Meta-ethics and Ethical Language

Overview

Recall questions on cognitivism and non-cognitivism, realism, ethical naturalism, Moore's naturalistic fallacy and open question argument, Hume's is-ought gap, intuitionism, prescriptivism, Ayer's emotivism and Stevenson's development of it.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Explain the difference between cognitivist and non-cognitivist accounts of moral language.

   Model answer

   Cognitivists hold that a moral statement expresses a belief about how things are, so it can be true or false. Non-cognitivists hold that it expresses something else, an attitude, feeling or command, so it is not the sort of thing that can be true or false at all, however grammatically it resembles a factual claim.

2. 2

   What is moral realism, and what does anti-realism deny?

   Model answer

   Realism holds that moral facts or properties exist independently of what anyone thinks about them, so cruelty would still be wrong if everyone approved of it. Anti-realism denies that any such mind-independent moral facts exist, and explains moral talk instead in terms of attitudes, conventions or projections.

3. 3

   Is moral language factual or symbolic?

   Model answer

   That is the dispute. If moral statements are factual they assert something about the world and answer to evidence. If they are symbolic they work more like religious or poetic language, expressing and evoking commitment and a way of seeing rather than reporting states of affairs, which changes what could count as showing one of them wrong.

4. 4

   How does the absolutist and relativist distinction show up in meta-ethics?

   Model answer

   An absolutist holds that a moral assertion has the same truth value everywhere, so if torture is wrong it is wrong in every society. A relativist holds that its truth depends on the standards of a culture, a period or an individual. The distinction is meta-ethical rather than normative because it concerns the status of the assertion, not its content.

5. 5

   What is ethical naturalism?

   Model answer

   The cognitivist view that moral properties are natural properties, so moral claims can in principle be established by observation and reasoning about the world. Utilitarianism is naturalist in identifying goodness with what produces happiness, and Aquinas' account of goodness as the fulfilment of human nature is often placed here too.

6. 6

   What is the naturalistic fallacy, and how does the open question argument support it?

   Model answer

   G E Moore argued in Principia Ethica that defining good in terms of any natural property, such as pleasure or what is desired, commits a fallacy, because good is a simple property that cannot be analysed into anything else. His test: for any proposed definition, say that goodness is pleasantness, the question whether what is pleasant is nevertheless good still makes sense and remains genuinely open, whereas asking whether a bachelor is unmarried does not. So the two terms cannot mean the same thing.

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