IMMORAL

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does immoral mean? 

• IMMORAL (adjective)
  The adjective IMMORAL has 2 senses:

1. deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong

2. not adhering to ethical or moral principles

  Familiarity information: IMMORAL used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• IMMORAL (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong

Similar:

debauched; degenerate; degraded; dissipated; dissolute; fast; libertine; profligate; riotous (unrestrained by convention or morality)

decadent; fin-de-siecle (marked by excessive self-indulgence and moral decay)

disgraceful; scandalous; shameful; shocking (giving offense to moral sensibilities and injurious to reputation)

scrofulous (morally contaminated)

Also:

unchaste (not chaste)

evil (morally bad or wrong)

unrighteous (not righteous)

wicked (morally bad in principle or practice)

Attribute:

morality (concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct)

Antonym:

moral (concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles)

Derivation:

immorality (the quality of not being in accord with standards of right or good conduct)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Not adhering to ethical or moral principles

Synonyms:

base; immoral

Context example:

unethical practices in handling public funds

Similar:

wrong (contrary to conscience or morality or law)

Derivation:

immorality (the quality of not being in accord with standards of right or good conduct)

 Context examples 

Dear mama, there, as soon as she got an inkling of the business, found out that it was of an immoral tendency.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

"An' right here I want to remark," Bill went on, "that that animal's familyarity with campfires is suspicious an' immoral."

(White Fang, by Jack London)

But I assure you it was no less brutal to me when everybody I knew recommended it to me as they would recommend right conduct to an immoral creature.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Every lingering struggle in his favour grew fainter and fainter; and in farther justification of Mr. Darcy, she could not but allow that Mr. Bingley, when questioned by Jane, had long ago asserted his blamelessness in the affair; that proud and repulsive as were his manners, she had never, in the whole course of their acquaintance—an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways—seen anything that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—anything that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits; that among his own connections he was esteemed and valued—that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his sister as to prove him capable of some amiable feeling; that had his actions been what Mr. Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of everything right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and that friendship between a person capable of it, and such an amiable man as Mr. Bingley, was incomprehensible.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

The rest was left contingent on the value of my professional exertions; in other and more expressive words, on the baseness of my nature, the cupidity of my motives, the poverty of my family, the general moral (or rather immoral) resemblance between myself and—HEEP.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a brief spell this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life, why, it would be immoral for me to perform any act that was a sacrifice.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)