Ethics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the issue of morality. It implies the concepts of what right and wrong conducts are. Ethics define how a person should act in some specific situations. It is not a new term, but it has been there since the Stone Age. Different religions and many philosophers have also made a substantial contribution to ethics.

There are different branches of ethics. First of all, comes descriptive ethics. Descriptive ethics include what people actually consider right and wrong. Accordingly, laws are made regarding that and if they are even acceptable or not. The moral principles of society keep on changing from time to time. However, the basic ethics remain the same. Descriptive ethics are also called comparative ethics. They are given the name comparative ethics as they are used to compare the ethics of past and present scenarios. Also, they are used to compare the ethics of different societies as well.

Then comes the next branch of ethics- Normative Ethics. Normative Ethics deals with some specific norms or a set of considerations. These norms indicate how people should act in some given situations. These ethics set out the rightness or wrongness of people’s actions. Normative Ethics are also known as prescriptive ethics. This name is given as there are principles involved with these ethics and those principles determine whether the actions of people are right or wrong in different situations.

An abstract way of analyzing ethics is called Meta-Ethics. They do not deal with whether the actions are right or wrong, rather they question what morality is.

Applied Ethics includes a philosophical examination of certain public and private life problems. The examination of those issues generally takes place from a moral standpoint. This branch of ethics is generally used by professions like doctors, teachers, etc.