| / English Dictionary |
MORALITY
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct
Classified under:
Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects
Hypernyms ("morality" is a kind of...):
quality (an essential and distinguishing attribute of something or someone)
Attribute:
moral (concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles)
immoral (deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong)
pure ((used of persons or behaviors) having no faults; sinless)
impure ((used of persons or behaviors) immoral or obscene)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "morality"):
righteousness (adhering to moral principles)
rightness (according with conscience or morality)
conscience (conformity to one's own sense of right conduct)
good; goodness (moral excellence or admirableness)
chastity; sexual morality; virtue (morality with respect to sexual relations)
Antonym:
immorality (the quality of not being in accord with standards of right or good conduct)
Derivation:
moral (concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles)
moralistic (narrowly and conventionally moral)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Motivation based on ideas of right and wrong
Synonyms:
ethical motive; ethics; morality; morals
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("morality" is a kind of...):
motivation; motive; need (the psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal; the reason for the action; that which gives purpose and direction to behavior)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "morality"):
hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure as a matter of ethical principle)
conscience; moral sense; scruples; sense of right and wrong (motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions)
Christ Within; Inner Light; Light; Light Within (a divine presence believed by Quakers to enlighten and guide the soul)
Derivation:
moralistic (narrowly and conventionally moral)
Context examples:
This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth; and if such parties succeed, how should a Captain Wentworth and an Anne Elliot, with the advantage of maturity of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them, fail of bearing down every opposition?
(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)
Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a School—not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity—but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
A disorder characterized by an enduring pattern of inflexibility, extreme orderliness, and perfectionism which interfere with efficiency and which may manifest in many different contexts, including work and leisure activities, financial matters, and issues of morality or ethics.
(Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, NCI Thesaurus)
They will love you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
She was previously disposed, I believe, to doubt the morality of my conduct in general, and was moreover discontented with the very little attention, the very little portion of my time that I had bestowed on her, in my present visit.
(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)
Conventionality is not morality.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
Your morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
I shall say nothing of those remote nations where Yahoos preside; among which the least corrupted are the Brobdingnagians; whose wise maxims in morality and government it would be our happiness to observe.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have been prattled into them, and afraid to live life.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
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