Descriptive Ethics takes a bottom-up approach by starting with how society actually behaves ethically and developing principles from those observations.

Descriptive Ethics takes a bottom-up approach by starting with how society actually behaves ethically and developing principles from those observations.

• A. Descriptive Ethics
• B. Applied Ethics
• C. Normative Ethics
• D. Meta Ethics

Answer: (A)

Descriptive ethics describes how people actually think and behave morally, using observations and data from society. It focuses on what is; it doesn’t prescribe what ought to be. That makes it a bottom-up approach because principles are inferred from real-world beliefs and practices rather than starting from abstract rules. In contrast, normative ethics begins with ideas about right and wrong and argues how people ought to act, which is a top-down method. Meta-ethics looks at the nature of moral judgments and the meaning of ethical terms, rather than at concrete behaviors. Applied ethics uses normative theories to address real-world issues. So describing the existing moral landscape and the reasoning people use fits descriptive ethics best.

Descriptive ethics describes how people actually think and behave morally, using observations and data from society. It focuses on what is; it doesn’t prescribe what ought to be. That makes it a bottom-up approach because principles are inferred from real-world beliefs and practices rather than starting from abstract rules. In contrast, normative ethics begins with ideas about right and wrong and argues how people ought to act, which is a top-down method. Meta-ethics looks at the nature of moral judgments and the meaning of ethical terms, rather than at concrete behaviors. Applied ethics uses normative theories to address real-world issues. So describing the existing moral landscape and the reasoning people use fits descriptive ethics best.