 2

holds either there really is no meaningful objective sense, just the

subjective sense, or the objective sense is understood in terms of the

subjective.

Let’s look at the objective locution again “He did the

right thing, but he didn’t know it at the time (or he had no way

of knowing it at the time)”. Perhaps all this means is “He

did what someone with all the facts and correct set of values would

have judged right by their own lights” – this would be

extensionally the same as “He performed the action with the best

actual consequences”. This is certainly a possible account of

what objective right means which makes use of a subjective

standard. But it violates the spirit of the subjective standard, since

it ties rightness neither to the psychology of the agent, or the

evidence that is actually available to the agent. For that reason, it

seems more natural to opt for 3. An advantage of this option is that

gives us a nice, unified account regarding the connection between the

objective and the subjective. Subjective standards, then, are

standards of praise and blame, which are themselves evaluable

according to the objective standard. Over time, people are in a

position to tell whether or not a standard actually works in a given

type of context. Or, perhaps it turns out that there are several

standards of blame that differ in terms of severity. For example,

if someone acts negligently a sensible case can be made that the person

is blameworthy but not as blameworthy as if they had acted

intentionally.

As to the worry that the objective standard doesn’t provide

action guidance, the objective theorist can hold that action guidance

is provided by the subjective standards of

praise/blameworthiness. Further, the standard itself can provide

what we need for action guidance through normative review (Driver

2012). Normative review is a retrospective look at what does in fact

meet the standard, and under what circumstances.

Now, consider a virtue ethical example. The right action is

the action that is the actual action that a virtuous person would

perform characteristically, in the circumstances, rather than the

action that the agent believes is the one the virtuous person would

perform. Then we evaluate an agent’s “v-rules”

in terms of how close they meet the virtuous ideal.

4. Decision Procedures and Practical Deliberation

Another function of moral theory is to provide a decision procedure

for people to follow so as to best insure they perform right

actions. Indeed, some writers, such as R. M. Hare hold action guidance

to be the function of the moral principles of the theory (Hare

1965). This raises the question of what considerations are relevant to

the content of such principles – for example, should the

principles be formulated taking into account the epistemic limitations

of most human beings? The requirement that moral principles be action

guiding is what Holly Smith terms the “Useability Demand”:

“…an acceptable moral principle must be useable for

guiding moral decisions…” (Smith 2020, 11). Smith

enumerates different forms satisfaction of this demand can take, and

notes that how one spells out a principle in order to meet the demand

will depend upon how the moral theorist views moral success. For

example, whether or not success is achieved in virtue of simply making

the right decision or if, in addition to making the right decision,

the agent must also have successful follow-through on that

decision.

There has been enormous debate on the issue of what is involved in

following a rule or principle, and some skepticism that this is in fact

what we are doing when we take ourselves to be following a

rule. (Kripke 1982) Some virtue theorists believe that it is moral

perception that actually does the guiding, and that a virtuous person

is able to perceive what is morally relevant and act accordingly

(McDowell 1979).

As discussed earlier in the section on criteria, however, this is

also controversial in that some theorists believe that decision

procedures themselves are not of fundamental significance. Again,

objective consequentialist who believes that the fundamental task of

theory is to establish a criterion for right argues that decision

procedures will themselves be established and evaluated on the basis of

how well they get us to actually achieving the right. Thus, the

decision-procedures are derivative. Others, such as subjective

consequentialists, will argue that the decision-procedures

specify the criterion in the sense that following the

decision-procedure itself is sufficient for meeting the

criterion. For example, an objective consequentialist will hold

that the right action maximizes the good, whereas the subjective

consequentialist might hold that the right action is to try to

maximize the good, whether or not one actually achieves it (Mason 2003

and 2019). Following the decision-procedure itself,

then, is the criterion.

The distinction between criterion and decision-procedure has been

acknowledged and discussed at least since Sidgwick, though it was also

mentioned by earlier ethicists. This distinction allows ethical

theories to avoid wildly implausible implications. For example,

if the standard that the theory recommends is ‘promote the

good’ it would be a mistake to think that ‘promote the

good’ needs to be part of the agent’s

deliberation. The consequentialist might say that, instead, it is

an empirical issue as to what the theory is going to recommend as a

decision-procedure, and that recommendation could vary from context to

context. There will surely be circumstances in which it would be

best to think in terms of meeting the standard itself, but again that

is an empirical issue. Likewise, it is open to a Virtue Ethicist

to hold that the right action is the one the virtuous agent would

perform in the circumstances, but also hold that the agent’s

deliberative processes need not make reference to the standard.

Pretty much all theories will want to make some space between the

standard and the decision-procedure in order to avoid a requirement

that agent’s must think in terms of the correct standard, in

order to act rightly, or even act with moral worth. There is a

distinction to be made between doing the right thing, and doing the

right thing for the right reasons. Doing the right thing for

the right reasons makes the action a morally worthy one, as it exhibits

a good quality of the will. It is possible for a theory to hold

that the ‘good will’ is one that understands the underlying

justification of an action, but that seems overly demanding. If

consequentialism is the correct theory, then demanding that people must

explicitly act intentionally to maximize the good would result in fewer

morally worthy actions than seems plausible. The ‘for the

right reasons’ must be understood as allowing for no explicit

invocation of the true justifying standard.

This has led to the development of theories that advocate

indirection. First, we need to distinguish two ways that

indirection figures into moral philosophy.

Indirection in evaluation of right action.

Indirection in that the theory does not necessarily advocate the

necessity of aiming for the right action.

To use Utilitarianism as an example again, Rule Utilitarianism is an

example of the first sort of indirection (Hooker 2000),

Sophisticated Consequentialism is an example of the second

sort of indirection (Railton 1984). One might hold that some

versions of Aristotelian Virtue ethics, such as Rosalind

Hursthouse’s version, also are of the first type, since

right action is understood in terms of virtue. One could imagine

an indirect consequentialist view with a similar structure: the

right action is the action that the virtuous person would perform,

where virtue is understood as a trait conducive to the good, instead of

by appeal to an Aristotelian notion of human flourishing.

The second sort relies on the standard/decision-procedure

distinction. Railton argues that personal relationships are good

for people, and explicitly trying to maximize the good is not a part of

our relationship norms, so it is likely good that we develop

dispositions to focus on and pay special attention to our loved

ones. The account is open to the possibility that people who

don’t believe in consequentialism have another way of deciding

how to act that is correlated with promotion of the good. If the

criteria a theory sets out need not be fulfilled by the agent guiding

herself with the reasons set out by the criteria, then it is termed

self-effacing. When a theory is self-effacing, it has

the problem of alienating a person from the justification of her own

actions. A middle ground, which is closer to Railton’s

view, holds that the correct justification is a kind of

“touchstone” to the morally good person – consulted

periodically for self-regulation, but not taken explicitly into

consideration in our ordinary, day-to-day lives. In this way, the

theory would not be utterly self-effacing and the agent would still

understand the moral basis for her own actions.

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The Definition of MoralityFirst published Wed Apr 17, 2002; substantive revision Tue Sep 8, 2020

The topic of this entry is not—at least directly—moral

theory; rather, it is the definition of morality. Moral

theories are large and complex things; definitions are not. The

question of the definition of morality is the question of identifying

the target of moral theorizing. Identifying this target

enables us to see different moral theories as attempting to capture

the very same thing. And it enables psychologists, anthropologists,

evolutionary biologists, and other more empirically-oriented theorists

to design their experiments or formulate their hypotheses without

prejudicing matters too much in terms of the specific content a code,

judgment, or norm must have in order to count as distinctively

moral.

There does not seem to be much reason to think that a single

definition of morality will be applicable to all moral discussions.

One reason for this is that “morality” seems to be used in

two distinct broad senses: a descriptive sense and a normative sense.

More particularly, the term “morality” can be used

either

descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by

a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an

individual for her own behavior, or

normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified

conditions, would be put forward by all rational people.

Which of these two senses of “morality” a moral

philosopher is using plays a crucial, although sometimes

unacknowledged, role in the development of an ethical theory. If one

uses “morality” in its descriptive sense, and therefore

uses it to refer to codes of conduct actually put forward by distinct

groups or societies, one will almost certainly deny that there is a

universal morality that applies to all human beings. The descriptive

use of “morality” is the one used by anthropologists when

they report on the morality of the societies that they study.

Recently, some comparative and evolutionary psychologists (Haidt 2006;

Hauser 2006; De Waal 1996) have taken morality, or a close

anticipation of it, to be present among groups of non-human animals:

primarily, but not exclusively, other primates.

Accepting that there are two uses or senses of

“morality”—a descriptive sense and a normative

sense—does not commit one to holding that the “distinction

between descriptions and norms—between what is and what ought to

be—is obvious and unbridgeable”, as some have held that it

does (Churchland 2011: 185). To see this, note that it is obvious that

there is a descriptive sense of morality. That is, it is obvious that

one can sensibly describe the moralities of various groups without

making any normative claims. And it should be equally obvious that

that one might hold that a certain code of conduct would be put

forward by all rational people under certain conditions without having

any particular views about the nature of the is/ought gap or the

possibility of crossing it.

