The topic of this entry is not—at least directly—moraltheory; rather, it is the definition of morality. Moraltheories are large and complex things; definitions are not. Thequestion of the definition of morality is the question of identifyingthetarget of moral theorizing. Identifying this targetenables us to see different moral theories as attempting to capturethe very same thing. A definition of morality also enablespsychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and othermore empirically-oriented theorists to design their experiments orformulate their hypotheses without prejudicing matters too much interms of the specific content a code, judgment, or norm must have inorder to count as distinctively moral. As we’ll see, differentfields of study may prioritize different criteria of adequacy in suchdefinitions, given their goals.

There does not seem to be much reason to think that a singledefinition of morality will be applicable to all moral discussions,even within philosophy. One reason for this is that“morality” seems to be used in two distinct broad senses:a descriptive sense and a normative sense. More particularly, the term“morality” can be used either

1. descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct endorsed by asociety or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individualfor her own behavior, or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specifiedconditions, would be endorsed by all rational people.

Any definition of “morality” in the descriptive sense willneed to specifywhich of the codes endorsed by a society orgroup count as moral. Even in small homogeneous societies that have nowritten language, distinctions are sometimes made between morality,law, and religion. And in larger and more complex societies thesedistinctions are often sharply marked. So “morality”cannot be taken to refer to every code of conduct endorsed by asociety. As Dahl (2023: 53) puts it, a descriptive definition of“morality” should bedistinctive: it shoulddistinguish moral judgments, principles, or codes from other normativejudgments, principles, or codes.

In the normative sense, “morality” refers to a code ofconduct that would be endorsed by anyone who meets certainintellectual and volitional conditions, almost always including thecondition of being rational. That a person meets these conditions istypically expressed by saying that the person counts as amoralagent. However, merely showing that a certain code would beendorsed by any moral agent is not enough to show that the code is themoral code. It might well be that all moral agents would also endorsea code of prudence or rationality, but this would not by itself showthat prudence was part of morality. So something else must be added;for example, that the code can be understood to involve a certain kindof impartiality, or that it can be understood as having the functionof making it possible for people to live together in groups.

As we’ve just seen, not allcodes that are endorsed bysocieties or groups are moral codes in the descriptive sense ofmorality, and not allcodes that would be endorsed by all moralagents are moral codes in the normative sense of morality. So anydefinition of morality—in either sense—will requirefurther criteria. Still, each of these two very brief descriptions ofcodes might be regarded as offering some features of morality thatwould be included in any adequate definition. In that way they mightbe taken to be offering somedefinitional features ofmorality, in each of its two senses. When one has specified enoughdefinitional features to allow one to classify all the relevanttheories—whether normative moral theories, or theories about thedescriptive moralities of different societies—as theories of acommon subject, one might then be taken to have given a definition ofmorality. This is the sense of “definition” at work inthis entry.

• 1. Is Morality Unified Enough to Define?
• 2. Descriptive Definitions of “Morality”
• 3. Descriptive Definitions in Allied Areas
• 4. Normative Definitions of “Morality”
  • 4.1 Morality and rationality
  • 4.2 Morality as a public system
  • 4.3 The content of morality
• 5. Relations Between Normative and Descriptive Morality
• 6. Variations
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Is Morality Unified Enough to Define?

An assumption suggested by the very existence of this encyclopediaentry is that there is some unifying set of features in virtue ofwhich all moral systems count as moral systems. But Sinnott-Armstrong(2016) directly argues against an analogous hypothesis in connectionwith moral judgments, and also seems to take this view to suggest thatmorality itself is not a unified domain. He points out that moraljudgments cannot be unified by any appeal to the notion of harm toothers, since there are such things as moral ideals, and there areharmless behaviors that a significant number of people regard asmorally wrong: Sinnott-Armstrong gives examples such as cannibalismand flag-burning. Whether people who condemn such behaviors morallyare correct in those judgments is largely irrelevant to the questionof whether they count as moral in the first place.

Sinnott-Armstrong seems right in holding that moral judgments cannotbe delimited from other judgments simply by appeal to their content.It seems quite possible for someone to have been raised in such a wayas to hold that it is morally wrong for adult men to wear shorts. Andit also seems plausible that, as he also argues, moral judgmentscannot be identified by reference to any sort of neurological featurecommon and peculiar to them and them alone. A third strategy might beto claim that moral judgments are those one makes as a result ofhaving been inducted into a social practice that has a certainfunction. However, this function cannot simply be to help facilitatethe sorts of social interactions that enable societies to flourish andpersist, since too many obviously non-moral judgments do this.

Beyond the problem just described, attempts to pick out moral codes inthe descriptive sense by appeal to their function often seem to bespecifying the function that the theorist thinks morality, in thenormative sense,would serve, rather than the function thatactual moralitiesdo serve. For example, Greene claimsthat

morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwiseselfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation, (2013:23)

and Haidt claims that

moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms,practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolvedpsychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulateself-interest and make cooperative societies possible. (2011: 270)

But these claims need to deal with the existence of dysfunctionalmoralities that do not in fact serve these functions. Perhaps thisproblem could be alleviated by pointing out that many instances of akind that have a function—for example, an actual humanheart—fail to fulfill that function.

