One might call them the 'merely morally permissible.' Examples of such acts include watching the evening news on television, eating an apple instead of an orange, choosing vanilla over chocolate, whistling while you work, thoroughly chewing your food before swallowing, brushing before flossing instead of after, etc. One is neither obligated nor prohibited from doing them. Morally neutral acts are morally right activities that are allowed but not required. They include the morally neutral, the morally obligatory, and the morally supererogatory. Morally right acts are activities that are allowed. Other descriptions would be that they are morally prohibited, morally impermissible, acts one ought not to do, and acts one has a duty to refrain from doing. Morally wrong acts are activities such as murder, theft, rape, lying, and breaking promises. And what of acts that go above and beyond the call of duty? They are morally right, but perhaps we need a term to separate them from other acts that are right in the sense of merely permissible.Įxpanding the category of “morally right” to include three different subcategories better captures the distinctions we want: To see this, note that while to say that an action is morally wrong means we ought not to do it, to claim that an action is morally right fails to clarify whether we should do it or are merely allowed to do it (that is, whether it is obligatory or merely permissible).

Though morality uses the categories of right and wrong, those two terms are not enough to capture all that we want to say about different types of behavior. Thus, “What is your ethics?” is usually taken to mean the same as “What is your morality?”Ĭontroversy exists in the study of morality about such questions as whether there is a single standard of morality for all people and how we can know what that standard is. But really there is such looseness in the use of the terms that in the minds of many morality and ethics are the same.

Some people use the term “ethics” for the systematic study of morality. Morality is “normative,” it is concerned with how people should behave, not just how they actually do behave. It evaluates behavior as right or wrong and may involve measuring the conformity of a person’s actions to a code of conduct or set of principles. Morality directs people to behave in certain ways and avoid behaving in other ways.

Ethics can be defined as