Cicero invented the Latin word behind morality to translate one Greek term
Morality comes from the Latin mos, meaning manner or custom, and Cicero coined the adjective moralis to render the Greek word for ethics. Chaucer brought it into English around 1375. The deeper question has not budged since: are moral claims reports of objective fact, or expressions of the customs that gave the word its name?
Morality is how social animals, humans included, judge actions, character and social arrangements. The yardsticks vary widely, covering honesty and cruelty, honour and shame, loyalty, purity, reciprocity and filial duty. Some usages separate it from ethics: morality for duty-based systems like Kant's, ethics for Aristotle's virtue-centred practical reasoning. Descriptively, the word just records the codes a society actually accepts; normatively, it names whatever is genuinely right, perhaps regardless of any culture's opinion.
Philosophers who study the foundations fall into two broad camps. Moral realists hold that some moral statements are true because they report objective facts, even while granting that conformity shapes behaviour. Anti-realists deny this in several ways: error theorists say all such claims are false, subjectivists that they describe attitudes, and non-cognitivists that they express feelings or issue commands. Some anti-realist views still end up universal, as when divine command theory grounds morality in a god's edicts.
Is anything shared across humanity? Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman surveyed cultures across millennia and found recurring virtues, among them courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. Yet a 2014 Pew survey across 40 countries found striking differences in which behaviours people considered acceptable at all. Moral relativists conclude that virtues are right only relative to a community; critics reply that slavery and infanticide cannot be excused by cultural context.
Evolutionary accounts offer part of an explanation. Biologists and psychologists argue that treating insiders differently from outsiders boosts group survival, and simple computer models of evolution reproduce both unexpected in-group cooperation and irrational hostility to outsiders. A parent favouring her own children spreads her genes, so selection pushes toward that preference. Celia Green contrasted tribal morality, which imposes a group's flexible norms, with territorial morality, which forbids intruding on another's property and dependents but otherwise permits a great deal.
Source: Morality