Even if Sinnott-Armstrong’s position is correct with regard tomorality in the descriptive sense, there might nevertheless be a codeof conduct that, given certain specified conditions, would be endorsedby all rational agents. That is, even if the descriptive sense ofmorality is a family-resemblance notion, vaguely bordered andopen-textured, or even if it is significantly disjunctive anddisunified, the normative sense might not be. By way of comparison, wemight think of the notion of food in two ways: as what people regardas food, and as what they would regard as food if they were rationaland fully informed. Certainly there is not much that unifies the firstcategory: not even being digestible or nutritious, since people regardvarious indigestible and non-nutritious substances as food, and foregomuch that is digestible and nutritious. But that does not mean that wecannot theorize about what it would be rational to regard as food.

2. Descriptive Definitions of “Morality”

An initial naïve attempt at a descriptive definition of“morality” might take it to refer to the most importantcode of conduct endorsed by a society and accepted by the members ofthat society. But the existence of large and heterogeneous societiesraises conceptual problems for such a descriptive definition, sincethere may not be any such society-wide code that is regarded as mostimportant. As a result, a definition might be offered in which“morality” refers to the most important code of conductendorsed by any group, or even by an individual. Apart from containingsome prohibitions on harming (certain) others, differentmoralities—when “morality” is understood in thisway—can vary in content quite substantially.

Law is distinguished from morality by having explicit written rules,penalties, and officials who interpret the laws and apply thepenalties. Although there is often considerable overlap in the conductgoverned by morality and that governed by law, laws are oftenevaluated—and changed—on moral grounds. Some theorists,including Ronald Dworkin (1986), have even maintained that theinterpretation of law must make use of morality.

Although the morality of a group or society may derive from itsreligion, morality and religion are not the same thing, even in thatcase. Morality is only a guide to conduct, whereas religion is alwaysmore than this. For example, religion includes stories about events inthe past, usually about supernatural beings, that are used to explainor justify the behavior that it prohibits or requires. Although thereis often a considerable overlap in the conduct prohibited or requiredby religion and that prohibited or required by morality, religions mayprohibit or require more than is prohibited or required by guides tobehavior that are explicitly labeled as moral guides, and mayrecommend some behavior that is prohibited by morality. Even whenmorality is not regarded as the code of conduct that is put forward bya formal religion, it is often thought to require some religiousexplanation and justification. However, just as with law, somereligious practices and precepts are criticized on moral grounds,e.g., that the practice or precept involves discrimination on thebasis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

When “morality” is used simply to refer to a code ofconduct endorsed by an actual group, including a society, even if itis distinguished from law and religion, it is being used in adescriptive sense. It is also being used in the descriptive sense whenit refers to important attitudes of individuals. Just as one can referto the morality of the Greeks, so one can refer to the morality of aparticular person. This descriptive use of “morality” isnow becoming more prominent because of the work of psychologists suchas Jonathan Haidt (2006), who have been influenced by the views ofDavid Hume (1751), including his attempt to present a naturalisticaccount of moral judgments.

Guides to behavior that are regarded as moralities normally involveavoiding and preventing harm to others (Frankena 1980), and perhapssome norm of honesty (Strawson 1961). But all of them involve othermatters as well, and Hare’s (1952, 1963) view of morality asthat which is most important allows that these other matters may bemore important than avoiding and preventing harm to others. This viewof morality as concerning that which is most important to a person orgroup allows matters related to religious practices and precepts, ormatters related to customs and traditions, e.g., purity and sanctity,to be more important than avoiding and preventing harm.

When “morality” is used in a descriptive sense, moralitiescan differ from each other quite extensively in their content and inthe foundation that members of the society claim their morality tohave. Some societies may claim that their morality, which is moreconcerned with purity and sanctity, is based on the commands of God.The descriptive sense of “morality”, which allows for theview that morality is based on religion in this way, picks out codesof conduct that are often in significant conflict with all normativeaccounts of morality.

A society might have a morality that takes accepting its traditionsand customs, including accepting the authority of certain people andemphasizing loyalty to the group, as more important than avoiding andpreventing harm. Such a morality might not count as immoral anybehavior that shows loyalty to the preferred group, even if thatbehavior causes significant harm to innocent people who are not inthat group. The familiarity of this kind of morality, which makesin-group loyalty almost equivalent to morality, seems to allow somecomparative and evolutionary psychologists, including Frans De Waal(1996), to regard non-human animals to be acting in ways very similarto those that are regarded as moral.

Although all societies include more than just a concern for minimizingharm to (some) human beings in their moralities, this feature ofmorality, unlike purity and sanctity, or accepting authority andemphasizing loyalty, is included in everything that is regarded as amorality by any society. Because minimizing harm can conflict withaccepting authority and emphasizing loyalty, there can be fundamentaldisagreements within a society about the morally right way to behavein particular kinds of situations. Philosophers such as Bentham (1789)and Mill (1861), who accept a normative account of morality that takesthe avoiding and preventing harm element of morality to be mostimportant, criticize all actual moralities (referred to by“morality” in the descriptive sense) that give precedenceto purity and loyalty when they are in conflict with avoiding andpreventing harm.

