"a moral instrument" is a correct phrase and can be used in written English.
It is used to describe a person or thing that is used to promote or enforce moral principles or values. Example: "Education is often seen as a moral instrument, as it has the power to shape the values and beliefs of individuals and society."
But the artists who look most magnetic today are the ones who made something personal of various trends that pooled up in the city and sustained a sense of art as moral instrument, a seismic device for transmitting political and spiritual moods.
One can easily imagine Bloom warning today, as Brooks did in "The Well Wrought Urn" in 1947, that if "every poem is an expression of its age," then "the poetry of the past becomes significant merely as cultural anthropology, and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or moral instrument," precluded from communicating universal truth.
Pace Shawcross, the answer is likely to involve less military intervention from the outside and greater use of nonviolent political, economic and, especially, moral instruments.
On Tuesday night, Obama carried on his long-running argument in favor of positive thinking, not as a perfect analytical tool — "there will be times when the process disappoints you," he said — but, instead, as a moral obligation, and an instrument in the work of continual American renewal.
Hartmann regarded his works as instruments of a moral purpose.
In concluding his case, he insisted that a physician in whose practice even one case of puerperal fever had occurred, had a moral obligation to purify his instruments, burn the clothing he had worn while assisting in the fatal delivery, and cease obstetric practice for a period of at least six months.
The focus on interpersonal morality showed that general moral rules, which some traditional ethical theories strove to develop, were rather crude instruments for conducting a moral life.
So the right evoked must be a moral not a legal right, claimed under a moral principle, not a legal instrument.
He deplores "the way in which banking became a merry-go-round of instruments which were not properly understood or properly priced – that's obviously a moral problem".
