Ethical language and meta-ethics

Overview

Recall questions on meta-ethics and cognitivism, ethical naturalism and its strengths, the naturalistic fallacy, the open question argument and the is-ought problem, intuitionism and moral knowledge, emotivism and its link to verification and relativism, and whether moral terms describe objective facts.

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

   What is meta-ethics, and how does it differ from normative ethics?

   Model answer

   Normative ethics asks what we ought to do and offers theories that answer it. Meta-ethics steps back and asks what we are doing when we make a moral claim at all: what words like good, right and wrong mean, whether moral statements can be true or false, and how anyone could know. It is a second-order enquiry, which is why two people can agree about meta-ethics and disagree completely about how to act.

2. 2

   What is the difference between a cognitivist and a non-cognitivist theory of moral language?

   Model answer

   Cognitivists hold that moral statements describe something and are therefore capable of being true or false, so they can be known. Non-cognitivists hold that moral statements do not describe anything at all but do something else, such as express a feeling, so they cannot be true or false. Naturalism and intuitionism are cognitivist positions; emotivism is non-cognitivist. This division organises the whole subject.

3. 3

   What is ethical naturalism?

   Model answer

   Ethical naturalism is the view that moral value is definable by reference to natural properties in the world, so that goodness is not a mysterious extra feature but something like the promotion of happiness, or the fulfilment of human nature. If moral claims are claims about natural facts, they can be investigated and settled in principle just as other factual claims can.

4. 4

   How does ethical naturalism connect to absolutism?

   Model answer

   If moral terms name real properties in the world, then a moral judgement is true or false independently of who is making it or where they live. What is genuinely good is good for everyone, so morality has fixed content that cultures may discover but do not create. Naturalism therefore supports moral absolutism, and it gives moral disagreement the same character as factual disagreement: one party is simply mistaken.

5. 5

   Give two examples of naturalist ethical theories and say what natural property each identifies with goodness.

   Model answer

   Utilitarianism identifies goodness with the production of pleasure and the reduction of pain, both of which are observable and in principle measurable. Natural law identifies goodness with the fulfilment of the purposes built into human nature, which are held to be discoverable by examining what human beings are. In both cases the moral question is turned into a question about the world.

6. 6

   What are the strengths of ethical naturalism?

   Model answer

   It makes moral disagreement tractable, because there is a fact of the matter to be established. It explains why we take moral claims seriously and argue about them as though something is at stake. It fits ordinary usage, since calling an action cruel seems to describe it rather than merely express distaste. And it grounds ethics in the same world that science investigates, without requiring any special moral faculty.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.