Leading an ethical life is demanding. It means that we must sometimes act in ways we would not otherwise choose to act – sometimes do what we would rather not do or refrain from doing what we would prefer to do. This much seems unsurprising. If leading an ethical life demanded nothing of us over and above what we would normally or naturally do, “ethics” would have no point. It would be merely descriptive – telling us how people behave, and how they judge each other – rather than prescriptive or normative. And in that case it would lack a central feature – perhaps the central feature – of ethics or morality. As philosophers like to put it, morality is “action-guiding.”

This is not to deny that description has its place. Anthropologists and journalists may describe how members of a group behave and what rules guide them without making any moral judgments, and such accounts can be interesting and informative. But if we want to know what to do, either because we are agents who have to act, or because we need to judge what standards of behavior are appropriate and right for other people as well as ourselves, we are in the realm of prescription rather than description, the normative and not simply the empirical.