Any definition of “morality” in the descriptive sense will

need to specify which of the codes put forward by a society

or group count as moral. Even in small homogeneous societies that have

no written language, distinctions are sometimes made between morality,

etiquette, law, and religion. And in larger and more complex societies

these distinctions are often sharply marked. So “morality”

cannot be taken to refer to every code of conduct put forward by a

society.

In the normative sense, “morality” refers to a code of

conduct that would be accepted by anyone who meets certain

intellectual and volitional conditions, almost always including the

condition of being rational. That a person meets these conditions is

typically expressed by saying that the person counts as a moral

agent. However, merely showing that a certain code would be

accepted by any moral agent is not enough to show that the code is the

moral code. It might well be that all moral agents would also accept a

code of prudence or rationality, but this would not by itself show

that prudence was part of morality. So something else must be added;

for example, that the code can be understood to involve a certain kind

of impartiality, or that it can be understood as having the function

of making it possible for people to live together in groups.

As we’ve just seen, not all codes that are put forward by

societies or groups are moral codes in the descriptive sense of

morality, and not all codes that would be accepted by all moral

agents are moral codes in the normative sense of morality. So any

definition of morality—in either sense—will require

further criteria. Still, each of these two very brief descriptions of

codes might be regarded as offering some features of morality that

would be included in any adequate definition. In that way they might

be taken to be offering some definitional features of

morality, in each of its two senses. When one has specified enough

definitional features to allow one to classify all the relevant moral

theories as theories of a common subject, one might then be taken to

have given a definition of morality. This is the sense of

“definition” at work in this entry.

Explicit attempts, by philosophers, to define morality are hard to

find, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. One

possible explanation for this is the combined effect of early

positivistic worries about the metaphysical status of normative

properties, followed (or augmented) by Wittgensteinian worries about

definitions of any significant terms whatsoever. Whatever the

explanation, when definitions have been offered, they have tended to

be directed at the notion of moral judgment (Hare 1952, 1981) rather

than at morality itself. However, to the degree that these definitions

of moral judgment are adequate, they might, without much effort, be

converted into definitions of morality in the descriptive sense. For

example, a particular person’s morality might be regarded as the

content of the basic moral judgments that person is prepared to

accept.

One might use a detailed definition of moral judgment to define

morality in a descriptive sense in another way—other than simply

as the content of a person’s moral judgments, or the content of

the moral judgments that prevail in a certain society or group. In

particular, the very features of a judgment that make it qualify as a

moral judgment might be transposed from a psychological key to

something more abstract. Here is one simplified example. Suppose that

a negative judgment of an action only counts as a negative moral

judgment if it involves the idea that there is a prima facie case for

punishing that action. In that case, a definition of morality in the

descriptive sense will include a corresponding idea: that the

prohibitions of morality, taken in the descriptive sense, are those

that are backed by the threat of punishment. Of course, if one goes

this route, other conditions will need to be included, to

differentiate morality from criminal law.

What counts as definitional of morality, in either sense of

“morality”, is controversial. Moreover, the line between

what is part of a definition, in the sense at issue, and what is part

of a moral theory, is not entirely sharp. For example, some might

regard it as definitional of morality, in the normative sense, that it

governs only interpersonal interactions. Others, however, might take

this to be a substantive theoretical claim. Some might take it as

definitional of “morality” in its descriptive sense that

it be a code of conduct that a person or group takes to be most

important. But others might say that attention to religion casts doubt

on this idea.

“Morality”, when used in a descriptive sense, has an

important feature that “morality” in the normative sense

does not have: a feature that stems from its relational nature. This

feature is the following: that if one is not a member of the relevant

society or group, or is not the relevant individual, then accepting a

certain account of the content of a morality, in the descriptive

sense, has no implications for how one thinks one should behave. On

the other hand, if one accepts a moral theory’s account of moral

agents, and of the conditions under which all moral agents would

endorse a code of conduct as a moral code, then one accepts that moral

theory’s normative definition of “morality”.

Accepting an account of “morality” in the normative sense

commits one to regarding some behavior as immoral, perhaps even

behavior that one is tempted to perform. Because accepting an account

of “morality” in the normative sense involves this

commitment, it is not surprising that philosophers seriously disagree

about which account to accept.

1. Is Morality Unified Enough to Define?

2. Descriptive Definitions of “Morality”

3. Implicit and Explicit Definitions in Allied Fields

4. Normative Definitions of “Morality”

5. Variations

5.1 Morality as linked to norms for responses to behavior

5.2 Morality as linked to advocacy of a code

5.3 Morality as linked to acceptance of a code

5.4 Morality as linked to justification to others

Bibliography

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1. Is Morality Unified Enough to Define?

An assumption suggested by the very existence of this encyclopedia

entry is that there is some unifying set of features in virtue of

which all moral systems count as moral systems. But Sinnott-Armstrong

(2016) directly argues against an analogous hypothesis in connection

with moral judgments, and also seems to take this view to suggest that

morality itself is not a unified domain. He points out that moral

judgments cannot be unified by any appeal to the notion of harm to

others, since there are such things as moral ideals, and there are

harmless behaviors that a significant number of people regard as

morally wrong: Sinnott-Armstrong gives example such as cannibalism and

flag-burning. Whether people who condemn such behaviors morally are

correct in those judgments is largely irrelevant to the question of

whether they count as moral in the first place.

Sinnott-Armstrong seems right in holding that moral judgments cannot

be delimited from other judgments simply by appeal to their content.

It seems quite possible for someone to have been raised in such a way

as to hold that it is morally wrong for adult men to wear shorts. And

it also seems plausible that, as he also argues, moral judgments

cannot be identified by reference to any sort of neurological feature

common and peculiar to them and them alone. A third strategy might be

to claim that moral judgments are those one makes as a result of

having been inducted into a social practice that has a certain

function. However, this function cannot simply be to help facilitate

the sorts of social interactions that enable societies to flourish and

persist, since too many obviously non-moral judgments do this.

Beyond the problem just described, attempts to pick out moral codes in

the descriptive sense by appeal to their function often seem to be

specifying the function that the theorist thinks morality, in the

normative sense, would serve, rather than the function that actual

moralities do serve. For example, Greene claims that

morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise

selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation, (2013: 23)

and Haidt claims that

moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms,

practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved

psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate

self-interest and make cooperative societies possible. (2011: 270)

But these claims need to deal with the existence of dysfunctional

moralities that do not in fact serve these functions. Perhaps this

problem could be alleviated by pointing out that many instances of a

kind that have a function—for example, an actual human

heart—fail to fulfill that function.

Even if Sinnott-Armstrong’s position is correct with regard to

morality in the descriptive sense, there might nevertheless be a code

of conduct that, given certain specified conditions, would be put

forward by all rational agents. That is, even if the descriptive sense

of morality is a family-resemblance notion, vaguely bordered and

open-textured, or even if it is significantly disjunctive and

disunified, the normative sense might not be. By way of comparison, we

might think of the notion of food in two ways: as what people regard

as food, and as what they would regard as food if they were rational and

fully informed. Certainly there is not much that unifies the first

category: not even being digestible or nutritious, since people regard

various indigestible and non-nutritious substances as food, and forego

much that is digestible and nutritious. But that does not mean that we

cannot theorize about what it would be rational to regard as food.

2. Descriptive Definitions of “Morality”

An initial naïve attempt at a descriptive definition of

“morality” might take it to refer to the most important

code of conduct put forward by a society and accepted by the members

of that society. But the existence of large and heterogeneous

societies raises conceptual problems for such a descriptive

definition, since there may not be any such society-wide code that is

regarded as most important. As a result, a definition might be offered

in which “morality” refers to the most important code of

conduct put forward and accepted by any group, or even by an

individual. Apart from containing some prohibitions on harming

(certain) others, different moralities—when

“morality” is understood in this way—can vary in

content quite substantially.

Etiquette is sometimes included as a part of morality, applying to

norms that are considered less serious than the kinds of norms for

behavior that are more central to morality. Hobbes expresses this sort

of view when he uses the term “small morals” to describe

“decency of behavior, as how one man should salute another, or

how a man should wash his mouth or pick his teeth before

company”, and distinguishes these from “those qualities of

mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity”

(1660 [1994]: Chapter XI, paragraph 1). When etiquette is included as

part of morality, morality is almost always being understood in the

descriptive sense. One reason for this is that it is clear that the

rules of etiquette are relative to a society or group. Moreover, there

are no plausible conditions under which we could pick out the

“correct” rules of etiquette as those that would be

accepted by all rational beings.

