Descriptive ethics

Descriptive ethics deal with what the population actually believes to be right and wrong, and holds up as ideals or condemns or punishes in law or politics, as contrasted to normative ethics which deals with what the population should believe to be right and wrong, and such concepts as sin and evil. Society is usually balancing the two in some way, and sociology and social psychology are often concerned with the balance, and more clinical assessments and instruments to determine ethical attitudes.

Value theory can be either normative or descriptive but is usually descriptive.

Lawrence Kohlberg described several levels of ethical rigor, of which the more shallow levels were descriptive and concerned with what others thought, and the deeper levels were more directly derived from relationships and abstract concepts.

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See also: list of ethics topics, meta-ethics, scruples, moral reasoning, simple view of ethics and morals