Descriptive ethics: simply involves describing how people behave and/or what sorts of moral standards they claim to follow. Descriptive ethics incorporates research from the fields of anthropology, psychology, sociology and history as part of the process of understanding what people do or have believed about moral norms.
What do people think is right?
Normative ethics: is the study of ethical theories that prescribe how people ought to act, the study of moral problems which seeks to discover how one ought to act, not how one does in fact act or how one thinks one should act.
It involves creating or evaluating moral standards. Thus, it is an attempt to figure out what people should do or whether their current moral behavior is reasonable. Also involves examining the moral standards people currently use in order to determine if they are justifiable, as well as attempting to construct new moral standards which might be better.
How should people act?
What is Right and what is Wrong?
What is Good and what is Evil?
Metaethics: is the study of what ethical terms and theories actually refer to. It deals with the meaning of moral terms and the logic of moral reasoning.
ü The analysis of moral reasoning involves clarifying and evaluating presuppositions and investigating the validity of moral arguments.
What does 'right' mean?
"What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?"
Special ethics: applies general ethics to solve particular problems.