Law is distinguished from morality by having explicit written rules,

penalties, and officials who interpret the laws and apply the

penalties. Although there is often considerable overlap in the conduct

governed by morality and that governed by law, laws are often

evaluated—and changed—on moral grounds. Some theorists,

including Ronald Dworkin (1986), have even maintained that the

interpretation of law must make use of morality.

Although the morality of a group or society may derive from its

religion, morality and religion are not the same thing, even in that

case. Morality is only a guide to conduct, whereas religion is always

more than this. For example, religion includes stories about events in

the past, usually about supernatural beings, that are used to explain

or justify the behavior that it prohibits or requires. Although there

is often a considerable overlap in the conduct prohibited or required

by religion and that prohibited or required by morality, religions may

prohibit or require more than is prohibited or required by guides to

behavior that are explicitly labeled as moral guides, and may

recommend some behavior that is prohibited by morality. Even when

morality is not regarded as the code of conduct that is put forward by

a formal religion, it is often thought to require some religious

explanation and justification. However, just as with law, some

religious practices and precepts are criticized on moral grounds,

e.g., that the practice or precept involves discrimination on the

basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

When “morality” is used simply to refer to a code of

conduct put forward by an actual group, including a society, even if

it is distinguished from etiquette, law, and religion, it is being

used in a descriptive sense. It is also being used in the descriptive

sense when it refers to important attitudes of individuals. Just as

one can refer to the morality of the Greeks, so one can refer to the

morality of a particular person. This descriptive use of

“morality” is now becoming more prominent because of the

work of psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt (2006), who have been

influenced by the views of David Hume (1751), including his attempt to

present a naturalistic account of moral judgments.

Guides to behavior that are regarded as moralities normally involve

avoiding and preventing harm to others (Frankena 1980), and perhaps

some norm of honesty (Strawson 1961). But all of them involve other

matters as well, and Hare’s view of morality as that which is

most important allows that these other matters may be more important

than avoiding and preventing harm to others (Hare 1952, 1963, 1981).

This view of morality as concerning that which is most important to a

person or group allows matters related to religious practices and

precepts, or matters related to customs and traditions, e.g., purity

and sanctity, to be more important than avoiding and preventing

harm.

When “morality” is used in a descriptive sense, moralities

can differ from each other quite extensively in their content and in

the foundation that members of the society claim their morality to

have. Some societies may claim that their morality, which is more

concerned with purity and sanctity, is based on the commands of God.

The descriptive sense of “morality”, which allows for the

view that morality is based on religion in this way, picks out codes

of conduct that are often in significant conflict with all normative

accounts of morality.

A society might have a morality that takes accepting its traditions

and customs, including accepting the authority of certain people and

emphasizing loyalty to the group, as more important than avoiding and

preventing harm. Such a morality might not count as immoral any

behavior that shows loyalty to the preferred group, even if that

behavior causes significant harm to innocent people who are not in

that group. The familiarity of this kind of morality, which makes

in-group loyalty almost equivalent to morality, seems to allow some

comparative and evolutionary psychologists, including Frans De Waal

(1996), to regard non-human animals to be acting in ways very similar

to those that are regarded as moral.

Although all societies include more than just a concern for minimizing

harm to (some) human beings in their moralities, this feature of

morality, unlike purity and sanctity, or accepting authority and

emphasizing loyalty, is included in everything that is regarded as a

morality by any society. Because minimizing harm can conflict with

accepting authority and emphasizing loyalty, there can be fundamental

disagreements within a society about the morally right way to behave

in particular kinds of situations. Philosophers such as Bentham (1789)

and Mill (1861), who accept a normative account of morality that takes

the avoiding and preventing harm element of morality to be most

important, criticize all actual moralities (referred to by

“morality” in the descriptive sense) that give precedence

to purity and loyalty when they are in conflict with avoiding and

preventing harm.

Some psychologists, such as Haidt, take morality to include concern

with, at least, all three of the triad of (1) harm, (2) purity, and

(3) loyalty, and hold that different members of a society can and do

take different features of morality to be most important. But beyond a

concern with avoiding and preventing such harms to members of certain

groups, there may be no common content shared by all moralities in the

descriptive sense. Nor may there be any common justification that

those who accept morality claim for it; some may appeal to religion,

others to tradition, and others to rational human nature. Beyond the

concern with harm, the only other feature that all descriptive

moralities have in common is that they are put forward by an

individual or a group, usually a society, in which case they provide a

guide for the behavior of the people in that group or society. In the

descriptive sense of “morality”, morality may not even

incorporate impartiality with regard to all moral agents, and it may

not be universalizable in any significant way (compare MacIntyre

1957).

Although most philosophers do not use “morality” in any of

the above descriptive senses, some philosophers do. Ethical

relativists such as Harman (1975), Westermarck (1960), and Prinz

(2007), deny that there is any universal normative morality and claim

that the actual moralities of societies or individuals are the only

moralities there are. These relativists hold that only when the term

“morality” is used in this descriptive sense is there

something that “morality” actually refers to. They claim

that it is a mistake to take “morality” to refer to a

universal code of conduct that, under certain conditions, would be

endorsed by all rational persons. Although ethical relativists admit

that many speakers of English use “morality” to refer to

such a universal code of conduct, they claim such persons are mistaken

in thinking that there is anything that is the referent of the word

“morality” taken in that sense.

Wong (1984, 2006, 2014) claims to be an ethical relativist because he

denies that there is any universal moral code that would be endorsed

by all rational people. But what seems to stand behind this claim is

the idea that there are cultural variations in the relative weights

given to, for example, considerations of justice and considerations of

interpersonal responsibility. And he assumes that those who believe in

a universal morality are committed to the idea that “if there is

fundamental disagreement, someone has got it wrong” (2014: 339).

But Gert (2005) is certainly not a relativist, and it is central to

his moral theory that there are fundamental disagreements in the

rankings of various harms and benefits, and with regard to who is

protected by morality, and no unique right answer in such cases. Wong

himself is willing to say that some moralities are better than others,

because he thinks that the moral domain is delimited by a functional

criterion: among the functions of a morality are that it promote and

regulate social cooperation, help individuals rank their own

motivations, and reduce harm.

When used with its descriptive sense, “morality” can refer

to codes of conduct with widely differing content, and still be used

unambiguously. This parallels the way in which “law” is

used unambiguously even though different societies have laws with

widely differing content. However, when “morality” is used

in its descriptive sense, it sometimes does not refer to the code of a

society, but to the code of a group or an individual. As a result,

when the guide to conduct put forward by, for example, a religious

group conflicts with the guide to conduct put forward by a society, it

is not clear whether to say that there are conflicting moralities,

conflicting elements within morality, or that the code of the

religious group conflicts with morality.

In small homogeneous societies there may be a guide to behavior that

is put forward by the society and that is accepted by (almost) all

members of the society. For such societies there is (almost) no

ambiguity about which guide “morality” refers to. However,

in larger societies people often belong to groups that put forward

guides to behavior that conflict with the guide put forward by their

society, and members of the society do not always accept the guide put

forward by their society. If they accept the conflicting guide of some

other group to which they belong (often a religious group) rather than

the guide put forward by their society, in cases of conflict they will

regard those who follow the guide put forward by their society as

acting immorally.

In the descriptive sense of “morality”, a person’s

own morality cannot be a guide to behavior that that person would

prefer others not to follow. However, that fact that an individual

adopts a moral code of conduct for his own use does not entail that

the person requires it to be adopted by anyone else. An

individual may adopt for himself a very demanding moral guide that he

thinks may be too difficult for most others to follow. He may judge

people who do not adopt his code of conduct as not being as morally

good as he is, without judging them to be immoral if they do not adopt

it. However, such cases do not undermine the restriction; a guide is

plausibly referred to as a morality only when the individual would be

willing for others to follow it, at least if

“follow” is taken to mean “successfully

follow”. For it may be that the individual would not be willing

for others to try to follow that code, because of worries

about the bad effects of predictable failures due to partiality or

lack of sufficient foresight or intelligence.

3. Implicit and Explicit Definitions in Allied Fields

Philosophers, because they do not need to produce operational tests or

criteria in the way that psychologists, biologists, and

anthropologists do, often simply take for granted that everyone knows

what belongs, and does not belong, to the moral domain. This attitude

finds expression in the philosopher’s common appeal to

intuition, or to what everyone agrees about. For example, Michael

Smith (1994) provides a very detailed analysis of normative reasons,

but in distinguishing specifically moral reasons from other sorts of

reasons, he says only that they are picked out by appeal to a number

of platitudes. And he makes no effort to provide anything like a

comprehensive list of such platitudes. Moreover, it is very likely

that there will be disagreement as to what counts as

platitudinous. Or, if it is definitional of “platitude”

that it be uncontroversial, it may be that what is platitudinous about

morality will be so thin as to fail to separate morality from other

domains. Failing to specify which particular criteria one takes to

govern one’s own theorizing, and consequently tacitly relying on

the idea that everyone already knows what counts as moral, can lead to

a number of problems. One, of course, is a conflation of morality with

other things (see Machery 2012 on Churchland 2011). Another is that

one mistakes one’s own cultural biases for universal truths

(Haidt and Kesiber 2010).

