meta ethics vocab

Question 1

Naturalism

Answer 1

Good can be defined in terms of some natural property of the
world (e.g. pleasure, human flourishing)

Question 2

Intuitionism

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

Emotivism

Answer 3

(Moral judgements are not true or false as they do not make truth claims. Instead, they express emotions, preferences, commands or attitudes

Question 4

Non-cognitive

Answer 4

ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false

Question 5

propositional

Answer 5

analytic (true by definition) or synthetic (can be proved true/false through testing).

Question 6

is-ought or fact-value gap

Answer 6

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

Question 7

LOGICAL ERROR

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

closed question

Answer 8

when it is evident that X and Y are the same due to their definitions
being the same
‘Is X Y?’

Question 9

open question

Answer 9

when it is not evident that X and Y are the same through their definitions
‘Is X Y?’

Question 10

naturalistic fallacy

Answer 10

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’.

Question 11

simple concept - sui generis

Answer 11

‘good’ - it cannot be broken down or analysed further beyond its immediate label.

Question 12

complex concept

Answer 12

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,

Question 13

moore believes that ‘Good’ is

Answer 13

a non-natural, sui, generis, simple concept.

Question 14

prima facie duties

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

Logical positivism

Answer 15

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.