/pragmatica/

The early uses of ‘moral’ in English translate the Latin and move to its use as a noun where ‘the moral’ of any literary passage is the practical lesson that it teaches. In these early uses ‘moral’ contrasts neither with such expressions as ‘prudential’ or ‘self-interested’ nor with such expressions as ‘legal’ or ‘religious’. The word to which it is closest in meaning is perhaps simply ‘practical’. Its subsequent history is one in which it is at first perhaps most usually part of the expression ‘moral virtue’ and then becomes a predicate in its own right with a continual tendency to narrow its meaning. It is in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that it recognizably takes on its modern meaning and becomes available for use in the contexts which I have just noted. It is in the late seventeenth century that it is used for the first time in its most restricted sense of all, that in which it has to do primarily with sexual behavior.