Because theorists in psychology and anthropology often need to design

questionnaires and other sorts of probes of the attitudes of subjects,

they might be expected to be more sensitive to the need for a

reasonably clear means of separating moral judgments from other sorts

of judgments. After all, examining the specifically moral judgments of

individuals is one of the most direct means of determining what the

moral code of a person or group might be. But despite this

expectation, and roughly half a century ago, Abraham Edel (1962: 56)

decried the lack of an explicit concern to delimit the domain of

morality among anthropologists, writing that “morality…is

taken for granted, in the sense that one can invoke it or refer to it

at will; but it is not explained, depicted, or analysed”. One

explanation for this that Edel suggested is the same as the

explanation for the same phenomenon in Philosophy: “it is

assumed that we all know what morality is and no explicit account need

be given”. But the danger for those making this assumption, he

points out, is that of “merging the morality concept with social

control concepts”. Reinforcing this tendency was the influence,

in anthropology, of the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1906

[2009]), for whom morality was simply a matter of how a given society

enforces whatever social rules it happens to have.

The failure to offer an operational definition of morality or moral

judgment may help explain the widespread but dubious assumption in

contemporary anthropology, noted by James Laidlaw (2016: 456), that

altruism is the essential and irreducible core of ethics. But Laidlaw

also notes that many of the features of what Bernard Williams (1985)

described as “the morality system”—features that

Williams himself criticized as the parochial result of a

secularization of Christian values—are in fact widely shared

outside of the West. This state of affairs leads Laidlaw to ask the

crucial question:

Which features, formal or substantive, are shared by the

“morality system” of the modern West and those of the

other major agrarian civilizations and literate religions?

This is, to a very close approximation, a request for the definition

of morality in the descriptive sense.

Klenk (2019) notes that in recent years anthropology has taken what he

terms an “ethical turn”, recognizing moral systems, and

ethics more generally, as a distinct object of anthropological study.

This is a move away from the Durkheimian paradigm, and includes the

study of self-development, virtues, habits, and the role of explicit

deliberation when moral breakdowns occur. However, Klenk’s

survey of attempts by anthropologists to study morality as an

independent domain lead him to conclude that, so far, their efforts do

not readily allow a distinction between moral considerations and other

normative considerations such as prudential, epistemic, or aesthetic

ones. (2019: 342)

In light of Edel’s worry about a conflation of moral systems

with systems of social control, it is interesting to consider Curry

(2016), who defends the hypothesis that

morality turns out to be a collection of biological and cultural

solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in

human social life. (2016: 29)

Curry notes that rules related to kinship, mutualism, exchange, and

various forms of conflict resolution appear in virtually all

societies. And he argues that many of them have precursors in animal

behavior, and can be explained by appeal to his central hypothesis of

morality as a solution to problems of cooperation and conflict

resolution. He also notes that philosophers, from Aristotle through

Hume, Russell, and Rawls, all took cooperation and conflict resolution

to be central ideas in understanding morality. It is unclear, however,

whether Curry’s view can adequately distinguish morality from

law and from other systems that aim to reduce conflict by providing

solutions to coordination problems.

Turning from anthropology to psychology, one significant topic of

investigation is the existence and nature of a distinction between the

moral and the conventional. More specifically, the distinction at

issue is between (a) acts that are judged wrong only because of a

contingent convention or because they go against the dictates of some

relevant authority, and (b) those that are judged to be wrong quite

independently of these things, that have a seriousness to them, and

that are justified by appeal to the notions of harm, rights, or

justice. Elliot Turiel emphasized this distinction, and drew attention

to the danger, if one overlooks it, of lumping together moral rules

with non-moral “conventions that further the coordination of

social interactions within social systems” (1983:

109–111). Those who accept this distinction are implicitly

offering a definition of morality in the descriptive sense. Not

everyone does accept the distinction, however. Edouard Machery and Ron

Mallon (2010) for example, are suspicious of the idea that

authority-independence, universality, justification by appeal to harm,

justice, or rights, and seriousness form a cluster found together with

sufficient regularity to be used to set moral norms apart from other

norms. Kelly et al. (2007) are similarly skeptical, and bring

empirical evidence to bear on the question.

The psychologist Kurt Gray might be seen as offering an account of

moral judgment that would allow us to determine the morality of an

individual or group. He and his co-authors suggest that

morality is essentially represented by a cognitive template that

combines a perceived intentional agent with a perceived suffering

patient. (Gray, Young, & Waytz 2012: 102)

This claim, while quite strong, is nevertheless not as implausibly

strong as it might seem, since the thesis is directly concerned with

the template we use when thinking about moral matters; it is

not directly concerned with the nature of morality itself. In the

sense of “template” at issue here, the template we use

when thinking about dogs might include having four legs, a tail, and

fur, among other things. But that does not mean that an animal must

have these features to count as a dog, or even that we believe

this.

Given the way that Gray et al. think of templates, even if their

hypothesis is correct, it would not mean that our psychology requires

us to think of the moral as always involving intentional agents and

perceiving patients. In line with this, and despite some lapses in

which they suggest that “moral acts can be defined in

terms of intention and suffering”, (2012: 109) their considered

view seems to be only that the dyadic template fits the

majority of moral situations, as we conceive them. Moreover,

the link between immoral behavior and suffering to which they appeal

in defending their general view is sometimes so indirect as to

undermine its significance. For example, they fit authority violations

into their suffering-based template by noting that “authority

structures provide a way of peacefully resolving conflict” and

that “violence results when social structures are

threatened”. In a similar stretch, they account for judgments

that promiscuity is wrong by gesturing at the suffering involved in

sexually transmitted diseases (2012: 107).

Another position in cognitive psychology that has relevance for the

definition of morality in the descriptive sense takes moral judgment

to be a natural kind: the product of an innate moral grammar (Mikhail

2007). If moral judgment is a natural kind in this way, then a

person’s moral code might simply consist in the moral judgments

that person is disposed to make. One piece of evidence that there is

such a grammar is to be found in the relative universality of certain

moral concepts in human cultures: concepts such as obligation,

permission, and prohibition. Another is an argument similar to

Chomsky’s famous “poverty of the stimulus” argument

for a universal human grammar (Dwyer et al. 2010; see also Roedder and

Harman 2010).

In evolutionary biology, morality is sometimes simply equated with

fairness (Baumard et al. 2013: 60, 77) or reciprocal altruism

(Alexander 1987: 77). But it is also sometimes identified by reference

to an evolved capacity to make a certain sort of judgment and perhaps

also to signal that one has made it (Hauser 2006). This also makes

morality into something very much like a natural kind, that can be

identified by reference to causal/historical processes. In that case,

a content-based definition of morality isn’t required: certain

central features are all that one needs to begin one’s

theorizing, since they will be enough to draw attention to certain

psychologically and biologically individuated mechanisms, and the

study of morality will be a detailed inquiry into the nature and

evolutionary history of these mechanisms.

4. Normative Definitions of “Morality”

Those who use “morality” normatively hold that morality is

(or would be) the behavioral code that meets the following condition:

all rational persons, under certain specified conditions, would

endorse it. Indeed, this is a plausible basic schema for definitions

of “morality” in the normative sense. Although some hold

that no code could meet the condition, many theorists hold that there

is one that does; we can call the former “moral skeptics”

and the latter “moral realists” (see entries on LINK:

moral skepticism and moral realism).

Many moral skeptics would reject the claim that there are any

universal ethical truths, where the ethical is a broader category than

the moral. But another interesting class of moral skeptics includes

those who think that we should only abandon the narrower category of

the moral—partly because of the notion of a code that

is central to that category. These moral skeptics hold that we should

do our ethical theorizing in terms of the good life, or the virtues.

Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) gave expression to this kind of view, which

also finds echoes in the work of Bernard Williams (1985). On the other

hand, some virtue theorists might take perfect rationality to entail

virtue, and might understand morality to be something like the code

that such a person would implicitly endorse by acting in virtuous

ways. In that case, even a virtue theorist might count as a moral

realist in the sense above.

Consequentialist views might not seem to fit the basic schema for

definitions of “morality” in the normative sense, since

they do not appear to make reference to the notions of endorsement or

rationality. But this appearance is deceptive. Mill himself explicitly

defines morality as

the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which

[a happy existence] might be, to the greatest extent possible,

secured. (1861 [2002: 12])

And he thinks that the mind is not in a “right state”

unless it is in “the state most conducive to the general

happiness”—in which case it would certainly favor morality

as just characterized. And the act-consequentialist J.J.C. Smart

(1956) is also explicit that he is thinking of ethics as the study of

how it is most rational to behave. His embrace of utilitarianism is

the result of his belief that maximizing utility is always the

rational thing to do. On reflection it is not surprising that many

moral theorists implicitly hold that the codes they offer would be

endorsed by all rational people, at least under certain conditions.

