There are three levels to meta ethics...

• Meta Ethics: What is 'good'? Does it exist? What does it mean?
• Normative Ethics: How do we decide what is right and wrong?
• Applied Ethics: What should X do?

Meta Ethics:

• The Greek word 'Meta' means above and beyond, so Meta Ethics is above or beyond 'normal ethics'
• Meta Ethics is concerned with the deeper questions of ethics
• Is there such a thing as right and wrong? And what do ethical words mean?

Internal and External Questions:

• The questions posed in normative and practical ethics are internal questions. The 'what should I do?' and 'how should I decide?' are within the game of ethics
• The questions posed by meta ethics are external questions. They are questions about the game posed outside of the game.

Naturalism:

• Believe that there is such a thing as 'goodness'
• What is right and wrong can be worked out using empirical evidence
• Aquinas, Mill and Aristotle would support this view

Emotivism:

• Emotivists believe that objective right and wrong does not exist
• When we call something right or wrong, we are describing our emotions towards that action
• A J Ayer was an emotivist

Intuitionism:

• Intuitionists believe that there is such a thing as goodness but goodness is not like other properties
• It cannot be worked out or experienced but we have an intuitive sense of right and wrong
• When we hear of a distressing crime, we just know that it is wrong
• G.E.Moore was in intuitionist

Ethical Naturalism:

• There is a type of moral realism. It agrees with Intuitionism that there are moral facts. It is cognitive believing that our moral language is able to be true or false.
• It disagrees to how these moral facts are known. Naturalists argue that moral facts can be logically or empirically deduced. Intuitionists believe that moral facts are 'just known' by intuition.

Types of Ethical Naturalism:

• There are a number of different types of naturalism. What they have in common is that they believe that things you can observe in the world lead you to moral truths
  1) Aquinas (1224-1274) - He would hold to a theological naturalism. The world has a God-given order built into it. Moral values can be worked out by understanding our God-given purpose and observing the natural order
  2) F H Bradley (1846-1924) - He argued that it is possible to understand our moral duties by observing our position or station in life. Although to some extent this is outdated and has a hint of Victorian class divisions. It could be argued that certain roles eg teacher, nurse, mother do seem to have certain duties or moral values that are attached to them
  3) Mill (1806-1873) - He argued that we can discover right and wrong by discovering what actions lead to pleasure or pain. By observing that stabbing someone causes pain, we can infer that this action is wrong.

The Naturalistic Fallacy:

• You cannot draw the 'wrongness' of something because it is not empirical
• The Naturalistic Fallacy says that it is a mistake to identify a moral claim (about what is good) with something that is natural eg you have sharp teeth - so it is a part of your nature to eat meat - it is good to eat meat and wrong to just eat vegetables
• Another related problem is the fact-value distinction. In other words, there is a gap between the facts of a matter and the moral value that we deduce
• There is no argument that can bridge this gap.

G E Moore agrees with Hume that there is a gap between facts and values. "You cannot get from an 'is' to an 'ought'", however, there really are moral values.

"Goodness is a simple idea" - Moore

• "Goodness resembles yellow more than it resembles a horse"
• Horses and other empirical things can be described and can be broken into parts
• Goodness is a simple idea, like the concept of yellow, it cannot be broken down into parts or properties
• It cannot be described but you can point out to many examples that you 'just know' are good.

Open Questions:

• Another reason why goodness cannot be designed by 'natural (empirical)' properties comes in Moore's work on open/closed questions
• (A closed question - "a bachelor is an unmarried man". Here it makes no sense to respond "yes, but is a bachelor really an unmarried man?" or "but is every unmarried man really a bachelor?". To do so would be a closed question to which there can only be one answer)
• However, an open question - if we say "is goodness really pleasure?" it does make sense to ask "is goodness really pleasure?" and "is pleasure truly good?"
• This is true of every attempt to define "good", "good" cannot be defined; it can only be recognised in particular cases through acts of intuition

A similarity and difference between intuitionism and naturalism:
They're both moral realist theories although naturalism says that you can work out right and wrong through empirical evidence and intuitionism says we have an intuitive sense of right and wrong