Meta-ethics Flashcards
What are the two ethical standpoints?
- Absolutism
- Relativism
Do not agree on what is moral but disagree on what it means to make a moral statement.
Where meta-ethics comes in.
Normative:
What you should and shouldn’t do.
Meta- ethics:
What do we actually mean by the term good?
Language of ethics, are moral states fixed truths or relative to emotions and beliefs?
What are the three arguments to know?
- Naturalism
- Intuitionism
- Emotivism
What is naturalism?
There is fixed right and wrong features in the universe. (Absolutism)
F.H Bradley and Phillipa Foot thought morals could be perceived in the world.
- Evil and good are absolute facts in the world.
- Not about your opinion, morals are just objectively true.
- Links to Aquinas’ NL how morals can be seen in nature.
How to prove morality in naturalism:
As it is focusing on natural world, suggests a moral statement can only be factual if it can be proved empirically.
Objective features in the world create morality.
David Hume and Naturalism:
We cannot move from an objective factual statement to a subjective moral statement. Eg, we cannot say just because Stalin was the ‘fait accompli’ leader of Russia, that it equals him being bad.
Yet Hume uses the example of someone murdered. From looking at the dead body we cannot prove the wrongness of the murder.
What does Hume’s critique of naturalism lead to?
Hume’s Law:
‘Is does not imply ought’.
Is= facts.
Ought= moral behaviour.
Saying a moral behaviour like do not murder (ought) does not make it a fact (is).
No amount of fact will make Stalin objectively a bad person, still an opinion.
‘it is the object of feeling, not of reason’.
What is Hume’s book?
A Treatise of Human Nature
Phillipa Foot against Hume:
Defends Naturalism.
Good or bad is ‘a fact about a given feature’.
Book- Natural Goddess.
When we describe someone as ‘just’ or ‘honest’, we are using evidence to back this up. Thus, these features can be seen as moral absolutes through ROLE MODELS.
Uses example of an Oak Tree, we can see that it has a ‘good’ aspect, sturdy roots because it keeps it up.
Phillipa Foot example:
Draws up on Kropotkin’s example, when an anthropologist studies native Malayan people under instructions never to take photographs, at one point has an opportunity to take the photo, but doesn’t because of the promise he has made.
Laws are absolute and humans know this.
Who was Phillipa Foot’s ethics based on?
Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics.
Weaknesses of ethical naturalism:
- Empiricists critique SEEING right and wrong. If you hit someone you can see it makes them unhappy, but you cannot SEE that making someone unhappy is bad.
- It assumes we have a built in ability to identify right and wrong, yet we do not. Different cultures have different opinions.
- What evidence do we use and ignore? Stalin was renowned for being great, Russia was changed from a Tsarist area to Stalingrad and was described as ‘the Lenin of today’. Do we ignore this evidence??
Intuitionism:
G.E. Moore
Moral truths cannot be defined but can be identified through intuition. Rejects Utilitarianism, which suggests that good can be quantified.
Good is a ‘simple notion’, good is good and we just know it, like we know yellow is yellow just by seeing it.
Also like a dog or cat have different breeds, but we still know it is a dog. Cannot be defined, we can only recognise it.
How does GE Moore go against naturalism?
Trying to verify or falsify good is committing the naturalistic fallacy.
Simply a way of renaming ‘Hume’s Law’.
