What is a descriptive claim?
Correspondingly, what is an example of a descriptive statement?
A description is just what you think it is: It describes a situation or what a philosopher might call a state of affairs. For example, “The car is red,” “The river is flowing quickly,” “I'm sad that my juicer is broken,” “Brutus killed Caesar.” A normative statement is a claim about how things ought to be.
One may also ask, what is the difference between a descriptive claim and a prescriptive claim?
A descriptive claim is when the statement is clear and to the point. An example of this would be that it is illegal to be in a car without having your seatbelt fastened. On the other hand, a prescriptive claim is a statement that is not as obvious as a descriptive claim, but recommends how something ought to be.
Normative ethics is the study of how people ought to behave. It is an argumentative discipline aimed at sorting out what behaviours (or rules for behaviour) would be best. Descriptive ethics is the study of how people do behave, and how they think they should behave.