Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Ethics: Meta Ethics - Coggle Diagram
Ethics: Meta Ethics
Points to remember:
Meta ethics looks closely at what is meant by the language of ethics (words like "good, right and duty") and what these words actually refer to.
Meta ethics reveals different ways of understanding how we can or cannot access knowledge of morality.
One way of interrogating the meta-ethics philosophers is to ask two questions: do they believe morals are absolutely real or relative to something else? How do they think our perception of things that are true works?
Naturalists think there is a perceivable scientific moral order of absolute facts in the world. There are absolute truths and we can detect them in the observable universe.
Emotivists think that morality is relative to different emotive expressions, which do not correspond to anything other than the emotion. Emotivism opposes naturalism's understanding of how things are known.
Intuitionists agree with emotivists that morals are not observable in the universe using our senses. However, they believe that it is possible to percieve morality, but we use intuition rather than senses to percieve observable objects.
Emotivists doubt that the intuitionist method of knowing reveals any fact, and they do not agree with what intuitionists think they know. Naturalists would agree with intuitionists that there is something to know but would disagree over the method intuitionists use to know it.
Naturalism:
- Ethical naturalists are absolutists. They believe that right and wrong are fixed features of the universe.
- They believe that there are facts about right and wrong. Morals are not about different points of view, tastes and opinions, but are about facts of the natural world.
- Morals are not merely invented by human beings. If everyone in the world thinks that a particular course of action is morally good, they could all be wrong and in fact it could be bad.
- Ethical naturalism holds the view that we can tell what is right and wrong by looking at the world around us and using our reason. Morality is a feature of the universe that we can percieve.
- Aquinas was an ethical naturalist. He thought that we could use our reason and our powers of observation to access the facts about what is moral and immoral.
- Aquinas was a theological naturalist because he thought that goodness comes from the will of God.
- Many normative ethical systems (utilitarianism, situation ethics, kantian ethics) have elements of naturalism in them. For example, they might claim as a fact that happiness is a good thing, or that agape love is an important goal.
- F.H. Bradley and Philippa Foot are examples of more modern, leading ethical naturalists.
- Philippa Foot defended ethical naturalism by saying that we can observe morality when we see people's behaviour.
- We call someone a 'good person' because of our observations; virtues can be recognised.
- Just as we can see in the natural world whether an animal is an excellent exmaple of its kind or is defective, we can also see excellence or defectiveness in the moral character of people.
Emotivism:
- Emotivists hold the idea that ethics arise as the result of our emotional responses.
- Emotivism is an ethical non-naturalist position, as it believes that there are no facts about right and wrong.
- According to emotivism, when we say things like 'stealing is wrong', we mean that stealing evokes emotions within us like disapproval.
- When we say 'helping others is good' we mean that helping others gives us good feelings.
- Emotivism is sometimes known as the 'hurrah/boo' theory because our statements about what is good and bad are seen as expressions of our feelings, not as reference to any actual facts.
- A.J. Ayer was a leading emotivist. He held the view that statements such as 'stealing is wrong' cannot be about meaningful facts because they cannot be tested using the 5 senses.
- In Ayer's view, a statement can only be meaningful if it can be empirically tested, and ethical statements cannot be.
- Therefore, ethical statements must be about something other than facts. Ayer thought ethical statements were about emotion.
- C.L. Stevenson developed Ayer's thinking, saying that moral language has an emotive element and also a 'prescriptive' element.
- When someone says 'stealing is wrong', they mean ' I dislike stealing and I encourage you to dislike it too'.
Intuitionism:
- Intuitionism is usually associated with the philosopher G.E. Moore.
- He wrote about the naturalistic fallacy. He argued that it is a mistake to try to define good in terms of something else. So if we say something is good because it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, then we are defining good as something else: maximal happiness.
- Moore thought good cannot be equated with something else; it is not the same.
- For Moore, goodness is a 'simple notion'. Good is just good, and that is all.
- Moore compared good with 'yellow'. Yellow cannot be defined, or equated with something else, it is just yellow and we know it when we see it.
- We know good when we see examples of it, by intuition, in the same way that we know beauty when we see it but have trouble defining it.
- H.A Prichard argued that it is a mistake to try to find reasoned arguments to support what we feel our moral obligations to be.
- He thought that duty is not the same as the good thing to do, but goes beyond it - we might know by intuition what the good thing to do is, but the idea that we have a moral duty to do that good thing is adding extra.
- Prichard thought that we know by intuition which of our moral obligations are more important than others.
- W.D. Ross was Pritchard's student and also thought that goodness could not be defined by making reference to other things.
- He developed intuitionism by introducing 7 prima facie duties (obvious duties to follow). These should be followed unless there is an even more compelling duty which overrides it.
Prima facie duties:
- Promise-keeping.
- Repairing harm done.
- Gratitude.
- Justice.
- Beneficence.
- Self-improvement.
- Non-maleficence.
Criticisms:
-
-
Criticisms of emotivism:
- Emotivism challenges the idea that there is any such thing as good and bad beyond our personal preferences and tastes.
- This seems counter-intuitive to many people when faced with terrible crimes or acts of great heroism.
- Statements like 'genocide is evil' seem to be far more than just opinions such as 'I happen to like dislike genocide'.
- If emotivism is accepted then there is no compelling reason for people to act morally.
- If an ambulance driver happens to not have a preference for doing their job properly and responding to emergency calls then there is no bigger reason why they should.