PHLA11H3 Lecture : Descriptive Vs Normalative.docx
Document Summary
Descriptive claim: claim about what is the case. Normative claim: claim about how things should be. Examples of descriptive claims: whales are fish, obama is the president of usa. Example of normative claims: -eat a lot of leafy greens, it is wrong to break a promise when keeping it is inconvenient. They can be true, false or debatable(ie: salsa vs ketchup) Morality is a normative domain about how things ought to be or how one should act. Normative epistemic claims: claims about what one should believe, how one ought to reason(epistemic = concerning knowledge). Moral claims are: normative rather than descriptive: they concern how things outht to be, rather than how things are, they are a particular kind of normative claim. We cannot infer normative claim from a purely descriptive claim and cannot go from is to. Psychologu, sociology, anthropology: can describe not only how people behave but also what people believe about how they ought to behave.
