4.1 meta ethics Flashcards
What is meta ethics?
- the application of language to ethics
- a meta-ethical statement is about what it means to claim that something is right or wrong, and grounds by which it does so
What is meant by ethical naturalism?
- goodness exists and can be described in terms of some feature of the world or of human life
What is meant by ethical non-naturalism?
- good cannot be defined in terms of natural phenomena
- good acts as a predicate, describing the thing/action BUT not inherent to it
What is cognitivism?
- moral truths exist independently of our mind
- moral judgements can be true or false; terms such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ correspond to the facts in the world
What is non-cognitivism?
- there is no such thing as moral truth in the world; what we call moral facts are subjective emotional responses
Who tends to be realists?
- cognitivists
Who tends to be anti-realist?
- moral facts don’t exist, there is no moral reality
Who coined the ‘is ought gap’?
David Hume
What does David Hume argue?
- deriving what ought to be done from what is the case is an example of false deduction
- philosophers talk about the way things are and then jump with no apparent justification to a claim about the way things ought to be -> You can’t get an ought from an is
Give an example of the is ought gap:
- the fact that a foetus feels pain doesn’t dictate that women should/should not have an abortion; there are other relevant factors
What is ethical naturalism?
- our moral judgements are derived from our experience of the world
- a moral term, such as ‘good’, can be understood in natural terms - the good is a natural property of the world
What is an example of ethical naturalism in ethics?
- utilitariansim = argues for psychological properties
- Mill argues the utilitarian understanding of human natire and human motivation is the origin of morality
What are some strengths of ethical naturalism?
- accounts for our moral feelings
- accounts for moral disagreements
What are some weaknesses of ethical naturalism?
- guilty of reductionism
- doesn’t distinguish between facts and values
What is ethical non-naturalism?
- argues that any attempt to define goodness leads to the naturalistic fallacy - goodness isn’t a property, like colour
What is meant by G E Moore’s open question argument?
- if the good was indeed pleasure, as Mill suggests, the answer to the question ‘Is the Good pleasure?’ would be so obvious; it would be a closed question
- BUT the fact that we have to think about it means it is an open question and therefore the Good cannot be understood naturally as pleasure
What does Moore argue about intuition?
- we know what is good through the process of intuition
- we intuitively know what the good is
- in the same way that we couldn’t describe ‘yellowness’ without pointing to a yellow object, we cannot describe what goodness is
What are some problems with ethical non-naturalism?
- What if intuitions conflict?
- Mackie = moral properties cannot be absolute because they’re culturally relative
- Ayer = moral rules are symbols
Is emotivism congnitivist or non-cognitivist?
non-cognitivist
What is meant by emotivism?
- Ayer = when we make a moral judgement, we are merely expressing personal feelings and emotions
- they allow us to share our emotions with others and aren’t based on sense-experience and don’t correspond to any physical properties in the world, therefore they are neither true nor false
What are some problems with Ayer’s emotivism?
- we can never really morally disagree in the way that we can disagree about facts
- the view that moral judgements could/should be detached from facts doesn’t meant that they are meaningless
- often referred to as the ‘boo-hurrah’ theory - Ayer reduces moral judgements and moral language to feelings of pleasure, displeasure/pain
What are some problems with emotivism in general?
- doesn’t allow for cultural relativism
- moral judgements can’t be reduced to subjective feelings BUT really they involve rational judgement
- there is no possibility of moral progress
Is prescriptivism cognitivist or non-cognitivist?
non-cognitivist
What is meant by prescriptivism?
- we use reason and logic to make moral judgements even if the reasoning relies on values being derived from facts
- moral judgements are action-guiding: they prescribe what to do
- moral terms aren’t descriptive BUT evaluative - they evaluate experiences
- the good itself is evaluative which means that it puts value on the object
What is a problem with prescriptivism?
- it doesn’t account for a clash of moral principles