Some psychologists, such as Haidt, take morality to include concernwith, at least, all three of the triad of (1) harm, (2) purity, and(3) loyalty, and hold that different members of a society can and dotake different features of morality to be most important. But beyond aconcern with avoiding and preventing such harms to members of certaingroups, there may be no common content shared by all moralities in thedescriptive sense. Nor may there be any common justification thatthose who accept morality claim for it; some may appeal to religion,others to tradition, and others to rational human nature. Beyond theconcern with harm, the only other feature that all descriptivemoralities have in common is that they are endorsed by an individualor a group, usually a society, in which case they provide a guide forthe behavior of the people in that group or society. In thedescriptive sense of “morality”, morality may not evenincorporate impartiality with regard to all moral agents, and it maynot be universalizable in any significant way (compare MacIntyre1957).

Although most philosophers do not use “morality” in any ofthe above descriptive senses, some do. Ethical relativists such asHarman (1975), Westermarck (1960), and Prinz (2007), deny that thereis any universal normative morality and claim that the actualmoralities of societies or individuals are the only moralities thereare. These relativists hold that only when the term“morality” is used in this descriptive sense is theresomething that “morality” actually refers to. They claimthat it is a mistake to take “morality” to refer to auniversal code of conduct that, under certain conditions, would beendorsed by all rational persons. Although ethical relativists admitthat many speakers of English use “morality” to refer tosuch a universal code of conduct, they claim such persons are mistakenin thinking that there is any such thing. Such relativists areplausibly regarded as skeptics about morality taken in the normativesense.

When used with its descriptive sense, “morality” can referto codes of conduct with widely differing content, and still be usedunambiguously. This parallels the way in which “law” isused unambiguously even though different societies have laws withwidely differing content. However, when “morality” is usedin its descriptive sense, it sometimes does not refer to the code of asociety, but to the code of a group or an individual. As a result,when the guide to conduct endorsed by, for example, a religious groupconflicts with the guide to conduct put forward by a society, it isnot clear whether to say that there are conflicting moralities,conflicting elements within morality, or that the code of thereligious group conflicts with morality.

In small homogeneous societies there may be a guide to behavior thatis endorsed by the society and that is accepted by (almost) allmembers of the society. For such societies there is (almost) noambiguity about which guide “morality” refers to. However,in larger societies people often belong to groups that endorse guidesto behavior that conflict with the guide endorsed by their society,and members of the society do not always endorse the guide endorsed bytheir society. If they endorse the conflicting guide of some othergroup to which they belong (often a religious group) rather than theguide endorsed by their society, in cases of conflict they will regardthose who follow the guide endorsed by their society as actingimmorally.

In the descriptive sense of “morality”, a person’sown morality cannot be a guide to behavior that that person wouldprefer others not to follow. However, the fact that an individualadopts a moral code of conduct for his own use does not entail thatthe personrequires it to be adopted by anyone else. Anindividual may adopt for himself a very demanding moral guide that hethinks may be too difficult for most others to follow. He may judgepeople who do not adopt his code of conduct as not being as morallygood as he is, without judging them to be immoral if they do not adoptit. However, such cases do not undermine the restriction; a guide isplausibly referred to as a morality only when the individual would bewilling for others to follow it, at least if“follow” is taken to mean “successfullyfollow”. For it may be that the individual would not be willingfor others totry to follow that code, because of worriesabout the bad effects of predictable failures due to partiality orlack of sufficient foresight or intelligence.

3. Descriptive Definitions in Allied Areas

Because psychologists and anthropologists often need to designquestionnaires and other sorts of probes of the attitudes of subjects,they might be expected to be more sensitive to the need for areasonably clear means of separating moral judgments from other sortsof judgments. But despite this expectation, and roughly half a centuryago, Abraham Edel (1962: 56) decried the lack of an explicit concernto delimit the domain of morality among anthropologists, writing that“morality…is taken for granted, in the sense that one caninvoke it or refer to it at will; but it is not explained, depicted,or analysed.” The danger here, he points out, is that of“merging the morality concept with social controlconcepts.” Augmenting this danger was the influence, inanthropology, of the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1906/2009),for whom morality was simply a matter of how a given society enforceswhatever social rules it happens to have.

The failure to offer an operational definition of morality or moraljudgment may help explain the widespread but dubious assumption incontemporary anthropology, noted by James Laidlaw (2016: 456), thataltruism is the essential and irreducible core of ethics. But Laidlawalso notes that many of the features of what Bernard Williams (1985)described as “the morality system”—features thatWilliams himself criticized as the parochial result of asecularization of Christian values—are in fact widely sharedoutside of the West. This state of affairs leads Laidlaw to ask thecrucial question:

Which features, formal or substantive, are shared by the“morality system” of the modern West and those of theother major agrarian civilizations and literate religions?

This is, to a very close approximation, a request for the definitionof morality in the descriptive sense.

