The narrative of Jonah has been used for millennia in Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious discourse as a source for moral and ethical teaching. As a central concern of social constructions the notion of good and evil plays a part in all societies and the Bible, both explicitly and implicitly, delineates boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Jonah explicitly deals with the question of good and evil while managing never to explain explicitly what is meant by either. In this regard Jonah presents itself as an ideal subject for considering morality in the abstract. It is clear in the narrative that the author assumes a set of moral standards that he shared with his audience that governed their understanding of the proper behavior of God, humanity, and nature. Little is provided in the story itself to define these ethical norms and nowhere does the story presume that final moral decisions are humanity's to decide.

In the early twenty-first century there is a strange conflict among intellectuals on moral norms. On the one hand, it has become almost a given that there are no ethical universals; indeed ethical thought post-de Sade, post-Marx and post-Nietzsche posits that there are no morals or ethics at all, simply self-serving relativist desires imposed as normative by “strong” individuals or interest groups who oppress others with usurped authority and heavy-handed force.