Definitions

Question 1

Cognitivism

Answer 1

Moral judgement can either be true or false

Question 2

Non-cognitivism

Answer 2

Moral judgements are neither true or false

Question 3

Moral Realism

Answer 3

There are mind independent moral facts or properties

Question 4

Moral Anti-Realism

Answer 4

There are no such things as moral facts or properties

Question 5

Moral Naturalism

Answer 5

Moral properties are natural properties of the world

Question 6

Moral Non-Naturalism

Answer 6

There are moral properties but they aren’t natural

Question 7

Intuitionism (Moral Non-Naturalism)

Answer 7

Moral truths are self-evident intuitions

Question 8

Emotivism (Moral Anti-Realism)

Answer 8

Moral judgements are expressions of emotion (boo, hurray)

Question 9

Prescriptivism (Moral Anti-Realism)

Answer 9

Morals are things that prescribe the right course of action

Question 10

Moore’s Open Question Argument

Answer 10

Asking whether a bachelor is an unmarried man is an unintelligible question because a bachelor is defined as an unmarried man, whereas asking whether maximising utility is good is an open question and makes sense to ask, therefore it is possible that it is not

Question 11

Naturalistic Fallacy

Answer 11

• a term that is definable cannot be defined
• any attempt to define the undefinable is fallacious
• good is undefinable
• utilitarians attempt to define good in natural terms
• hence utilitarianism is guilty of naturalistic fallacy

Question 12

Ayer’s Verification Principle

Answer 12

A sentence is meaningful if- it is true by definition, or - verifiable through sense experience
Therefore moral judgements are meaningless

Question 13

Hume’s Is- Ought Gap

Answer 13

• judgements of reason describe what is the case
• judgements of value prescribe what ought to be the case
• judgements of reason and judgements of value are therefore entirely different from one another
• therefore, you cannot draw conclusions about value based on reason
  This presents a problem for the cognitivist view that moral judgements are fact

Question 14

Mackie’s Argument From Relativity

Answer 14

• there are differences in moral code from society to society
• there are disagreements between people about moral code
• this is either because: there is an objective truth about the matter, but people’s perceptions are distorted, or there is no objective truth about it
• the best explanations of moral disagreements is that there are no objective moral values

Question 15

Mackie’s Arguments from Queerness

Answer 15

Metaphysical Queerness-
- moral realism is committed to a belief in a) the existence of strange objective moral properties in the world and b) that these peculiar moral properties are somehow able to generate a motivation for an action
Mackie’s argues that this is absurd, it is our needs, desires and hopes that motivate

Question 16

Epistemological Queerness (argument from Queerness pt 2)

Answer 16

According to Mackie, the moral realist must also be committed to believing that we have a mysterious faculty which enable us to detect these peculiar moral properties. It makes more sense to say that there are no moral properties and so none to sense

Question 17

Mackie’s Error Theory

Answer 17

Mackie’s Ontological Claim-
There are no objective moral values because something is objective if: it is either true or false, it is about the world ‘out there’, it describes something that is mind independent. Moral properties are none of these claims.

Question 18

Mackie’s Error theory cont.

Mackie’s Semantic Claim

Answer 18

All ethical judgements claim to be objective, this is an error.

• it is an error based on our belief in objective, independent, moral properties that literally do not exist
• the error arises from the way we are brought up in society, which leads to a complex moral theory that we project onto the world as if it were true of the world
• this mistake persists because we believe that our projections of moral values onto the world are inherent of the world itself