Submitted by: Submitted by happytan26
Views: 468
Words: 546
Pages: 3
Category: Spirituality
Date Submitted: 07/22/2011 10:30 PM
Descriptive ethics
- might also be referred to as behavioral ethics.
-- It contrasts with normative ethics, meta-ethics, and applied ethics.
Descriptive ethics: What do people think is right?
Normative (prescriptive) ethics: How should people act?
Applied ethics: How do we take moral knowledge and put it into practice?
Meta-ethics: What does 'right' even mean?
- can be thought of as a branch of ethics that attempts to describe, understand, and explain moral phenomena.
- this approach attempts to describe and explain moral action, moral decision making, and moral phenomena.
-As such they use social science frameworks that often include theory building and hypothesis testing in terms of discerning answers. Engaging these kinds of questions in a business context, then, can be thought of as descriptive business ethics, or the application to the broader organizational context can be referred to as descriptive organizational ethics.
-One important body of research of descriptive ethics is cognitive moral development theory
-Kohlberg’s theory describes the developmental processes used by individuals as they grow and develop in terms of how they resolve moral issues and make moral choices.
-tries to write down the rules of behavior that people use in their lives.
For example: "some people believe that it is alright to lie in certain circumstances". They don't judge whether or not it is alright, they just say that some people believe that it is alright. Descriptive ethics are not value judgements about what is right or wrong, they are just observations about how people tend to behave - what ethics they tend to follow.
MORALITY VS ETHICS
morality might be considered the practice of such moral code
Ethics” may be thought of, then, as simply the study of morality.
Descriptive ethics is a value-free approach to ethics, which defines it as a social science...