Klenk (2019) notes that in recent years anthropology has taken what heterms an “ethical turn”, recognizing moral systems, andethics more generally, as a distinct object of anthropological study.This is a move away from the Durkheimian paradigm, and includes thestudy of self-development, virtues, habits, and the role of explicitdeliberation when moral breakdowns occur. However, Klenk’ssurvey of attempts by anthropologists to study morality as anindependent domain lead him to conclude that, so far, their effortsdo

not readily allow a distinction between moral considerations and othernormative considerations such as prudential, epistemic, or aestheticones. (2019: 342)

In light of Edel’s worry about a conflation of moral systemswith systems of social control, it is interesting to consider Curry(2016), who defends the hypothesis that

morality turns out to be a collection of biological and culturalsolutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent inhuman social life. (2016: 29)

Curry notes that rules related to kinship, mutualism, exchange, andvarious forms of conflict resolution appear in virtually allsocieties. And he argues that many of them have precursors in animalbehavior, and can be explained by appeal to his central hypothesis ofmorality as a solution to problems of cooperation and conflictresolution. He also notes that philosophers, from Aristotle throughHume, Russell, and Rawls, all took cooperation and conflict resolutionto be central ideas in understanding morality. It is unclear, however,whether Curry’s view can adequately distinguish morality fromlaw and from other systems that aim to reduce conflict by providingsolutions to coordination problems.

In evolutionary biology, morality is sometimes simply equated withfairness (Baumard et al., 2013: 60, 77) or reciprocal altruism(Alexander 1987: 77). But it is also sometimes identified by referenceto an evolved capacity to make a certain sort of judgment and perhapsalso to signal that one has made it (Hauser 2006). This makes moralityinto something very much like a natural kind, that can be identifiedby reference to causal/historical processes. In that case, acontent-based definition of morality isn’t required: certaincentral features are all that one needs to begin one’stheorizing, since they will be enough to draw attention to certainpsychologically and biologically individuated mechanisms, and thestudy of morality will be a detailed inquiry into the nature andevolutionary history of these mechanisms.

The view that moral judgment is a natural kind is also represented inpsychology (Mikhail 2007). If moral judgment is a natural kind in thisway, then a person’s moral code might simply consist in themoral judgments that person is disposed to make. One piece of evidencein favor of the natural kind hypothesis is the relative universalityof certain moral concepts in human cultures: concepts such asobligation, permission, and prohibition. Another is an argumentsimilar to Chomsky’s famous “poverty of thestimulus” argument for a universal human grammar (Dwyer et al.2010; see also Roedder and Harman 2010).

In psychology, one significant topic of investigation is the existenceand nature of a distinction between the moral and the conventional(Machery and Stich 2022). More specifically, the distinction at issueis between (a) acts that are judged wrong only because of a contingentconvention or because they go against the dictates of some relevantauthority, and (b) those that are judged to be wrong quiteindependently of these things, that have a seriousness to them, andthat are justified by appeal to the notions of harm, rights, orjustice. Elliot Turiel emphasized this distinction, and drew attentionto the danger, if one overlooks it, of lumping together moral ruleswith non-moral “conventions that further the coordination ofsocial interactions within social systems” (1983: 109–11). Thosewho accept this distinction are implicitly offering a definition ofmorality in the descriptive sense. But not all psychologists acceptthe distinction (see Machery and Mallon 2010 and Kelly et al.2007).

The psychologist Kurt Gray might be seen as offering an account ofmoral judgment that would allow us to determine the morality of anindividual or group. He and his co-authors suggest that

morality is essentially represented by a cognitive template thatcombines a perceived intentional agent with a perceived sufferingpatient. (Gray et al. 2012: 102)

This claim, while quite strong, is nevertheless not as implausiblystrong as it might seem, since the thesis is directly concerned withthetemplate we use when thinking about moral matters; it isnot directly concerned with the nature of morality itself. In thesense of “template” at issue here, the template we usewhen thinking about dogs might include having four legs, a tail, andfur, among other things. But that does not mean that an animal musthave these features to count as a dog, or even that we believethis.

Given the way that Gray et al. think of templates, even if theirhypothesis is correct, it would not mean that our psychology requiresus to think of the moral as always involving intentional agents andperceiving patients. In line with this, and despite some lapses inwhich they suggest that “moral acts can bedefined interms of intention and suffering,” (2012: 109) their consideredview seems to be only that the dyadic template fits themajority of moral situations, as we conceive them. Moreover,the links between immoral behavior and suffering to which they appealin defending their general view is sometimesextremely looseand indirect. For example, they fit authority violations into theirsuffering-based template by noting that “authority structuresprovide a way of peacefully resolving conflict” and that“violence results when social structures arethreatened.”

In a recent illuminating discussion of morality an object ofpsychological study (Dahl 2023) offers his own suggested definition of“morality” as a matter of those concerns that are regardedby an agent as obligatory, and that have to do with others’welfare, rights, fairness and justice, as well as certainpsychologically interesting effects of such concerns. Dahl’sdefinition has its merits, but—importantly—he does notoffer it as the uniquely best definition. Indeed, he repeatedlystresses that in empirical science there is no pressing need todetermine the “correct” definition of “moral.”Rather, what is of primary importance is simply clarity about thesense of “moral” at issue in any given line of research.The definitions Dahl urges his fellow psychologists to make explicitshould, he argues, have four virtues. They should betechnical in the sense of being well-defined and easy toapply while at the same time overlapping with messy everyday use atleast to a sufficient degree. They should also bepsychological in the sense of picking out sufficiently commonpsychological characteristics. They should bedescriptive inthe sense of not depending, for their application any particularnormative or evaluative stance. And, lastly, they should bedistinctive, in that they should distinguish moral attitudesfrom other sorts of normative attitudes.

