I am grading papers and came upon the following sentence: "Candide becomes immoral…"
It bothers me — I am of the sense that a person can become amoral, but I'm not sure what it would mean for a person to become immoral. A person can certainly perform immoral actions or espouse positions which go against a standard of morality, but can the person be immoral — can "immoral" modify the person in some sense? Is this too much a philosophy question and not enough an English usage question?
Best Answer
If you use Google Ngrams to look at usage statistics, immoral is applied to people much more often than amoral. While moral philosophers may make a distinction between immoral and amoral, I suspect that most English speakers don't use the word amoral, and use immoral where maybe they should technically use amoral when talking about people.