Q:

Is "immoral" in the act or the person?

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?

A:

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. 

A:

Dan, the morality of a person or action is necessarily determined in context of moral standards.  When your student says "Candide becomes immoral...", he or she is consciously or unconsciously applying some moral standard to Candide.  (Of course I don't know what comes after the ellipsis, so I don't know whether or not the student clarifies ...).  If Candide violates his own standards, his action is immoral and he becomes immoral in his own judgement.  If Candide violates the student's standards, it is still appropriate for the student to claim that the act and the actor are immoral.  But, ideally the student should clarify by what standard the action and actor are being judged.
Shorter and more to the point: a person can be judged immoral both in terms of external standards and his or her internal standards.  And, clearly, an action can be judge immoral, again, against some standard.  
Of course if the actor does not know that action is immoral or does not regard the action as immoral, by the actor's standard, the action is either moral or amoral.

