Meta Ethics Flashcards
Hume’s ‘is’ ‘ought’ gap
‘Moving from an objective statement of fact to a subjective statement of value does not work, because it leaves open questions that have not been answered.’
Can describe an ought from an is
John Searle
institution of promise keeping is a natural fact about society, and there are ‘normative implications’ for this.
Moore’s reasoning of goodness
‘good is good, and that is the end of the matter.’
‘it is incapable of definition’
‘it is simple and has no parts’
‘innumerable objects of thoughts which are themselves incapable of definition’
We cannot know goodness naturalistically, but only non-naturalistically through our own intuition,
We can use our moral intuition to judge if a moral statement is true of false.
It is instinctive and we have a ‘simple notion’. e.g. yellow - we can recognise it, but we can never accurately describe it.
Ayer
‘evincing my moral disproval’
‘Ethical terms do not serve only to express feeling. They are calculated also to arouse feeling and so to stimulate action.’
‘The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content.’
R M Hare
‘expresses prescriptions or evaluations or attitudes which we assent to without being constrained by truth conditions.’
implicit principle which says that the statement applies to all precisely similar situations.