The increasing importance, in the everyday life of many people, oftechnology that makes use of natural language processing andartificial intelligence makes a definition of morality take on asignificant practical relevance in these newly developing areas. Theissue is not simply that artificial agents should not behave in waysthat would be regarded as immoral in genuine moral agents. Rather, adefinition of morality is likely to be used to gather the data onwhich artificial intelligences are trained, as well as to providebenchmarks for their acceptability. At present there is an explosionof research on moral phenomena connected with AI and NLP (seeHagendorff and Danks 2022 and references therein). This researchrepresents a new perspective on the determinants of moral judgments inhumans (see, e.g., Pauketat and Anthis 2022), since human beings havenot, until very recently, confronted non-human agents capable ofacting and communicating in ways that closely resemble human beings.Vida et al. (2023) plausibly suggest that this research may lead tomore general definitions of morality in psychology and perhaps inother areas as well.

It would of course be beneficial if there were a small standardizedset if widely-shared benchmarks for adequate moral value alignment inAI. But, unsurprisingly, there are at present no such benchmarks,since there is not even a widely shared definition of morality. Vidaet al. surveyed nearly 100 papers that purport to concern moral issuesconnected with artificial intelligence. One main conclusion is

there is a lack of clarity and consistency as to whether morality in[natural language processing and artificial intelligence] is addressedpurely empirically or also normatively. This lack of clarity persistsalso in regards to the further usage of ethical terminology (2023:5538).

4. Normative Definitions of “Morality”

Explicit philosophical attempts to define morality in the normativesense are hard to find, at least since the beginning of the 20thcentury. One possible explanation for this is the combined effect ofearly positivistic worries about the metaphysical status of normativeproperties, followed (or augmented) by Wittgensteinian worries aboutdefinitions of any significant terms whatsoever. Whatever theexplanation, when definitions have been offered, they have tended tobe directed at the notion of moral judgment (Hare 1952, 1981), notmorality itself.

Even moral realists who offer fully developed moral theories do nottend to offer anything like a definition of morality. Instead, whatthese philosophers usually offer is a justification of a set of normswith which they take their audience already to be acquainted. Ineffect, they tacitly pick morality out by reference to certain salientand relative uncontroversial bits of its content: that it prohibitskilling, stealing, deceiving, cheating, and so on. In fact, this wouldnot be a bad way of defining morality, if the point of such adefinition were only to be relatively theory-neutral, and to allowtheorizing to begin. We could call it a “reference-fixingdefinition” or “substantive definition” (see Prinzand Nichols 2010: 122).

A reference-fixing definition of morality in the normative sense isnot, however, a definition in the sense at issue in this entry. Itonly specifies certain salient bits of content, and leaves completelyimplicit what it is about that content that makes it count as moral.For our purposes, a better schema for a definition is the following:morality is (or would be) the behavioral code that all rationalpersons, under certain specified conditions, would endorse. Some whooffer a definition that fits this schema also argue that there is nosuch code. These, again, are skeptics about morality in the normativesense.

In looking for a definition of morality in the normative sense, moralskeptics are useful, since their arguments often amount to specifyingsome definitional feature of morality, and arguing that nothing hasit. For example, one interesting class of moral skeptics includesthose who think that we should abandon the narrow category of themoral because of the notion ofa code at its center. Thesemoral skeptics hold that we should do our normative theorizing interms of the good life, or the virtues, not morality. Their argumentstherefore involve the view that it is definitional of morality that itbe acode. Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) gave expression tothis kind of view, which also finds echoes in the work of BernardWilliams (1985). J. L. Mackie (1977), on the other hand, was a skepticabout morality because he thought that no code would pick out aproperty that would infallibly motivate anyone who saw or appreciatedit. So Mackie took it as definitional of morality that all rationalbeings endorse it in a very strong sense of “endorse”: onethat includes being motivated.

4.1 Morality and rationality

One’s understanding of what morality is, in the normative sense,will depend very significantly on how one understands rationality.Morality, in the normative sense, is sometimes taken to prohibitcertain forms of consensual sexual activity, or the use ofrecreational drugs. But including such prohibitions in an account ofmorality as a universal guide that all rational persons would endorserequires a very particular view of rationality. After all, many willdeny that it is irrational to favor harmless consensual sexualactivities, or to favor the use of certain drugs for purelyrecreational purposes.

