Ethical Language Flashcards
Meta-ethics is the area of philosophy which attempts to answer the question of what goodness actually is, including whether it even exists.
What is normative ethics?
- Normative ethical theories attempt to devise a system for determining which actions are good and which are bad.
define moral realism
- the view that moral properties exist in reality
- moral statements are objective and realist.
- good and bad exist independently of us
define moral anti-realism
- The view that moral properties (like goodness/badness) do not exist in reality.
- moral starements are subjective and cannot be proved true or false
- subjective and non-cognitive
Define:
- cognitivism
- non-cognitivism
- Cognitivism: ethical language expresses beliefs about reality which can therefore be true or false, thorugh verification and falsification
- Non-cognitivism: ethical language expresses some non-cognition like an emotion, does not attempt to describe reality and therefore cannot be true or false.
Name the moral realist meta-ethical theories
- Ethical naturalism
- Ethical non-naturalism/intuitionism
Describe ethical naturalism
- the view that goodness is something real in the natural (physical) world – which can be empirically verified and falsified.
- able to reduce goodness from its objective moral properties to natural properties.
• It reduces morality to other natural properties which can be observed so that ethical statements become propositions which can be verified or falsified.
Describe utilitarian’s foundation in ethical naturalism
• a utilitarian equates goodness to ‘happiness. Therefore, through observation, it is possible to test whether an action leads to happiness or not, which makes it moral or immoral.
- Mill supports (EN) by arguing that the only evidence we have of something being desirable is that people actually desire it. This means that moral concepts like “good” can be grounded in empirical observations of human behavior. As happiness is universally desired, Mill concludes that happiness is, therefore, a natural and fundamental good.
- • This desirability is “all the proof the case admits of” that happiness is a good thing
Describe Aristotelian naturalism
. Aristotle claims that goodness = eudaimonia (flourishing). Flourishing is a factual feature of natural organisms. - Philippa Foot defends this view, pointing to the example of plants.
There is a factual, natural difference between a plant that is flourishing and a plant that is not. The same is true for humans.
Name the criticisms / weaknesses of ethical naturalism
- naturalistic fallacy: Moore
- Hume’s is/ought gap
- the open question argument
Describe Hume’s is/ought gap
- attempts to show that moral judgments cannot be inferred from facts.
- Hume said 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 cannot deduce a value from a fact
- Hume proposes that ethical language comes from ‘the heart’, not ‘the understanding’. It expresses an ‘active feeling or sentiment’. This makes the is-ought gap also an argument against cognitivism and for non-cognitivism.
Describe how Hume’s argument can be applied to Bentham
- P1. It is human nature to find pleasure good (fact – ‘is-statement’).
- C1. Pleasure is good and we ought to maximise pleasure (value – ‘ought’ statement).
- Hume’s point is that this is not a valid deduction. This conclusion does not follow, is not justified, by that premise.
- This doesn’t mean that pleasure is good and that we ought to maximise pleasure.
Evaluate Hume’s is/ought argument
- strong in undermining EN : If moral judgments cannot be validly inferred from observable features of the world, then ethical naturalism fails to provide a sound, objective basis for morality.
- R: Patricia Churchland proposes that Hume’s argument only targets deductive reasoning from is to ought. Could take Bentham and Mill’s arguments for utilitarian naturalism as inductive. Pleasure being our natural end doesn’t deductively entail/mean pleasure is good, but it is inductive evidence for pleasure being good. So, Hume’s critique doesn’t apply.
- John Searle
Describe Moore’s naturalistic fallacy
- Moore believes it is fallacy to assume that something being natural means that it is good, and that EN are wrong in using a non-ethical term ( a natural property) to explain an ethical term.
- Moore concluded that we can’t define goodness. We can’t say what goodness is because it is only itself – it is sui generis.
Evalauate Moore’s naturalistic fallacy
- Moore’s insistence on the uniqueness of moral properties leads to ethical non-naturalism, making moral knowledge difficult to justify.
- If “good” cannot be analyzed through empirical or natural terms, critics question how we can understand or justify moral claims.
- use any evaluations of ethical non-naturalism
Give the open question criticism of EN
- moore
- Moore argued that if naturalism were true, the result would be illogical.
- Moore argues that if “goodness” were equivalent to a natural property like “pleasure,” then the statement “goodness = pleasure” would be a tautology and uninformative, but because it is actually informative and meaningful, moral properties cannot be reduced to natural properties, disproving ethical naturalism.
Evaluate the strength of the open question argument to EN
- WEAKNESS : contend that the open question argument may be question-begging. Moore assumes that “good” is an indefinable, simple property, but this assumption is precisely what ethical naturalists dispute. The argument, then, might be seen as begging the question against ethical naturalism, rather than refuting it on independent grounds.
- STRENGTH; challenges ethical naturalism by demonstrating that moral terms like “good” cannot be adequately defined in terms of natural properties. If “good” were identical to a natural property, such as pleasure or evolutionary fitness, then questions like “Is pleasure good?” would be closed and trivial. However, these questions remain meaningful and open, suggesting that moral goodness cannot be reduced to or equated with natural properties.
use weakness for rebuttal and strength for defence / eval
Describe intuitionism
Evaluate intuitionism
