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Philosophy vocabulary · Ethics and Moral Philosophy

Morality

Meaning in philosophy, with examples

/məˈræləti/nounCore term

In philosophy, morality means: The principles about right and wrong behavior that people or societies accept, or the quality of an action being morally right or wrong.

In Turkish: ahlak, ahlakilik

How it is used

Many writers use morality for the actual practice of judging right and wrong and ethics for the philosophical study of it, but the two are often interchangeable. The adjective is moral and the adverb morally.

Example sentences

  1. Does morality depend on religion, or can it stand on its own?

  2. Nietzsche criticized what he called slave morality.

Common collocations

  • common-sense morality
  • the morality of war
  • slave morality
  • morally wrong
  • ethicsThe branch of philosophy that studies right and wrong, good and bad, and how we ought to live and treat one another.
  • metaethicsThe branch of ethics that asks what moral claims mean, whether they can be true or false and how we could know them, rather than which actions are right.
  • relativismThe view that truth, knowledge or moral rightness is not absolute but depends on a culture, a person or a framework.
  • moral realismThe metaethical view that there are objective moral facts, which hold independently of what any person or culture believes about them.

More terms: Ethics and Moral Philosophy

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