Any discussion or study of ethics can be split into two essential but different questions: “Why?” and “How?”
Investigations into “why” humans act cover the guiding, underlying principles of ethical standards such as virtue, human behavior, fear of consequence, and desire for happiness. This aspect of ethics is also called normative ethics, and it is concerned with figuring out the meat of morality. The end goal of normative ethics is to help us determine the proper course of action for human behavior, which is to say the most moral, correct, or just ways of thinking and acting. One basic example of normative ethics is Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. It states that morality is an outgrowth of rational thought, and it’s normative because it seeks to define the best way a person should act.
“How” humans actually act, whether in adhering to a standard moral code or not, is a completely different situation altogether. Have you ever heard a parent say to their child, “Do as I say, not as I do?” This quip exposes the major difference between theory and action, or “ought to” and “actually does.” Ethics define us as humans, but the disconnect between having a sense of what is morally good and doing another thing anyway may more accurately define us as humans.
The actions that result (or do not result) from normative ethics fall under the banner of descriptive ethics. John Stuart Mill’s principle of utility is a kind of descriptive ethics. It’s an examination of behavior itself, as opposed to the ethics that lead to behavior, and defines good actions as ones that promote happiness or pleasure. To make a long story short: Ideals and ideas are normative ethical theories, and actual actions (and the process that surrounds them) are descriptive ethics.
Normative ethical theories are any ethical theories that debate the innate or natural value of an action, thought, or feeling—particularly if it is objectively right or wrong. Determining virtues and their reach is a normative ethical practice. So is debating the rightness or wrongness of actions based on their consequences—yes, action is ultimately involved but in terms of normative ethics the practice is more about the motivating factors behind the action, and not the action itself.
Here are some normative ethical quandaries:
• If killing is accepted as being wrong, is it morally acceptable to put convicted murderers to death?
• Is it morally acceptable to free slaves because the practice is abhorrent, even though freeing them would violate the laws of a community that permits it?
• Is there ever an acceptable reason to inflict pain upon another person?
In many ways, normative ethics is like high-level etiquette. They are wrapped up in the manners of life, and how people ought to behave toward one another so as not to offend. But it’s way more complex than that. Ethics are of major importance and override the rules and laws of society, and are often a matter of life and death, and as some ethicists would argue, describe the pursuit of happiness. While it is morally acceptable and encouraged to be polite, normative ethics frame our ability to live our lives in a just and free manner.
Descriptive ethics, then, are all about action—how those normative ethics are used where it really counts. It’s the study of how human beings actually behave in the ethical realm, whether they’re actively considering the ethical ramifications of their actions or not. Descriptive ethics is what humans do to one another and themselves—the “applied” in applied ethics. (This may be an easier term to understand than descriptive ethics, and the term applied ethics is used just as often, if not more so, than descriptive ethics.) It’s a little confusing, but descriptive ethics also concern the motivations of social behavior, such as how people reason their way through ethics, what people consider to be the most important factors in action, and the regulation of behavior based on those standards on a society- or community-wide level. Recall that normative ethics are all about the theories of why, whereas descriptive ethics are all about understanding the actions of how.
Descriptive ethics is just as rooted in sciences like psychology, anthropology, and sociology as it is philosophy. One example of descriptive ethics is how widely acceptable moral standards are used to form laws. For example, the actions that a society chooses to punish its members is an insight into the ethics of the people of that society.
“At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn’t mean that you can’t think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.” —Twentieth-century Australian ethicist Peter Singer
One other important, elementary force in ethics is the concept of metaethics. This is really what the overarching study of ethics is about. In trying to determine how to act and why via normative and descriptive ethical forms, metaethics seeks to investigate the source of the ethical principles that make us choose one course of action over another. This is where things like divine intervention, universal truths, and reason come into play—the soil from which all other ethical philosophies grow.