Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Meta Ethics - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Divine command theory: God's nature s the standard of goodness; moral goodness is determined by God's commands
      - Modified divine command theory: God's commands are grounded in God's omnibenevolent nature; God's commands are inherently good
      - Natural law theory: Moral truths are derived from the nature of the universe and human beings, as created by God
      - Moral realism independent of divine command: Moral truths exist independently of God's will; God recognises these truths and commands accordingly
      - Divine nature theory: God's nature is the standard of goodness itself
      - Voluntarism vs intellectualism: Voluntarism emphasises the will and power of God in determining moral standards; Intellectualism stresses God's reason and knowledge, suggesting God's understanding of goodness informs His commands
      - Pluralistic approaches: While divine command plays a crucial role in moral guidance, other factors like human reasoning, social contracts, and intrinsic values of action also contribute to moral understanding
- - - - The best action is the one that results in the greatest amount of happiness
    - - Utilitarianism embodies naturalism by grounding moral decisions in the natural consequences of actions - specifically, their impact on overall happiness and suffering
  - - - This is a false move and treats moral facts as if they are in the same class as physical or empirical facts.
    - - You cannot logically derive an 'ought' (value judgement) from an 'is' (fact statement)
    - - Oversimplification: just identifying a natural fact or behavior directly informs us of its moral status
      - Not all natural facts lead to positive moral outcomes (eg. disease)
      - Morality is complex and involves considerations beyond mere observations of the natural world
- - - - When we make moral statements, we are making claims that are capable of big true or false
      - Moral language/judgements are assertions about the world that have truth-values
      - Does not specify whether these moral statements correspond to objective facts about the world
      - About the nature of moral language, holding that moral claims are propositions with truth values
    - - Claims that there are objective moral facts that make moral statements true or false
      - Independent of human opinions or feelings
      - There are real, objective standards of right and wrong that exist in the world, just like physical laws
      - Claims these propositions correspond to objective moral facts in the world
    - - What you're really saying is more about your feelings than making a factual statement
      - When we make moral statements, we're not statin cats that can be true or false
      - Moral language is about expressing how we feel or what we prefer, rather than making claims about the world that can be right or wrong
      - Different forms of non-cognitivism
        
        Emotivists
        
        Moral terms are expressions of feeling or emotion
        
        'Non-sense' words ; no meaning
        
        Cultural relativists
        
        Ethical judgements are culturally specific and refer only to cultural conventions
        
        'Man is the measure of all things' - Protagoras
        
        'Custom is the king of all' - Herodotus
        
        Nihilists
        
        Ethical judgements are simply false as there is nothing in the world or our minds to which they refer
        
        Nihilism
        
        Radical questioning of the foundations and value of moral systems
        
        Nietzsche
        
        Values held up by moral realists are not objective features of the world but rater human constructs
        
        These values are expressions of the will to power
        
        Denies the existence of inherent moral values
    - - Denies that there are objective moral facts/truths that exist independently of our beliefs/cultures/feelings
      - There are no universal moral truths waiting to be discovered
      - What's considered 'right' or 'wrong' depends on societal norms, personal beliefs, or other subjective factors
- - - - 'Open question argument'
        
        You can always ask 'but is that really good?'
        
        'Good' is a simple, indefinable quality that we recognize through intuition
        
        We jus 'know' when something is morally good
      - Challenges moral naturalism
      - The question remains open and meaningful, suggesting that 'goodness' and 'pleasure' are not identical; there's something about 'goodness' that isn't captured by simply equating it to a natural property like pleasure.
      - Moral properties are non-natural
      - Moral qualities have a unique, indefinable nature that resists being pinned down to naturalistic explanations
    - - 'Prima facie duties'
        
        Duties that appear to be binding at first glance but might be overridden by more important duties upon closer inspection
    - - Moral naturalism tries to reduce moral truths to natural facts/properties, whereas intuitionists argue the rightness of an action isn't the same as its natural properties
      - Intuitionism suggests we have an immediate understanding of moral truths, whereas moral naturalism relies on observation and reasoning
      - Moral naturalism seeks a basis for morality in the empirical world, whereas intuitionism find the basis for moral knowledge in non-empirical reasoning
    - - Cognitivist because it treats moral statements as claims about the world that have truth values which we can know to be true or false
      - Realist because it holds that these truths as objective moral facts