Unless one holds this, one will have to admit that, having been shown

that a certain behavior is morally required, a rational person might

simply shrug and ask “So what? What is that to me?” And,

though some exceptions are mentioned below, very few moral realists

think that their arguments leave this option open. Even fewer think

this option remains open if we are allowed to add some additional

conditions beyond mere rationality: a restriction on beliefs, for

example (similar to Rawls’ (1971: 118) veil of ignorance), or

impartiality.

Definitions of morality in the normative sense—and,

consequently, moral theories—differ in their accounts of

rationality, and in their specifications of the conditions under which

all rational persons would necessarily endorse the code of conduct

that therefore would count as morality. These definitions and theories

also differ in how they understand what it is to endorse a code in the

relevant way. Related to these differences, definitions of

“morality”—and moral theories—differ with

regard to those to whom morality applies: that is, those whose

behavior is subject to moral judgment. Some hold that morality applies

only to those rational beings that have certain specific features of

human beings: features that make it rational for them to endorse

morality. These features might, for example, include fallibility and

vulnerability. Other moral theories claim to put forward an account of

morality that provides a guide to all rational beings, even if these

beings do not have these human characteristics, e.g., God.

Among those who use “morality” normatively, virtually all

hold that “morality” refers to a code of conduct that

applies to all who can understand it and can govern their

behavior by it, though many hold that it protects a larger

group. Among such theorists it is also common to hold that morality

should never be overridden. That is, it is common to hold that no one

should ever violate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral

reasons. This claim is trivial if “should” is taken to

mean “morally should”. So the claim about moral

overridingness is typically understood with “should”

meaning “rationally should”, with the result that moral

requirements are asserted to be rational requirements. Though common,

this view is by no means always taken as definitional. Sidgwick (1874)

despaired of showing that rationality required us to choose

morality over egoism, though he certainly did not think rationality

required egoism either. More explicitly, Gert (2005) held that though

moral behavior is always rationally permissible, it is not

always rationally required. Foot (1972) seems to have held

that any reason—and therefore any rational requirement—to

act morally would have to stem from a contingent commitment or an

objective interest. And she also seems to have held that sometimes

neither of these sorts of reasons might be available, so that moral

behavior might not be rationally required for some agents. Finally,

moral realists who hold desire-based theories of reasons and formal,

means/end theories of rationality sometimes explicitly deny that moral

behavior is always even rationally permissible (Goldman

2009), and in fact this seems to be a consequence of Foot’s view

as well, though she does not emphasize it.

Despite the fact that theorists such as Sidgwick, Gert, Foot, and

Goldman do not hold that moral behavior is rationally required, they

are by no means precluded from using “morality” in the

normative sense. Using “morality” in the normative sense,

and holding that there is such a thing, only entails holding that

rational people would put a certain system forward; it does not entail

holding that rational people would always be motivated to follow that

system themselves. But to the degree that a theorist would deny even

the claim about endorsement, and hold instead that rational people

might not only fail to act morally, but might even reject it as a

public system, that theorist is either not using

“morality” in a normative sense, or is denying the

existence of morality in that sense. Such a theorist may also be using

“morality” in a descriptive sense, or may not have any

particular sense in mind.

When “morality” is used in its normative sense, it need

not have either of the two formal features that are essential to

moralities referred to by the descriptive sense: that it be a code of

conduct that is put forward by a society, group, or individual, or

that it be accepted as a guide to behavior by the members of that

society or group, or by that individual. Indeed, it is possible that

morality, in the normative sense, has never been put forward by any

particular society, by any group at all, or even by any individual.

This is partly a consequence of the fact that “morality”

in the normative sense is understood in terms of a conditional that is

likely to be counterfactual: it is the code that would be endorsed by

any fully rational person under certain conditions.

If one is a moral realist, and one also acknowledges the descriptive

sense of “morality”, one may require that descriptive

moralities at least approximate, in some ways, morality in the

normative sense. That is, one might claim that the guides to behavior

of some societies lack so many of the essential features of morality

in the normative sense, that it is incorrect to say that these

societies even have a morality in a descriptive sense. This is an

extreme view, however. A more moderate position would hold that all

societies have something that can be regarded as their morality, but

that many of these moralities—perhaps, indeed, all of

them—are defective. That is, a moral realist might hold that

although these actual guides to behavior have enough of the features

of normative morality to be classified as descriptive moralities, they

would not be endorsed in their entirety by all moral agents.

While moral realists do not claim that any actual society has or has

ever had morality as its actual guide to conduct, “natural

law” theories of morality claim that any rational person in any

society, even one that has a defective morality, is capable of knowing

what general kinds of actions morality prohibits, requires,

discourages, encourages, and allows. In the theological version of

natural law theories, such as that put forward by Aquinas, this is

because God implanted this knowledge in the reason of all persons. In

the secular version of natural law theories, such as that put forward

by Hobbes (1660), natural reason is sufficient to allow all rational

persons to know what morality prohibits, requires, etc. Natural law

theorists also claim that morality applies to all rational persons,

not only those now living, but also those who lived in the past.

In contrast to natural law theories, other moral theories do not hold

quite so strong a view about the universality of knowledge of

morality. Still, many hold that morality is known to all who can

legitimately be judged by it. Baier (1958), Rawls (1971) and

contractarians deny that there can be an esoteric morality:

one that judges people even though they cannot know what it prohibits,

requires, etc. For all of the above theorists, morality is what we can

call a public system: a system of norms (1) that is knowable

by all those to whom it applies and (2) that is not irrational for any

of those to whom it applies to follow (Gert 2005: 10). Moral judgments

of blame thus differ from legal or religious judgments of blame in

that they cannot be made about persons who are legitimately ignorant

of what they are required to do. Act consequentialists seem to hold

that everyone should know that they are morally required to act so as

to bring about the best consequences, but even they do not seem to

think judgments of moral blame are appropriate if a person is

legitimately ignorant of what action would bring about the best

consequences (Singer 1993: 228). Parallel views seem to be held by

rule consequentialists (Hooker 2001: 72).

The ideal situation for a legal system would be that it be a public

system. But in any large society this is not possible. Games are

closer to being public systems and most adults playing a game know its

rules, or they know that there are judges whose interpretation

determines what behavior the game prohibits, requires, etc. Although a

game is often a public system, its rules apply only to those playing

the game. If a person does not care enough about the game to abide by

the rules, she can usually quit. Morality is the one public system

that no rational person can quit. The fact that one cannot quit

morality means that one can do nothing to escape being legitimately

liable to sanction for violating its norms, except by ceasing to be a

moral agent. Morality applies to people simply by virtue of their

being rational persons who know what morality prohibits, requires,

etc., and being able to guide their behavior accordingly.

Public systems can be formal or informal. To say a

public system is informal is to say that it has no authoritative

judges and no decision procedure that provides a unique guide to

action in all situations, or that resolves all disagreements. To say

that a public system is formal is to say that it has one or both of

these things (Gert 2005: 9). Professional basketball is a formal

public system; all the players know that what the referees call a foul

determines what is a foul. Pickup basketball is an informal public

system. The existence of persistent moral disagreements shows that

morality is most plausibly regarded as an informal public system. This

is true even for such moral theories as the Divine Command theory and

act utilitarianism, inasmuch as there are no authoritative judges of

God’s will, or of which act will maximize utility, and there are

no decision procedures for determining these things (Scanlon 2011:

261–2). When persistent moral disagreement is recognized, those

who understand that morality is an informal public system admit that

how one should act is morally unresolvable, and if some resolution is

required, the political or legal system can be used to resolve it.

These formal systems have the means to provide unique guides, but they

do not provide the uniquely correct moral guide to the action that

should be performed.

An important example of a moral problem left unsettled by the informal

public system of morality is whether fetuses are impartially protected

by morality and so whether or under what conditions abortions are

allowed. There is continuing disagreement among fully informed moral

agents about this moral question, even though the legal and political

system in the United States has provided fairly clear guidelines about

the conditions under which abortion is legally allowed. Despite this

important and controversial issue, morality, like all informal public

systems, presupposes agreement on how to act in most moral situations,

e.g., all agree that killing or seriously harming any moral agent

requires strong justification in order to be morally allowed. No one

thinks it is morally justified to cheat, deceive, injure, or kill a

moral agent simply in order to gain sufficient money to take a

fantastic vacation. Moral matters are often thought to be

controversial because everyday decisions, about which there is no

controversy, are rarely discussed. The amount of agreement concerning

what rules are moral rules, and on when it is justified to violate one

of these rules, explains why morality can be a public system even

though it is an informal system.

