meta ethics vocab Flashcards
Naturalism
Good can be defined in terms of some natural property of the
world (e.g. pleasure, human flourishing)
Intuitionism
Good cannot be defined in terms of some natural property
of the world. BUT it can still be held to be objectively true/false – it is self-evident to us whether something is good or not, even if we can’t express it using language.
Emotivism
(Moral judgements are not true or false as they do not make truth claims. Instead, they express emotions, preferences, commands or attitudes
Non-cognitive
ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false
propositional
analytic (true by definition) or synthetic (can be proved true/false through testing).
is-ought or fact-value gap
You cannot move from a descriptive statement about how things are, to a prescriptive statement about how things OUGHT to be.
There is no logical connection between these two statements
LOGICAL ERROR
logical error mixing up moral and non-moral terms which are distinct part of language - Moore believed
that morality CANNOT be described in natural, non-moral terms.
closed question
when it is evident that X and Y are the same due to their definitions
being the same
‘Is X Y?’
open question
when it is not evident that X and Y are the same through their definitions
‘Is X Y?’
naturalistic fallacy
open questions are not valid in moral debate, because they
cannot be proved. The problem for naturalists is that they think open questions can be proved – they appeal to natural properties in the world to argue, for example, that ‘a beautiful painting is a thing that gives happiness’.
simple concept - sui generis
‘good’ - it cannot be broken down or analysed further beyond its immediate label.
complex concept
can easily be reduced or explained in other terms (e.g. a horse is a complex concept because it can be reduced to concepts such as mammal, herbivore,
moore believes that ‘Good’ is
a non-natural, sui, generis, simple concept.
prima facie duties
WD ROSS - immediately present themselves to our intuitions when we face a moral dilemma.
duties which he thought were immediately deducible from our intuitions. These were: fidelity, reparation, gratitude, non-injury, harm-prevention, beneficence, self- improvement, and justice.
Logical positivism
there are only two ways for language to
have factual meaning: etiher it must express logical truths or tautologies, such as ‘2 + 2 = 4’ or ‘all
bachelors are unmarried’, or else it must express a hypothesis that we could test and verify by
experiment.
