Moral questions differ from other kinds of questions. Whether your office computer can copy a pirated DVD is a factual question. By contrast, whether you should copy the DVD is a moral question. When we answer a moral question or make a moral judgment, we appeal to moral standards.

These standards differ from other kinds of standards. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt to a formal dinner party is boorish behavior. Murdering the King’s English with double negatives violates the basic conventions of proper language usage.

Photographing the finish of a horse race with low-speed film is poor photographic technique. In each case a standard is violated–fashion, grammatical, technical–but the violation does not pose a serious threat to human well-being.

Moral ideals are diverse because they alarm behavior that is of solemn importance to human well-being that can profoundly injure or benefit people.

The conventional moral norms against insincerity, burglary, and killing deal with actions that can hurt people and the moral principle that human beings should be treated with self-esteem and deference uplifts the human temperament.

Whether products are healthful or harmful, work situations safe or unsafe, personnel procedures biased or fair, privacy respected or invaded are also matters that seriously affect human well-being. The standards that govern our conduct in these matters are moral standards. A second characteristic follows from the first.

Moral standards take priority over other standards, including self-interest. Something that morality condemns–for instance, die burglary of your neighbor’s home–cannot be justified on the non-moral grounds that it would be a thrill to do it or that it would pay off handsome.

We take moral standards to be more important than other deliberations in managing our activities. A third typical point of moral standards is that their soundness depends on the adequacy of the reasons that support or justify them.