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en-wikipedia-org-4277		Descriptive ethics - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	1053	179	55	Descriptive ethics, also known as comparative ethics, is the study of people's beliefs about morality.[citation needed] It contrasts with prescriptive or normative ethics, which is the study of ethical theories that prescribe how people ought to act, and with meta-ethics, which is the study of what ethical terms and theories actually refer to. In other words, this is the division of philosophical or general ethics that involves the observation of the moral decision-making process with the goal of describing the phenomenon. Those working on descriptive ethics aim to uncover people's beliefs about such things as values, which actions are right and wrong, and which characteristics of moral agents are virtuous. Lawrence Kohlberg: An example of descriptive ethics[edit] Kohlberg's research can be classed as descriptive ethics to the extent that he describes human beings' actual moral development. If, in contrast, he had aimed to describe how humans ought to develop morally, his theory would have involved prescriptive ethics.	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-4277.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-4277.txt