moral sense
4
4.6
- noun
- /ˈmɔrəl sɛns/
:
sentido moral
- Now that she's cured, Consuelo is innocent in the moral sense of the word!
- human moral sense
- man's moral sense
- capacity of a moral sense
The difficulty is not avoided by recourse to what is sometimes now called the moral sense.
- The difficulty is not avoided by recourse to what is sometimes now called the moral sense.
- Their grandiosity around some moral sense of how much more right and how much more right they do things than everyone else.
- So this is from the poetic principle and Poe talks again about intellect and the moral sense.
Examples
-
It's a play about the numbing of the moral sense.
-
The teacher introduces the notion of an inborn "moral sense" (e.g., fairness, duty, etc.).
Academic text (1997) -
You have no moral sense.
-
As I said, scale and ease do matter, and I mean in a moral sense, too.
Blog text (28) -
"Do you have a moral sense?" asked Eddie.
Fiction book (1998) -
Being a nurse is to be engaged in a practice with an inherent moral sense.
Academic text (2010) -
But rather that humans do have a genuinely moral sense and awareness of right and wrong, which motivates them.
Academic text (2010) -
People are endowed with a kind of moral sense with which they can apprehend right and wrong.
Academic text (2010) -
Hume states that there is an innate moral sense that grounds our moral awareness.
Academic text (1999) -
He made his decision based on a strongmoral sense of what was right.
Synonyms
632
4.6
An inner feeling that tells you what is right or wrong and makes you feel guilty
7
3.8
An understanding of what is right and wrong that guides a person's actions
1
2.3
Ideas about what is right and wrong that guide how people behave
Feelings that make you hesitate because something seems wrong
How Developed
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'ability to distinguish right from wrong' is directly derivable from combining 'moral' (relating to ethics) and 'sense' (capacity for judgment). This is a regular, compositional noun phrase with clear cross-linguistic parallels (e.g., Spanish 'sentido moral', French 'sens moral'), so a B1 learner who knows both words should readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Moral sense comes from the idea of moral (about 'right' and 'wrong') and sense (an inner feeling that tells you what to do). Think of it as a small inner compass that points to good choices, so that's why it means the ability to know 'right' from 'wrong'.