By using the notion of an informal public system, we can improve the

basic schema for definitions of “morality” in the

normative sense. The old schema was that morality is the code

that all rational persons, under certain specified conditions, would

endorse. The improved schema is that morality is the informal

public system that all rational persons, under certain specified

conditions, would endorse. Some theorists might not regard the

informal nature of the moral system as definitional, holding that

morality might give knowable precise answers to every question. This

would have the result that conscientious moral agents often cannot

know what morality permits, requires, or allows. Some philosophers

deny that this is a genuine possibility.

On any definition of “morality”, whether descriptive or

normative, it is a code of conduct. However, on ethical- or

group-relativist accounts or on individualistic accounts—all of

which are best regarded as accounts of morality in the descriptive

sense—morality often has no special content that distinguishes

it from nonmoral codes of conduct, such as law or religion. Just as a

legal code of conduct can have almost any content, as long as it is

capable of guiding behavior, and a religious code of conduct has no

limits on content, most relativist and individualist accounts of

morality place few limits on the content of a moral code. Of course,

actual codes do have certain minimal limits—otherwise the

societies they characterize would lack the minimum required degree of

social cooperation required to sustain their existence over time. On

the other hand, for moral realists who explicitly hold that morality

is an informal public system that all rational persons would put

forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents, it has a

fairly definite content. Hobbes (1660), Mill (1861), and most other

non-religiously influenced philosophers in the Anglo-American

tradition limit morality to behavior that, directly or indirectly,

affects others.

The claim that morality only governs behavior that affects others is

somewhat controversial, and so probably should not be counted as

definitional of morality, even if it turns out to be entailed by the

correct moral theory. Some have claimed that morality also governs

behavior that affects only the agent herself, such as taking

recreational drugs, masturbation, and not developing one’s

talents. Kant (1785) may provide an account of this wide concept of

morality. Interpreted this way, Kant’s theory still fits the

basic schema, but includes these self-regarding moral requirements

because of the particular account of rationality he employs. However,

pace Kant, it is doubtful that all moral agents would put

forward a universal guide to behavior that governs behavior that does

not affect them at all. Indeed, when the concept of morality is

completely distinguished from religion, moral rules do seem to limit

their content to behavior that directly or indirectly causes or risks

harm to others. Some behavior that seems to affect only oneself, e.g.,

taking recreational drugs, may have a significant indirect harmful

effect on others by supporting the illegal and harmful activity of

those who benefit from the sale of those drugs.

Confusion about the content of morality sometimes arises because

morality is not distinguished sufficiently from religion. Regarding

self-affecting behavior as governed by morality is supported by the

idea that we are created by God and are obliged to obey God’s

commands, and so may be a holdover from the time when morality was not

clearly distinguished from religion. This religious holdover might

also affect the claim that some sexual practices such as homosexuality

are immoral. Those who clearly distinguish morality from religion

typically do not regard sexual orientation as a moral matter.

It is possible to hold that having a certain sort of social goal is

definitional of morality (Frankena 1963). Stephen Toulmin (1950) took

it to be the harmony of society. Baier (1958) took it to be “the

good of everyone alike”. Utilitarians sometimes claim it is the

production of the greatest good. Gert (2005) took it to be the

lessening of evil or harm. This latter goal may seem to be a

significant narrowing of the utilitarian claim, but utilitarians

always include the lessening of harm as essential to producing the

greatest good and almost all of their examples involve the avoiding or

preventing of harm. It is notable that the paradigm cases of moral

rules are those that prohibit causing harm directly or indirectly,

such as rules prohibiting killing, causing pain, deceiving, and

breaking promises. Even those precepts that require or encourage

positive action, such as helping the needy, are almost always related

to preventing or relieving harms, rather than promoting goods such as

pleasure.

Among the views of moral realists, differences in content are less

significant than similarities. For all such philosophers, morality

prohibits actions such as killing, causing pain, deceiving, and

breaking promises. For some, morality also requires charitable

actions, but failure to act charitably on every possible occasion does

not require justification in the same way that any act of killing,

causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises requires justification.

Both Kant (1785) and Mill (1861) distinguish between duties of perfect

obligation and duties of imperfect obligation and regard not harming

as the former kind of duty and helping as the latter kind of duty. For

Gert (2005), morality encourages charitable action, but does not

require it; it is always morally good to be charitable, but it is not

immoral not to be charitable.

Even if the plausible basic schema for definitions of

“morality” in the normative sense is accepted, one’s

understanding of what morality is, in this sense, will still depend

very significantly on how one understands rationality. As has already

been mentioned, morality, in the normative sense, is sometimes taken

to prohibit certain forms of consensual sexual activity, or the use of

recreational drugs. But including such prohibitions in an account of

morality as a universal guide that all rational persons would put

forward requires a very particular view of rationality. After all,

many will deny that it is irrational to favor harmless consensual

sexual activities, or to favor the use of certain drugs for purely

recreational purposes.

One concept of rationality that supports the exclusion of sexual

matters, at least at the basic level, from the norms of morality, is

that for an action to count as irrational it must be an act that harms

oneself without producing a compensating benefit for

someone—perhaps oneself, perhaps someone else. Such an account

of rationality might be called “hybrid”, since it gives

different roles to self-interest and to altruism. An account of

morality based on the hybrid concept of rationality could agree with

Hobbes (1660) that morality is concerned with promoting people living

together in peace and harmony, which includes obeying the rules

prohibiting causing harm to others. Although moral prohibitions

against actions that cause harm or significantly increase the risk of

harm are not absolute, in order to avoid acting immorally,

justification is always needed when violating these prohibitions. Kant

(1797) seems to hold that it is never justified to violate some of

these prohibitions, e.g., the prohibition against lying. This is

largely a result of the fact that Kant’s (1785) concept of

rationality is purely formal, in contrast with the hybrid concept of

rationality described above.

Most moral realists who offer moral theories do not bother to offer

anything like a definition of morality. Instead, what these

philosophers offer is a theory of the nature and justification of a

set of norms with which they take their audience already to be

acquainted. In effect, they tacitly pick morality out by reference to

certain salient and relative uncontroversial bits of its content: that

it prohibits killing, stealing, deceiving, cheating, and so on. In

fact, this would not be a bad way of defining morality, if the point

of such a definition were only to be relatively theory-neutral, and to

allow theorizing to begin. We could call it “the

reference-fixing definition” or “the substantive

definition” (see Prinz and Nichols 2010: 122).

Some, including Hare (1952, 1963), have been tempted to argue against

the possibility of a substantive definition of morality, on the basis

of the claim that moral disapproval is an attitude that can be

directed at anything whatsoever. Foot (1958a, 1958b), argued against

this idea, but the substantive definition still has the drawback is

that it does not, somehow, seem to get at the essence of morality. One

might suggest that the substantive definition has the advantage of

including Divine Command theories of morality, while such theories

might seem to make trouble for definitions based on the plausible

schema given above. But it is plausible to hold that Divine Command

theories rest on Natural Law theories, which do in fact fit the

schema. Divine Command theories that do not rest on Natural Law might

make trouble for the schema, but one might also think that such

theories rest instead on a confusion, since they seem to entail that

God might have made it immoral to act beneficently.

5. Variations

As one gives more substance and detail to the general notions of

endorsement, rationality, and the relevant conditions under which

rational people would endorse morality, one moves further from

providing a definition of morality in the normative sense, and closer

to providing an actual moral theory. And a similar claim is true for

definitions of morality in the descriptive sense, as one specifies in

more detail what one means in claiming that a person or group endorses

a system or code. In the following four subsections, four broad ways

of making the definitions of morality more precise are presented. They

are all sufficiently schematic to be regarded as varieties of

definition, rather than as theories.

5.1 Morality as linked to norms for responses to behavior

Expressivists about morality do not take there to be any objective

content to morality that could underwrite what we above called

“the substantive definition”. Rather, they explicitly

recognize the existence of significant variation in what rules and

ideals different people put forward as morality in the normative

sense. And they doubt that this variation is compatible with moral

realism. Consequently, they need to offer some unifying features of

these different sets of rules and ideals, despite variation in their

content. As a result of this pressure, some expressivists end up

offering explicit accounts of a distinctively moral attitude

one might hold towards an act token or type. These accounts can of

course be taken to underwrite various forms of morality in the

descriptive sense. But they can also be taken to provide the basis of

one form of moral realism.

To see how an expressivist view can be co-opted by a moral realist of

a certain sort, consider Allan Gibbard’s (1990) moral

expressivism. Gibbard holds that moral judgments are expressions of

the acceptance of norms for feeling the emotions of guilt and anger.

One can accept Gibbard’s view of what it is to endorse a moral

claim without accepting the view that, in conflicts, all disagreements

are faultless. That is, even a moral realist can use Gibbard’s

view of the nature of moral judgment, and extract from it a definition

of morality. Used by such a theorist, Gibbard’s view entails

that morality, in the normative sense, is the code that is picked out

by the correct set of norms for feeling guilt and anger: that

is, the norms a rational person would endorse. This is

equivalent to accepting the plausible general schema for a definition

of “morality” given above, and understanding endorsement

in a special sense. To endorse a code in the relevant way, on this

definition, is to think that violations of its norms make guilt and

anger appropriate.

