4.1 meta ethics

Question 1

What is meta ethics?

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

What is meant by ethical naturalism?

Answer 2

• goodness exists and can be described in terms of some feature of the world or of human life

Question 3

What is meant by ethical non-naturalism?

Answer 3

• good cannot be defined in terms of natural phenomena
• good acts as a predicate, describing the thing/action BUT not inherent to it

Question 4

What is cognitivism?

Answer 4

• 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

Question 5

What is non-cognitivism?

Answer 5

• there is no such thing as moral truth in the world; what we call moral facts are subjective emotional responses

Question 6

Who tends to be realists?

Answer 6

• cognitivists

Question 7

Who tends to be anti-realist?

Answer 7

• moral facts don’t exist, there is no moral reality

Question 8

Who coined the ‘is ought gap’?

Answer 8

David Hume

Question 9

What does David Hume argue?

Answer 9

• 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

Question 10

Give an example of the is ought gap:

Answer 10

• the fact that a foetus feels pain doesn’t dictate that women should/should not have an abortion; there are other relevant factors

Question 11

What is ethical naturalism?

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

What is an example of ethical naturalism in ethics?

Answer 12

• utilitariansim = argues for psychological properties
• Mill argues the utilitarian understanding of human natire and human motivation is the origin of morality

Question 13

What are some strengths of ethical naturalism?

Answer 13

• accounts for our moral feelings
• accounts for moral disagreements

Question 14

What are some weaknesses of ethical naturalism?

Answer 14

• guilty of reductionism
• doesn’t distinguish between facts and values

Question 15

What is ethical non-naturalism?

Answer 15

• argues that any attempt to define goodness leads to the naturalistic fallacy - goodness isn’t a property, like colour

Question 16

What is meant by G E Moore’s open question argument?

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

What does Moore argue about intuition?

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

What are some problems with ethical non-naturalism?

Answer 18

• What if intuitions conflict?
• Mackie = moral properties cannot be absolute because they’re culturally relative
• Ayer = moral rules are symbols

Question 19

Is emotivism congnitivist or non-cognitivist?

Answer 19

non-cognitivist

Question 20

What is meant by emotivism?

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

What are some problems with Ayer’s emotivism?

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

What are some problems with emotivism in general?

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

Is prescriptivism cognitivist or non-cognitivist?

Answer 23

non-cognitivist

Question 24

What is meant by prescriptivism?

Answer 24

• 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

Question 25

What is a problem with prescriptivism?

Answer 25

• it doesn’t account for a clash of moral principles