One concept of rationality that supports the exclusion of sexualmatters, at least at the basic level, from the norms of morality, isthat for an action to count as irrational it must be an act thatincreases the risk of harms to oneself without producing acompensating benefit for someone—perhaps oneself, perhapssomeone else. Such an account of rationality might be called“hybrid”, since it gives different roles to self-interestand to altruism. An account of morality based on the hybrid concept ofrationality could agree with Hobbes (1660) that morality is concernedwith promoting people living together in peace and harmony, whichincludes obeying the rules prohibiting causing harm to others.Although moral prohibitions against actions that cause harm orsignificantly increase the risk of harm are not absolute, in order toavoid acting immorally, justification is always needed when violatingthese prohibitions. Kant (1797) seems to hold that it is neverjustified to violate some of these prohibitions, e.g., the prohibitionagainst lying. This is largely a result of the fact that Kant’s(1785) concept of rationality is purely formal, in contrast with thehybrid concept of rationality described above.

Consequentialist views might not seem to fit the basic schema fordefinitions of “morality” in the normative sense, sincethey do not appear to make reference to the notions of endorsement orrationality. But this appearance is deceptive. Mill himself explicitlydefines morality as

the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which[a happy existence] might be, to the greatest extent possible,secured. (1861 [2002: 12])

And he thinks that the mind is not in a “right state”unless it is in “the state most conducive to the generalhappiness”—in which case it would certainly favor moralityas just characterized. And the act-consequentialist J.J.C. Smart(1956) is also explicit that he is thinking of ethics as the study ofhow it is most rational to behave. His embrace of utilitarianism isthe result of his belief that maximizing utility is always therational thing to do. On reflection it is not surprising that manymoral theorists implicitly hold that the codes they offer would beendorsed by all rational people, at least under certain conditions.Unless one holds this, one will have to admit that, having been shownthat a certain behavior is morally required, a rational person mightsimply shrug and ask “So what?” And, though someexceptions are mentioned below, very few moral realists think thattheir arguments leave this option open. Even fewer think this optionremains open if we are allowed to add some additional conditionsbeyond mere rationality: a restriction on beliefs, for example(similar to Rawls’ (1971: 118) veil of ignorance), orimpartiality.

Among those who use “morality” normatively, it is commonto hold that it is definitional of morality that it should never beoverridden. That is, it is common to hold that no one should everviolate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral reasons. Thisclaim is trivial if “should” is taken to mean“morally should”. So the claim about moral overridingnessis typically understood with “should” meaning“rationally should”, with the result that moralrequirements are asserted to be rational requirements. Though common,this view is by no means always taken as definitional. Sidgwick (1874)despaired of showing that rationalityrequired us to choosemorality over egoism, though he certainly did not think rationalityrequired egoism either. More explicitly, Gert (2005) held that thoughmoral behavior is always rationallypermissible, it is notalways rationallyrequired. Foot (1972) seems to have heldthat any reason—and therefore any rational requirement—toact morally would have to stem from a contingent commitment or anobjective interest. And she also seems to have held that sometimesneither of these sorts of reasons might be available, so that moralbehavior might not be rationally required for some agents. Finally,moral realists who hold desire-based theories of reasons and formal,means/end theories of rationality sometimes explicitly deny that moralbehavior is always even rationallypermissible (Goldman2009), and in fact this seems to be a consequence of Foot’s viewas well, though she does not emphasize it.

Despite the fact that theorists such as Sidgwick, Gert, Foot, andGoldman do not hold that moral behavior is rationally required, theyare by no means precluded from using “morality” in thenormative sense. Using “morality” in the normative sense,and holding that there is such a thing, only entails holding thatrational people would endorse a certain system; it does not entailholding that rational people would always be motivated to follow thatsystem themselves. But to the degree that a theorist would deny eventhe claim about endorsing the system, that theorist is either notusing “morality” in a normative sense, or is denying theexistence of morality in that sense. Such a theorist may be using“morality” in a descriptive sense, or may not have anyparticular sense in mind.

4.2 Morality as a public system

Let us define apublic system as a system of norms that (1)is knowable by all those to whom it applies, and (2) is not irrationalfor any of those to whom it applies to follow (Gert 2005: 10). Theideal situation for a legal system would be that it be a publicsystem. But in any large society this is not possible. Games arecloser to being public systems and most adults playing a game know itsrules, or they know that there are judges whose interpretationdetermines what behavior the game prohibits, requires, etc. Although agame is often a public system, its rules apply only to those playingthe game. If a person does not care enough about the game to abide bythe rules, she can usually quit. It is plausible that it is definitionof morality in the normative sense that it is the one public systemthat no rational person can quit. The fact that one cannot quitmorality means that one can do nothing to escape being legitimatelyliable to sanction for violating its norms, except by ceasing to be amoral agent. Morality applies to people simply by virtue of theirbeing rational persons who know what morality prohibits, requires,etc., and being able to guide their behavior accordingly.

Public systems can beformal orinformal. To say apublic system is informal is to say that it has no authoritativejudges and no decision procedure that provides a unique guide toaction in all situations, or that resolves all disagreements. To saythat a public system is formal is to say that it has one or both ofthese things (Gert 2005: 9). Professional basketball is a formalpublic system; all the players know that what the referees call a fouldetermines what is a foul. Pickup basketball is an informal publicsystem. The existence of persistent moral disagreements shows thatmorality is most plausibly regarded as an informal public system. Thisis true even for such moral theories as the Divine Command theory andact utilitarianism, inasmuch as there are no authoritative judges ofGod’s will, or of which act will maximize utility, and there areno decision procedures for determining these things (Scanlon 2011:261–2). When persistent moral disagreement is recognized, thosewho understand that morality is an informal public system admit thathow one should act is morally unresolvable, and if some resolution isrequired, the political or legal system can be used to resolve it.These latter formal systems have the means to provide unique guides,but they do not provide the uniquely correct moral guide to the actionthat should be performed.

