Meta-ethics

Question 1

What is meta ethics?

Answer 1

Meta-ethics doesn’t attempt to tell us what makes something is right or wrong or how to act; that is the focus of normative ethics. Meta-ethics analyses the reasoning behind ethical language and moral terms such as good and right.

Question 2

What are the two main views?

Answer 2

Cognitivism: moral truths exist independently of our mind. Moral judgements can be true and false; terms such as right and wrong correspond to facts in the world.

Non-cognitivism: there is no such thing as moral truths in the world; what we call moral facts are subjective emotional responses.

Question 3

What is the fact-value distinction?

Answer 3

One of the main concerns of meta-ethics is to understand the relationship between facts and values.

• A fact is a statement that can be true or false.
• A value is a belief, judgement or attitude.

Question 4

What is the issue?

Answer 4

The issue is whether a value judgement can be considered a fact.

• Most cognivists are moral realists.
• Non-cognitivists are anti-realists.

Question 5

What is the is-ought gap?

Answer 5

Hume argued that deriving what ought to be done from what is the case of an example of false deduction. Non-cognitivists argue that we cannot reason from statements to statements of value.

Question 6

What do cognitivists argue?

Answer 6

Cognitivists attempt to bridge the gap between is and ought and argue that morality is attached to certain facts and ideas that all people share.

Question 7

What is naturalism?

Answer 7

Naturalism is the view that there are moral properties in the world. It is a cognitivist and realist argument.

Question 8

What is Good for naturalists?

Answer 8

The Good is a natural property of the

world. A natural property can be a physical or a psychological feature.
- We can infer from those properties what the Good actually is.

Question 9

What are the 4 rules of naturalism?

Answer 9

P1: The end of our desires is happiness.
P2: Things are desirable in so far as people desire them in the same way as sounds are audible in so far as people hear them.
P3: Personal happiness is a good to each person.
P4: As society is a sum of individual interests, general happiness is a good for this sum of interests.
C: Therefore, the Good is happiness.

Question 10

What does P3 bridge?

Answer 10

P3 bridges the fact-value distinction.

Question 11

What are the strengths of ethical naturalism?

Answer 11

• Ethical naturalism accounts for our moral feelings when we feel outraged by a clear injustice.
• Naturalism accounts for moral disagreements.
• An effective cognitivist theory.
• In line with how most people see morality.

Question 12

What are the problems with ethical naturalism?

Answer 12

• Naturalism is guilty of reductionism in so far as it limits or reduces moral judgements to natural facts about the world.
• The main problem, however, is that it doesn’t distinguish between moral facts and values and implies that a ought can be derived from an is i.e. that the fact that something naturally is the case means we ought to do it.

Question 13

What is Moore’s criticism of naturalism?

Answer 13

G.E. Moore takes a cognitivist position but argues that the Good cannot be reduced to a natural property of the world.

Question 14

What is the open question argument?

Answer 14

P1: According to naturalism, good is pleasure.
P2: If P1 is true, then the question is the good pleasure? is equivalent to saying is the good good? which is a closed question.
P3: I have to reflect on this and my intuition is that it is not a simple yes or no answer.
C: Therefore, the good is pleasure.

Question 15

What is the naturalistic fallacy?

Answer 15

The naturalistic fallacy is committed when a non-natural object is given natural properties.

Question 16

Why is Moore’s theory cognitivist?

Answer 16

Moore’s theory is cognitivist because for him moral properties exist and are real even though they are not natural properties.

Question 17

What are the problems with Moore’s argument?

Answer 17

More accuses Mill of producing a circular argument but commits the same fallacy in his own argument.
Moore argues that we just know what is good.

Question 18

What did J.L Mackie say?

Answer 18

Mackie makes the following points:

• There is a difference between kind and cruel actions.
• It is possible to describe such acts and outline their differences.
• He argues that moral properties cannot be absolute because they are culturally relative.

Question 19

What does Ayer argue?

Answer 19

Ayer argues that ethical assertions may be symbolic in that they express moral judgements, but In no way are facts.

- Supported emotivism on the logical Positivist ground (verification principle)
- Moral statements cant satisfy strong or weak verification
- Strong verification - ie There are 20 rooms in the room
- Weak verification - Henry VIII had 6 wives. 
- Moral statements cant satisfy either and are therefore meaningless
- Saying something like 'stealing money is wrong' adds no factual value. 
- Logical positivists have an analytic approach to language.  - Argues the boo-hurrah theory.

Question 20

What does David Hume say?

Answer 20

For Hume, moral judgements are responses to the external world. Values cannot be logically derived from fact.

Question 21

What are the problems with Ayer’s emotivism?

Answer 21

• We can never really morally disagree in the way that we can disagree about facts.

Question 22

What are the problems with emotivism?

Answer 22

• Relies heavily on the fact-value distinction. If the distinction is wrong, the theory collapses.
• When we make a moral judgement, we don’t necessarily try to influence others.
• Emotivism doesn’t distinguish clearly between non-moral and moral judgements.

Question 23

What does Hare say?

Answer 23

• Moral judgements are action-guiding: they prescribe what to do.
• Moral terms are descriptive but evaluative
• Moral judgements are meaningful when they can apply to everyone in a similar situation.
• Prescriptivism places more emphasis on reason than does emotivism.

Question 24

What are the problems with prescriptivism?

Answer 24

• Prescriptivism doesn’t account for a clash of moral principles.