What do Descriptive ethics aim to understand?

Descriptive ethics focuses on examining and understanding people's beliefs, attitudes, and practices regarding morality. It seeks to gather insights into how individuals and groups perceive ethical issues, rather than prescribing or evaluating what actions ought to be taken or the theoretical frameworks surrounding morality. This branch of ethics is primarily concerned with the empirical data of moral beliefs in different cultures, societies, and individuals, making it distinct from normative ethics, which is about what actions are morally right or wrong.

The other choices center around more prescriptive or theoretical aspects of ethics. For example, understanding the nature of moral obligations pertains more to normative ethics and philosophical investigations. Similarly, discussing what actions individuals ought to take delves into ethical prescriptions, while theoretical definitions of good and evil abstractly analyze moral concepts rather than concrete beliefs held by people. Thus, the focus of descriptive ethics on understanding what people believe about morality is what makes that choice the correct answer.