metaethics

Question 1

ayer emotivism

Answer 1

• ethical statements are expressions of opinion (Ayer) - they are not factual and therefore cannot be verified

ethical statements can tell us something about an individual
person’s sentiments or values, they can tell us nothing more than that.

Based on logical positivism which stated that for statements to be true they had either to be analytic or synthetic, talk of goodness could not be verified and therefore ethical statements are meaningless

verification principle
Boo/hurrah theory.Ayer concluded ethical language was meaningless,since it can’t be empirically verified nor is it analytically true.
- paradox highlights a limitation of verificationism—its inability to justify its own criteria for meaningfulness

Question 2

naturalism

Answer 2

posits that ethical goodness corresponds to real properties in the natural world
eg. Bentham’s Utilitarianismclaims that goodness = pleasure

ethical language iscognitive
It is a sentence and a proposition about reality which will be either true or false

You cannot move from a descriptive statement about how things are, to a prescriptive statement about how things OUGHT to be.

Hume’s is-ought gap tells us that since we can’t derive a value from a fact, our fact-value associations are arbitrary and thus nothing more than how we personally feel. We express our feelings as moral claims which can appear to disagree, but ultimately they only express emotions

Searle argues that ‘institutional’ facts are created and sustained by collective human agreement. Therefore, they almost serve as a bridge between objective facts and subjective values - social practice makes descriptive facts tie in with evaluative statements

if values are contingent on social conventions, it becomes challenging to establish universal/objective criteria for implementing moral decision-making

Pigden argues that you can in fact logically gain conclusions from premises which deal with different subjects (e.g. It is raining today, therefore I ought not play football).
+ even if hedgehog conclusions cannot be drawn from premises about cats, this does not necessarily mean that they are not synonymous with each other - there might well be words synonymous with the concept good that exist in nature.

Midgley - naturalism = crude reductivism, they reduce goodness to one single non-natural concept which ignores the idea that goodness may be linked to many non-moral terms (e.g. happiness, duty, agape love).

Question 3

moore

Answer 3

naturalistic fallacy - Principa Ethica:
It is a fallacy to assume that something being natural means that it is good.

logical error mixing up moral and non-moral terms which are distinct part of language.

An informative statement cannot be equal in meaning to an uninformative tautological statement

We experience goodness, which Moore clams is due to a faculty of intuition.

the word ‘good’ cannot be defined - humans have no choice but to apprehend the truth or falsity of a moral proposition when observing or reflecting on the relevant moral situation
there are objective moral facts, but we can only know them by intuition (self evident to us) –we cannot describe them by reference to anything else.

w d ross - real objective moral truths that are part of the fundamental nature of the universe like geometry or arithmetics
- certain prima facie duties that immediately present themselves
to our intuitions when we face a moral dilemma

Gaita - nun’s behavior serves as an example that communicates a moral truth about the equal dignity and worth of all human beings + heavily relies on personal experiences and individual relationships to understand moral truths

Question 4

Mackie

Answer 4

argument from relativity - Intuitionism assumes that there are OBJECTIVE MORAL FACTS.

If intuitionism is true, we can all access these facts, which means we should all be able to agree on what is good (even if we can’t define it).

But moral disagreement is visible everywhere.

Therefore, intuitionism must be false.

argument from queerness - If intuitionism is true, moral facts are weird. They are unlike anything in the universe. We can’t work them out deductively (through logic) or inductively (empirically).

This means that if intuitionism is true, we can only identify moral facts through an equally weird faculty called ‘intuition’, which itself can’t be identified deductively or inductively.

So either intuitionism is true, and there are these weird facts and this weird faculty that we can never identify or prove. Or intuitionism is not true, since neither these facts or this faculty actually exist.

Therefore, the lack of evidence suggests that intuitionism is (probably) not true.

AYER - intuitionists argue that good cannot be defined in terms of natural properties available for empirical enquiry. Therefore, there is no criterion with which to judge intuitionism’s ethical judgements, and more importantly, no way of evaluating conflicting intuitions from person to person.

Question 5

emotivism

Answer 5

lang must be non-cognitive

if this was believed by everyone then the world might descend into anarchy and chaos if there are noobjective ethical principles.

Even if embracing emotivism could lead to adverse consequences, it doesn’t necessarily invalidate its truth.

Question 6

mcintyre/ stevenson

Answer 6

mcintyre suggest that what gives moral utterances meaning is not necessarily whether they are factual/descriptive but their imporatnce/relevance to the people around them - serves a practical purpose, guiding individuals and communities in making moral decisions

stevenson - moral judgments consist of two key elements: an expression of attitude based on belief and a persuasive element aimed at influencing others. This perspective imbues ethical language with meaning by emphasizing the communicative and persuasive aspects of moral statements

Gibbard - Proposes that moral judgments express our normative beliefs and plans.