Despite the existence of important and controversial moral issues,morality, like all informal public systems, presupposes agreement onhow to act in most moral situations, e.g., all agree that killing orseriously harming any moral agent requires strong justification inorder to be morally allowed. No one thinks it is morally justified tocheat, deceive, injure, or kill a moral agent simply in order to gainsufficient money to take a fantastic vacation. Moral matters are oftenthought to be controversial because everyday decisions, about whichthere is no controversy, are rarely discussed. The amount of agreementconcerning what rules are moral rules, and on when it is justified toviolate one of these rules, explains why morality can be a publicsystem even though it is an informal system.

By using the notion of an informal public system, we can improve thebasic schema for definitions of “morality” in thenormative sense. The old schema was that morality is thecode ofconduct that all rational persons, under certain specifiedconditions, would endorse. The improved schema is that morality is theinformal public system that all rational persons, undercertain specified conditions, would endorse. Some theorists might notregard the informal nature of the moral system as definitional,holding that morality might give knowable precise answers to everyquestion. This would have the result that conscientious moral agentsoften cannot know what morality permits, requires, or allows. Somephilosophers deny that this is a genuine possibility.

4.3 The content of morality

For moral realists who explicitly hold that morality, in the normativesense, is an informal public system that all rational persons wouldendorse for governing the behavior of all moral agents, it has afairly definite content. Hobbes (1660), Mill (1861), and most othernon-religiously influenced philosophers in the Anglo-Americantradition limit morality to behavior that, directly or indirectly,affects others.

The claim that morality, in the normative sense, only governs behaviorthat affects others is somewhat controversial, and so probably shouldnot be counted as definitional, even if it turns out to be entailed bythe correct moral theory. Some have claimed that morality also governsbehavior that affects only the agent herself, such as takingrecreational drugs, masturbation, and failure to develop one’stalents. Kant (1785) may provide an account of this wide concept ofmorality. Interpreted this way, Kant’s theory still fits thebasic schema, but includes these self-regarding moral requirementsbecause of the particular account of rationality he employs. However,pace Kant, it is doubtful that all moral agents would endorsea universal guide to behavior that governs behavior that does notaffect other people at all. When the concept of morality is completelydistinguished from religion, moral rules do seem to limit theircontent to behavior that directly or indirectly causes or risks harmto others. Some behavior that seems to affect only oneself, e.g.,taking recreational drugs, may have a significant indirect harmfuleffect on others by supporting the illegal and harmful activity ofthose who benefit from the sale of those drugs.

Confusion about the content of morality sometimes arises becausemorality is not distinguished sufficiently from religion. Regardingself-affecting behavior as governed by morality is supported by theidea that we are created by God and are obliged to obey God’scommands, and so may be a holdover from the time when morality was notclearly distinguished from religion. This religious holdover mightalso affect the claim that some sexual practices such as homosexualityare immoral. Those who clearly distinguish morality from religiontypically do not regard sexual orientation as a moral matter.

It is possible to hold that having a certain sort of social goal isdefinitional of morality (Frankena 1963). Stephen Toulmin (1950) tookit to be the harmony of society. Baier (1958) took it to be “thegood of everyone alike”. Utilitarians sometimes claim it is theproduction of the greatest good. Gert (2005) took it to be thelessening of evil or harm. This latter goal may seem to be asignificant narrowing of the utilitarian claim, but utilitariansalways include the lessening of harm as essential to producing thegreatest good, and almost all of their examples involve avoiding orpreventing harm. It is notable that the paradigm cases of moral rulesare those that prohibit causing harm directly or indirectly, such asrules prohibiting killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breakingpromises.

Among the views of moral realists, differences in content are lesssignificant than similarities. For all such philosophers, moralityprohibits actions such as killing, causing pain, deceiving, andbreaking promises. For some, morality also requires charitableactions, but failure to act charitably on every possible occasion doesnot require justification in the same way that any act of killing,causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises requires justification.Both Kant (1785) and Mill (1861) distinguish between duties of perfectobligation and duties of imperfect obligation and regard not harmingas the former kind of duty and helping as the latter kind of duty. ForGert (2005), morality encourages charitable action, but does notrequire it; it is always morally good to be charitable, but it is notimmoral not to be charitable.

5. Relations Between Normative and Descriptive Morality

When “morality” is used in its normative sense, it neednot have either of the two formal features that are essential tomoralities referred to by the descriptive sense: that it be a code ofconduct that is endorsed by a society, group, or individual, or thatit be accepted as a guide to behavior by the members of that societyor group, or by that individual. Indeed, it is possible that morality,in the normative sense, has never been endorsed by any particularsociety, by any group at all, or even by any individual. This ispartly a consequence of the fact that “morality” in thenormative sense is understood in terms of a conditional that is likelyto be counterfactual: it is the code that would be endorsed by anyfully rational person under certain conditions.

