moralistic
Americanadjective
-
explaining or interpreting something in terms of right and wrong, especially in a self-righteous or tiresome way.
They reject both the moralistic view of addiction as willful evil and the medical model of addiction as a disease.
-
emphasizing morality, especially unduly; moralizing.
She frowns on moralistic preaching that focuses on ethical duty divorced from the gospel of grace and gratitude.
-
concerned with regulating the morals of others, as by imposing censorship or other restrictions.
By trying to protect people from their own mistakes, moralistic laws prevent them from learning responsibility.
-
relating to or being a philosopher or philosophy chiefly concerned with principles of morality.
During this period of antiquity, a number of moralistic philosophies emerged at the same time in different parts of the world.
Other Word Forms
- antimoralistic adjective
- moralistically adverb
- overmoralistic adjective
- pseudomoralistic adjective
- quasi-moralistic adjective
- quasi-moralistically adverb
- semimoralistic adjective
- unmoralistic adjective
Etymology
Origin of moralistic
First recorded in 1840–45; moralist ( def. ) + -ic ( def. )
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Biopics are “an exasperating genre,” Variety wrote, smushing some of “the planet’s most unorthodox personalities into a reductive, overly moralistic mold.”
It’s at the Venn diagram of a Saturday morning cartoon and a moralistic Greek myth.
From Los Angeles Times
To achieve some of these much-needed reforms, we must shift the cultural narrative — peeling back the moralistic and judgment-laced rhetoric around poverty, savings and retirement — and acknowledge existing structural barriers to savings.
From Salon
He invited controversy, however, not by advocating a more amoral, realpolitik foreign policy but by delivering a finger-wagging, highly moralistic lecture about, among other things, how our allies are insufficiently liberal about free expression.
From Los Angeles Times
New York and New England went on to become competing centers of power and ideology: one pluralistic and globally-minded; the other moralistic, monocultural and, well, puritanical.
From Salon
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