Closely related to Gibbard’s account is one according to which

the norms of relevance are not norms for the emotions, but are norms

for other reactions to behavior. For example, a person’s

morality might be the set of rules and ideals they regard as picked

out by appropriate norms for praise and blame, and other social

sanctions (Sprigge 1964: 317). In fact, reference to praise and blame

may be more adequate than reference to guilt and anger, since the

latter seem only to pick out moral prohibitions, and not to make room

for the idea that morality also recommends or encourages certain

behaviors even if it does not require them. For example, it is

plausible that there is such a thing as supererogatory action, and

that the specification of what counts as supererogatory is part of

morality—whether in the descriptive or normative sense. But it

does not seem likely that we can account for this part of morality by

appeal to norms for guilt and anger, and it is not at all clear that

there are emotions that are as closely linked to supererogation as

guilt and anger are to moral transgression. On the other hand, it

seems plausible that norms for praising action might help to pick out

what counts as supererogatory.

Another version of the present strategy would replace talk of praise

and blame with talk of reward and punishment. This view would take

morality to be a system that explained what kinds of actions are

appropriately rewarded and—more centrally—punished. This

sort of view, which remains closely related to Gibbard’s

suggestion, can also be regarded as fitting the general schema given

above. On this view, the notion of endorsing a code is unpacked in

terms of the acceptance of norms for reward and punishment. Skorupski

(1993), following Mill (1861), advocates a definition of morality

along these lines, though he then understands punishment primarily in

terms of blame, and understands blame as very closely linked to

emotion—indeed, merely having the emotion can count as

blaming—so that the resulting view is similar to Gibbard’s

in one important way, at least when one focuses on moral

wrongness.

It is certainly plausible that it is appropriate to feel guilt when

one acts immorally, and to feel anger at those who act immorally

towards those one cares about. It is even plausible that it is

only appropriate, in some particular sense of

“appropriate”, to feel guilt and anger in connection with

moral transgressions. So norms for guilt and anger may well uniquely

pick out certain moral norms. And similar claims might be made about

norms for praise and blame. However, it is not equally clear that

morality is properly defined in terms of emotions or other

reactions to behavior. For it may be, as Skorupski emphasizes, that we

need to understand guilt and anger, and praise and blame, in terms of

moral concepts. This worry about direction of explanation seems less

pressing for the notions of reward and punishment. These responses to

behavior, at least in themselves, might simply be understood

in terms of the meting out of benefits and harms. Of course they will

only count as reward and punishment when they are linked to

someone’s having followed or violated a rule that all rational

people would want to see enforced by such responses.

5.2 Morality as linked to advocacy of a code

One way of understanding the notion of endorsement is as advocacy.

Advocating a code is a second- or third-personal matter, since one

advocates a code to others. Moreover, it is consistent with advocating

a code, that one does not plan on following that code oneself. Just as

asserting something one believes to be false still counts as asserting

it, hypocritical advocacy of a code still counts as advocacy of that

code. When endorsement is understood as advocacy, it can be used in

definitions of morality, in the descriptive sense, as long as it is

the morality of a group or society. And advocacy can also be used as

an interpretation of endorsement when providing a definition of

morality in the normative sense. Of course those who accept a

definition of morality in any of these senses—as the code that a

group or society endorses, or as the code that would be universally

advocated by all rational agents under certain conditions—do not

hold that the advocacy would necessarily, or even probably, be

hypocritical. But they do hold that the important thing about a moral

code—what picks it out as a moral code—is that it would be

put forward by all the relevant agents, not that it would be

followed by all of them. The notion of advocacy has less of a

place in a descriptive account of a single person’s morality,

since when someone is hypocritical we often deny that they really hold

the moral view that they advocate.

Mill (1861), in addition to offering a moral theory, takes pains to

explain how morality differs from other normative systems. For him,

norms that simply promote utility are norms of expediency. In order to

qualify as morally wrong, an act must be one that ought to be

punished. Thinking that an act of a certain kind ought to be punished

is a third-personal matter, so it seems plausible to put Mill’s

view of what is definitional of morality into the category being

discussed in this section. It is worth noting that hypocrisy is, for

Mill, not only a possibility, but—given the present sorry state

of moral education—virtually unavoidable. That is because being

motivated to advocate punishment for a certain kind of act is quite

different from being motivated to refrain from that same kind of act.

Advocating punishment for a certain kind of act might be one’s

utility-maximizing choice, while actually performing that kind of act

(trying, of course, to avoid detection) might also be

utility-maximizing. And for Mill what determines what a person will

advocate, and how a person will act, are the foreseeable consequences

for that person.

Bernard Gert’s (2005) moral view also operates with a definition

of morality that understands endorsement as advocacy, in the sense of

putting forward as a guide for all rational agents. Gert offers the

following two conditions as those under which all rational persons

would put forward a universal guide for governing the behavior of all

moral agents. The first condition is that they are seeking agreement

with all other rational persons or moral agents. The second condition

is that they use only those beliefs that are shared by all rational

persons: for example, that they themselves are fallible and vulnerable

and that all those to whom morality applies are also fallible and

vulnerable. The second condition rules out both religious beliefs and

scientific beliefs since there are no religious beliefs or scientific

beliefs that all rational persons share. This condition is plausible

because no universal guide to behavior that applies to all rational

persons can be based on beliefs that some of these rational persons do

not share.

5.3 Morality as linked to acceptance of a code

Another way of understanding the notion of endorsement is as

acceptance. Unlike advocating a code, accepting a code is a

first-personal matter. It might include intending to conform

one’s own behavior to that code, feeling guilty when one does

not, and so on. One cannot hypocritically accept a code. Indeed,

hypocrisy is simply a matter of advocating a code one does not accept.

So this notion of endorsement is available to someone who is trying to

provide a definition of morality in the descriptive sense, even when

considering a single person’s morality.

Paradigmatic views in the natural law tradition starting with Aquinas

hold both that the laws of morality have their source in God, and that

these laws constitute the principles of human practical rationality

(Finnis 1980; MacIntyre 1999). Views in this tradition may be seen as

using the basic schema for definitions of morality in the normative

sense, understanding endorsement as acceptance. Members of this

tradition typically hold that all rational persons know what kinds of

actions morality prohibits, requires, discourages, encourages, and

allows. It is central to Aquinas’s view that morality is known

to all those whose behavior is subject to moral judgment, even if they

do not know of the revelations of Christianity. This is why Aquinas

holds that knowing what morality prohibits and requires does not

involve knowing why morality prohibits and requires what it does.

Those who belong to the natural law tradition also hold that reason

endorses acting morally. This sort of endorsement of course has a

cognitive component. But it is also motivational. Aquinas does not

hold that knowledge of morality is always effective: it can be blotted

out by evil persuasions or corrupt habits. But if reason is not

opposed by such forces, any rational person would not only know what

was prohibited and required by morality, but would follow those

prohibitions and requirements. So, for natural law theorists,

endorsement amounts to acceptance.

5.4 Morality as linked to justification to others

The lack of an explicit and widely accepted definition of morality may

partially explain the resilience of act-consequentialist accounts of

morality. Without an explicit definition, it may be easier to ignore

the fact that act-consequentialist theories are not particularly

concerned with interpersonal interactions, but typically apply just as

well to desert island scenarios as to individuals who live in

societies. In any case, it has been recognized that in order to combat

consequentialism, it would be helpful to have something like a

plausible definition of morality that made it clear that the subject

matter of morality is something different from simply the goodness and

badness of consequences. T.M. Scanlon (1982, 1998), applying this

strategy, suggests that the subject matter of morality—what we

are talking about, when we talk about morality—is a system of

rules for the regulation of behavior that is not reasonably rejectable

based on a desire for informed unforced general agreement.

Scanlon’s suggestion regarding the subject matter of morality

can easily be seen as an instance of the general schema given above.

His “system of rules” is a specific kind of informal

public system; he understands endorsement by all rational people as

non-rejection by all reasonable people; and he offers a specific

account of the conditions under which moral agents would reach the

relevant agreement. But Scanlon also places very heavy emphasis on the

fact that if he is right about the subject matter of morality, then

what compliance with moral norms allows us to do is to justify our

behavior to others in ways that they cannot reasonably reject. Indeed,

the ability to justify ourselves to reasonable people is a primary

source of moral motivation for Scanlon (see also Sprigge 1964: 319).

This might seem to suggest a somewhat different definitional claim

about morality: that morality consists in the most basic norms in

terms of which we justify ourselves to others. But it is plausible

that this purportedly definitional claim is better thought of as a

corollary of Scanlon’s particular version of the general schema,

with endorsement understood as non-rejection. For, if morality is the

system of norms that would be endorsed in this way, we can justify our

actions to others by pointing out that even they, were they

reasonable, would have endorsed rules that allowed our behavior.

