Meta-ethics Flashcards
The euthypo dilemma
If right thing to do is Gods commands
- does G command it bc it’s right thing to do
- or is it the right thing to do bc its commanded by G?
Questions it asks
- are there moral truths or do they simply express our attitudes towards certain practices?
- are moral stds independent of our judgements?
Qs In meta ethics
What things are right and wrong
What do we mean when we say right and wrong
Hume: Is and ought
Moral judgements not based on reason but our moral sentiments
Ought can’t be derived from is
-ought=prescriptive (how the world should be)
-is= descriptive (what the world is acc like)
Moore: the naturalistic fallacy
Of identifying moral good with any natural property
OQA
-Good is undefinable
-there are objective moral truths which we know by intuition
Fact/value distinction
2 fundamentally diff sorts of statements about the world
Facts- we can have knowledge about
Positive statements
Values- not= moral skepticism
-our moral intuition can’t count as knowledge of anything
Normative statements
Fact/Value distinction: Moral truths
May be as real and thought independent as anything and we may have knowledge of them
BUT, we come to know them diff from facts
-Moore: moral intuition
-Kant: pure a priori reason
Fact/Value distinction: Moral naturalism
Hold that values= special sort of fact
- Peter railton: good = objective, biological criterion
- discovering moral truths is not diff in principle to scientific ones
Fact/Value distinction: Pragmatism
Think facts reduce to values
Facts are true statements- what does it mean to call them true?
-most useful to us to believe (valubility of utility)
Fact/Value distinction: in general
Utilitarians: accept FVD- suppressed premise; you ought to max pleasure
Kantians: empirical (source of knowledge through experience) prop can’t determine our duty (unclear)
Aristotlians: reject- to understand facts = to know what is good
