Morality
Morality is the concept of doing the right thing. Morals are basic guidelines for living. It is about conventions or rules, and tries to classify actions and intentions into two groups.
- Some of them are good / true
- Others are wrong / false
Cicero introduced the term when he wrote philosphia moralis. He used it to translate Ancient Greek Ethike (which is ethics, in English)
Morality in other fields
- Ethics, as a part of philosophy. It describes principles, values and virtues
- Moral theology describes morality in the context of religion.
- Moral psychology looks at the emotions and incentives people have when they act for right or wrong.
- Political science and economics can also be looked at from a point of view of morality.
- Philosophy of law also looks at the relationship between law and morality.
Authority and choice
Many people have written about ways of choosing what the right thing is. Some believe that there is an objective (true even if you do not agree with it) morality, often thinking it was set by God or another similar being; others think that morality is subjective (that what is good or bad is a community choice).
People can learn morals from religion, parents, friends, school, books, or from ethical traditions. People that teach or follow morals are called moralists.
It can also be a lesson that someone learns in a book or story. It is usually one line at the end of the story ("The moral of this story is....."). Fables are stories with a moral.
The opposite of "moral" is "immoral", meaning the wrong thing to do. "Amoral" means something that is not related to morality, or has no morally good or bad aspect to it. It is the same as "morally neutral". Morality means that you can tell between a right and a wrong thing.
Morality Media
Allegory with a portrait of a Venetian senator (Allegory of the morality of earthly things), attributed to Tintoretto, 1585
Immanuel Kant introduced the categorical imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
Kohlberg's model of moral development