Stephen Darwall’s (2006) moral view can also be seen as flowing

from a version of the general schema, and yielding claims about

justifiability to others. Darwall claims that morality is a matter of equal accountability among free and rational beings. On his view, I

behave morally towards you to the degree that I respect the claims you

have authority to make on me. Darwall also holds that I will respect

those claims if I acknowledge certain assumptions to which I am

committed simply in virtue of being a rational, deliberating agent. As

a result, his view is that morality—or at least the morality of

obligation—is a “scheme of accountability” (a

certain sort of informal public system) that all rational people will

endorse. Unlike Scanlon’s view, however, Darwall’s view

makes use of a stronger sense of endorsement than non-rejection.

Specifically, it includes the recognition of the reasons provided by

the authoritative demands of other people. And that recognition is

positively motivational.

Both Scanlon’s and Darwall’s views emphasize the social

nature of morality, taken in the normative sense: Scanlon, by

reference to justification to others; Darwall, by appeal to the

relevance of second-personal reasons. But Darwall builds a

responsiveness to second-personal reasons into the relevant notion of

rationality, while Scanlon simply makes the empirical claim that many

people are motivated by a desire to justify themselves to others, and

notes that his definition of morality will yield rules that will allow

one to do this, if one follows them. The sort of definition described

section 5.1

also makes the social nature of morality essential to it, since it

centrally features the notion of a response to the behavior of others.

The definitions described in sections

5.2

and

5.3

do not entail the social nature of morality, since it is

possible to accept, and even to advocate, a code that concerns only

self-regarding behavior. But on any plausible account of rationality a

code that would be advocated by all moral agents will govern

interpersonal interactions, and will include rules that prohibit

causing harm without sufficient reason. Only the definition offered in

section 5.3

therefore can be taken as realistically compatible with an egoistic

morality.

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Aristotle’s EthicsFirst published Tue May 1, 2001; substantive revision Sat Jul 2, 2022

Aristotle conceives of ethical theory as a field distinct from the

theoretical sciences. Its methodology must match its subject

matter—good action—and must respect the fact that in this

field many generalizations hold only for the most part. We study

ethics in order to improve our lives, and therefore its principal

concern is the nature of human well-being. Aristotle follows Socrates

and Plato in taking the virtues to be central to a well-lived life.

Like Plato, he regards the ethical virtues (justice, courage,

temperance and so on) as complex rational, emotional and social

skills. But he rejects Plato’s idea that to be completely

virtuous one must acquire, through a training in the sciences,

mathematics, and philosophy, an understanding of what goodness is.

What we need, in order to live well, is a proper appreciation of the

way in which such goods as friendship, pleasure, virtue, honor and

wealth fit together as a whole. In order to apply that general

understanding to particular cases, we must acquire, through proper

upbringing and habits, the ability to see, on each occasion, which

course of action is best supported by reasons. Therefore practical

wisdom, as he conceives it, cannot be acquired solely by learning

general rules. We must also acquire, through practice, those

deliberative, emotional, and social skills that enable us to put our

general understanding of well-being into practice in ways that are

suitable to each occasion.

1. Preliminaries

2. The Human Good and the Function Argument

3. Methodology

3.1 Traditional Virtues and the Skeptic

3.2 Differences from and Affinities to Plato

4. Virtues and Deficiencies, Continence and Incontinence

5. The Doctrine of the Mean

5.1 Ethical Virtue as Disposition

5.2 Ethical Theory Does Not Offer a Decision Procedure

5.3 The Starting Point for Practical Reasoning

6. Intellectual Virtues

7. Akrasia

8. Pleasure

9. Friendship

10. Three Lives Compared

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Ethics vs. Morals

Diffen › English Language › Grammar › Words

Ethics and morals relate to “right” and “wrong” conduct. While they are sometimes used interchangeably, they are different: ethics refer to rules provided by an external source, e.g., codes of conduct in workplaces or principles in religions. Morals refer to an individual’s own principles regarding right and wrong.

Comparison chart

Ethics versus Morals comparison chart

EthicsMoralsWhat are they? The rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group or culture.

Principles or habits with respect to right or wrong conduct. While morals also prescribe dos and don'ts, morality is ultimately a personal compass of right and wrong.

Where do they come from? Social system - External

Individual - Internal

Why we do it? Because society says it is the right thing to do.

Because we believe in something being right or wrong.

Flexibility Ethics are dependent on others for definition. They tend to be consistent within a certain context, but can vary between contexts.

Usually consistent, although can change if an individual’s beliefs change.

The "Gray" A person strictly following Ethical Principles may not have any Morals at all. Likewise, one could violate Ethical Principles within a given system of rules in order to maintain Moral integrity.

A Moral Person although perhaps bound by a higher covenant, may choose to follow a code of ethics as it would apply to a system. "Make it fit"

Origin Greek word "ethos" meaning"character"

Latin word "mos" meaning "custom"

Acceptability Ethics are governed by professional and legal guidelines within a particular time and place

Morality transcends cultural norms

Source of Principles

Ethics are external standards that are provided by institutions, groups, or culture to which an individual belongs. For example, lawyers, policemen, and doctors all have to follow an ethical code laid down by their profession, regardless of their own feelings or preferences. Ethics can also be considered a social system or a framework for acceptable behavior.

Morals are also influenced by culture or society, but they are personal principles created and upheld by individuals themselves.

Consistency and Flexibility

Ethics are very consistent within a certain context, but can vary greatly between contexts. For example, the ethics of the medical profession in the 21st century are generally consistent and do not change from hospital to hospital, but they are different from the ethics of the 21st century legal profession.

An individual’s moral code is usually unchanging and consistent across all contexts, but it is also possible for certain events to radically change an individual's personal beliefs and values.

Conflicts Between Ethics and Morals

One professional example of ethics conflicting with morals is the work of a defense attorney. A lawyer’s morals may tell her that murder is reprehensible and that murderers should be punished, but her ethics as a professional lawyer, require her to defend her client to the best of her abilities, even if she knows that the client is guilty.

Another example can be found in the medical field. In most parts of the world, a doctor may not euthanize a patient, even at the patient's request, as per ethical standards for health professionals. However, the same doctor may personally believe in a patient's right to die, as per the doctor's own morality.

Origins

Much of the confusion between these two words can be traced back to their origins. For example, the word "ethic" comes from Old French (etique), Late Latin (ethica), and Greek (ethos) and referred to customs or moral philosophies. "Morals" comes from Late Latin's moralis, which referred to appropriate behavior and manners in society. So, the two have very similar, if not synonymous, meanings originally.

Morality and ethics of the individual have been philosophically studied for well over a thousand years. The idea of ethics being principles that are set and applied to a group (not necessarily focused on the individual) is relatively new, though, primarily dating back to the 1600s. The distinction between ethics and morals is particularly important for philosophical ethicists.

Videos Explaining the Differences

The following video explains how ethics are objective, while morals are subjective.

References

The Definition of Morality - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Ethics Definition - Dictionary.com

Ethic Origins - Online Etymology Dictionary

Moral Origins - Wiktionary

Morals Definition - Dictionary.com

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Comments: Ethics vs Morals

Anonymous comments (5)

October 23, 2013, 2:02pm

The Greek and Latin origins seem to indicate that the definitions are reversed. However, I think that the definitions are correct for how the terms are used. For example, Olympic athletes have a code of ethics to which they must adhere; and people are often given the advice to "follow their moral compass"

— 72.✗.✗.224

June 25, 2012, 6:43pm

WOW!!! Neat website... I love it! :D

— 70.✗.✗.68

May 30, 2013, 11:41pm

I think the distinction drawn here is backwards. If you listen to how these words are used idiomatically, moral tends to relate to codified societal beliefs that are received on an unquestioned basis (the 1960's use of the term "moral majority" for instance.) On the other hand ethics implies a philosophical and hence reasoned set of values that the individual thinks through (going back to Aristotle's Ethics).

— 173.✗.✗.75

November 15, 2013, 8:17pm

Part of being an educated person is that you know how to find the field that studies the thing you are interested in. Philosophy is the field that studies ethics. Philosophers use the terms "ethical" and "moral" more or less interchangeably, and tend not to use the term "morals".

The content here is of very very poor quality, and looks like it was simply made up by someone.

If you want to learn about this, a good starting point is the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That is a very high quality source, with several entries on ethics.

— 75.✗.✗.251

March 23, 2014, 12:59am

Morality is an individual's opinion of right and wrong. An ethical code is the opinion of a group that has the authority to force others to follow their views, or be penalized. Having the authority to make rules does not make your rules any more objective or rational. ALL moral views are subjective. Posting videos from a cult that believes in magic destroys your credibility.

— 76.✗.✗.223

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