If one is a moral realist, one may require that descriptive moralitiesat least approximate, in some ways, morality in the normative sense.That is, one might claim that the guides to behavior of some societieslack so many of the essential features of morality in the normativesense, that it would be incorrect to say that these societies evenhave a morality in a descriptive sense (Luco 2014: 385). Even if oneendorses such a criterion for a code to count as moral, it remainsplausible that all societies have something that can be regarded astheir morality. One need only add that many of thesemoralities—perhaps, indeed, all of them—are to some degreedefective. That is, a moral realist might hold that although theseactual guides to behavior have enough of the features of normativemorality to be classified as descriptive moralities, they would not beendorsed in their entirety by all moral agents.

While most moral realists do not claim that any actual society has orever has had morality as its actual guide to conduct, “naturallaw” theories of morality claim that any rational person in anysociety—even one that has a defective morality—is capableof knowing what general kinds of actions morality prohibits, requires,discourages, encourages, and allows. In the theological version ofnatural law theories, such as that put forward by Aquinas, this isbecause God implanted this knowledge in the reason of all persons. Inthe secular version of natural law theories, such as that put forwardby Hobbes (1660), natural reason is sufficient to allow all rationalpersons to know what morality prohibits, requires, etc. Natural lawtheorists also claim that morality applies to all rational persons,not only those now living, but also those who lived in the past. Suchviews might be thought to blur the line between normative anddescriptive morality, since they hold that there is a sense in whichall members of all societies are already aware of, and accept, thesame code.

In contrast to natural law theories, other moral theories do not holdquite so strong a view about the universality of knowledge ofmorality. Still, many hold that morality is known to all who canlegitimately be judged by it. In line with this latter view, Baier(1958), Rawls (1971) and other contractarians deny that there can beanesoteric morality: one that judges people even though theycannot know what it prohibits, requires, etc. For all of the abovetheorists, morality is a public system. Moral judgments of blame thusdiffer from legal or religious judgments of blame in that they cannotbe made about persons who are legitimately ignorant of what they arerequired to do.

6. Variations

As one gives more substance and detail to the general notions ofendorsement, rationality, and the relevant conditions under whichrational people would endorse morality, one moves further fromproviding a definition of morality in the normative sense, and closerto providing an actual moral theory. And a similar claim is true fordefinitions of morality in the descriptive sense, as one specifies inmore detail what one means in claiming that a person or group endorsesa system or code. What follow are four broad ways of making thedefinition of morality, in the normative sense, more precise, focusingon the notion of endorsement. They are all sufficiently schematic tobe regarded as varieties of definition, rather than as theories. Buttheir relations to particular theories also serves to show that thegeneral schema is adequate to a wide range of detailed accounts.Similar examples might be offered for accounts of morality in thedescriptive sense.

The expressivist Allan Gibbard (1990) held that moral assertionsexpressacceptance of norms for feeling the emotions of guilt andanger. A moral realist might appeal to this attitude to make thegeneral schema for morality more precise in the following way:

V1: Morality is the informal public system that is picked out by theset of norms for feeling guilt and anger that all rational people,given specified conditions, would accept.

Similar use might be made of appeal to norms for praise and blame(Sprigge 1964: 317) or norms for reward and punishment (Skorupksi1993). All of these co-options of expressivist views amount to givingmore specific content to the notion of endorsing code.

Another way of understanding the notion of endorsement is asadvocacy. Advocating a code is a second- or third-personalmatter, since one advocates a code toothers. Moreover, it isconsistent with advocating a code, that one does not plan on followingthat code oneself. Just as asserting something one believes to befalse still counts as asserting it, hypocritical advocacy of a codestill counts as advocacy of that code. When endorsement is understoodas advocacy, it can be used in definitions of morality, in thedescriptive sense, as long as it is the morality of a group orsociety. And endorsement-as-advocacy can also be used indefinition of morality in the normative sense. Such a view has beenoffered by Gert (2005). The corresponding general definition ofmorality, into which Gert’s account fits, is the following:

V2: Morality is the informal public system that, given specifiedconditions, would be advocated by all rational people.

The notion of advocacy has less of a place in a descriptive account ofa single person’s morality, since when someone is hypocriticalwe often deny that they really hold the moral view that they advocate.One way of understanding the notion of endorsement that applies toindividuals as well as to groups is asacceptance. Thisyields the following:

V3: Morality is the informal public system that, given specifiedconditions, would be accepted by all rational people.

Contractarians like Gauthier (1986), who view morality primarily froma first-personal point of view, can be seen as understanding moralityin this way, since accepting a code is a first-personal matter.

T.M. Scanlon (1982, 1998) suggests that the subject matter ofmorality—what we are talking about, when we talk aboutmorality—is a system of rules for the regulation of behaviorthat is not reasonably rejectable based on a desire for informedunforced general agreement. This, also, can be seen as an instance ofthe general schema given above, as follows:

V4: Morality is the informal public system that, given that they werereasonable and looking for an unforced general agreement, would not berejected by any rational people.

V4 is perhaps a limiting case of a variation on the basic schema,since it interprets endorsement simply as non-rejection.

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