To study morality is to study whether one's actions, intentions, and choices are right or wrong. Or said another way,

it's about figuring out how to behave based on standards of propriety and impropriety. Within that same

realm of inquiry, the study of ethics is figuring out how one might formalize, systematize,

defend, and communicate rightness and wrongness. So if morality is

sussing out what right and wrong is, ethics is determining how we apply that knowledge of right

and wrong on a personal and a societal level. Under the umbrella category of ethics, there are three main subcategories.

Metaethics is the study of morality itself, asking questions about how we know what is right and wrong in the first place,

and what, if any, meaning, our moral decisions might have in an absolute sense.

Normative ethics asks how we might apply what we learn

about morality and what it means practically to behave morally. And applied ethics asks what

obligations we might have as people and as members of societies when it comes to our behaviors

within different ethical spaces.

So it's figuring out, for instance, how ethics apply in the world of biology versus the ethics

that exist within the world of economics, and how those differ, how they intermingle, and what it

means for us and how we behave.

There's a broader term that comes to us from a similar theoretical space,

axiology, which refers to the study of value as a whole. So all philosophical

quandaries that tie back to value in some way, which is most of them, including anything

we might ask about morality and ethics, those topics fit under the even larger umbrella topic of

axiology. Axiology emerged alongside a period of governmental collapse and reemergence

between the 5th and 6th centuries in Greece. Well-known historical philosophers like Socrates

benefited from that development as it established

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