Morality

Morality is a phenomenon among social animals, including humans, through which communities and individuals evaluate actions, character, and social arrangements. It often refers to a set of standards, doctrines, or systems of conduct that evaluate actions and character traits using criteria that vary across individuals, societies, social classes, public opinion, religions, cultures, customs, and traditions. These evaluations often include rightness or wrongness, virtues or vices, honesty or cruelty, honor or disgrace, filial piety, community harmony, purity, reciprocity, shame, the influence of a person's inner beliefs, and propriety or impropriety of relationships between oneself and others. Morality involves evaluative judgments about agents and actions and assessments of actions as moral or immoral behavior. Cross-species and cross-cultural research suggests that attention to moral sentiments exists in all human societies, and that moral sentiments are part of cultural universals. Some studies further indicate that behaviors related to morality, such as honesty, helpfulness, tolerance, loyalty, responsibility, social justice, equality, family and national security, stability of social order, gratitude, and the like, are part of universal values. That is, these behaviors may be virtues universally recognized by all societies. The ethical position advocating such principles is called moral universalism. However, the philosophy of moral relativism opposes universal moral principles, holding that no universal morality exists. Immorality is the violation of morality. Nihilism is the active viewpoint that opposes or rejects morality as a concept. While amorality is variously defined as an unawareness of, indifference toward, or disbelief in any particular set of moral standards or principles.