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The standards for behavior expected of and by hunters and commonly followed throughout the sport, whether expressly communicated by hunting laws or not.
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You have subplanted morals for ethics.
A. Descriptive Ethics or Morals: a study of human behavior as a consequence of beliefs about what is right or wrong, or good or bad, insofar as that behavior is useful or effective. In a sense, morals is the study of what is thought to be right and what is generally done by a group, society, or a culture. In general, morals correspond to what actually is done in a society.
1. Morals is best studied as psychology, sociology, or anthropology. Different societies have different moral codes.
2. Morals is a descriptive science; it seeks to establish "what is true" in a society or group.
3. Often morals are considered to be the shared ideals of a group, irrespective of whether they are practiced.
4. In the sense of descriptive ethics or morals, different persons, groups, and societies have different moral standards. This observation is seen as true by all sides.
a. We would commit the fallacy of equivocation to conclude from this observation that there is no universal ethical (q.v., below under I, B) standard.
b. We can only conclude by observation that there appears to be or is no universal moral standard. For more on this distinction see the notes on the Case Study: Moral Rules and Ethical Standards.
c. This confusion between descriptive and prescriptive ethics occurs quite often by persons untrained in philosophical analysis.
B. Normative Ethics or Prescriptive Ethics: 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.
1. More specifically, (normative) ethics is the discipline concerned with judgments of setting up norms for ...
a. When an act is right or wrong--e.g., is it wrong to liter on campus when we pay someone to pick up the litter.
b. What kinds of things are good or desirable—i.e., is knowledge to ge sought for its own sake or for money; is money to be sought for its own sake or for power? And so on.
c. When a person deserves blame, reward, or neither—e.g., a person who stole your wallet returns it intact two weeks later, how doe you judge his actions? What is appropriate to say?
2. From the terms introduced so far, you can see that different things can be meant by the terms: ethical, unethical, moral, immoral, nonmoral, amoral, and nonethical.
E.g., how would you describe the action of a mechanic who throws a tire iron over in a corner after changing a tire? Think about probable consequences both mental and physical.