Ethical Language Flashcards
What is realism?
The things we talk about refer to something real in the world.
What is anti-realism?
The things we talk about do not refer to anything in the real world.
What is cognitivism?
The things we talk about are beliefs, true/false and are about the world
What is non-cognitivism?
The things we talk about are not beliefs, they cannot be true or false and are not about the world
What is ethical naturalism?
The belief that moral facts and values are in the world and morals can be defined as/reduced to objective, natural properties in the world.
What is the is/ought problem for naturalism?
Also known as Hume’s Law
We cannot infer what ought to be from what is. The fact that humans do eat meat does not mean that they ought to eat meat.
Therefore, we should never appeal to matters of fact in order to justify moral judgements and naturalism is false
What is ethical non-naturalism?
Moral predicates do not stand for natural properties, but denote non-natural properties. Ethical language contains terms, in particular ‘good’, that cannot be reduced to, or defined by, non-ethical terms.
What is the open question argument?
Good is either;
indefinable,
definable,
meaningless.
Cannot be meaningless
Cannot be definable because asking ‘is good, good?’ is like asking ‘is a bachelor an unmarried man?’
Therefore good is indefinable and naturalism is committing a naturalistic fallacy trying to define good
What is error theory?
Our moral judgements make a systematic error based on out belief in things that on’t actually exist
Error theory is moral scepticism
Moral codes are readily explained by reference to the ways of life that they reflect, rather than direct reference to our perception
‘Argument from queerness’ the reason why ethics are so odd (e.g. we cannot point at them or count them) and we cannot interact with them is because they don’t actually exist.
What is emotivism?
Ethical language does not make statements or assertions about the world, only expressions of our feelings, possibly with the intent to influence others.
Criticise emotivism
No rational agreement is possible and no knowledge can be had of them because we are all entitled to our own opinions.
What is prescriptivism?
Moral judgements are recommendations of what to do - like prescribing things. When Mill said that ‘happiness is desirable’ he actually meant that ‘happiness is something that ought to be desired’
Overcomes the criticism of emotivism because it is just employing effective means to thatend and those means need not involve putting forward reasons.
Criticise prescriptivism
Is it really plausible to suppose that all moral discourse is concerned with telling people what to do. Surely we don’t just prescribe, we discuss, resolve, confess etc. Hare is restricting his analysis to those contexts in which one speaker addresses to another a moral judgement upon some course of action
