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Meta ethics - Coggle Diagram
Meta ethics
Naturalism
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Aquinas' version
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the world has a god given order built into it - moral values can be worked out by understanding our god given purpose and observing natural order
FH Bradley's version
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outdated to some extent and has a hint of victorian class divisions - yet could be argued certain roles have certain duties or values attached e.g. doctor, teacher, etc.
Utilitarianist version
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we can discover right and wrong by discovering what actions lead to pleasure or pain - observing that stabbing someone causes them pain, we can infer that this action is wrong
objection to naturalism
Hume - is ought problem - moving from empirical 'is' to moral claims involving 'ought' and 'ought not'
Hume suggests that no matter how closely we examine the situation itself we will not be able to empirically see or hear the wrongness of such an action
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Intuitionism
believes that moral truths cant be discovered by observation of the world
right and wrong are not able to be defined but are self evident
we are able to them by our intuition
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GE Moores intuitionism
identifies the naturalistic fallacy as the key error that naturalism makes - for any natural property e.g. pleasure, we can still ask the question 'is pleasure really good?' it is possible to answer no and thus shows that pleasure and good are not the same
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Moore uses the analogy with the colour yellow to explain how intuitionism works
it is difficult to describe yellow we can only point out things that are yellow
in the same way we are able to recognise goodness it cannot be defined but it can be shown and known
complex ideas - e.g. horse are ideas that can be broken down into parts (legs, neck, etc)
simple ideas - e.g. colour yellow cannot be divided into parts
Moore states that goodness is a simple idea which are grasped by intuition
assessing
PROS
- takes Humes is ought challenge seriously
- there is widespread agreement on moral intuitions
- defends the existence of moral facts
CONS
- people can have different intuitions on topics
- it is not clear what this strange phenomenon of intuition is
- idea of an extra ability that is not able to be analysed by the senses seems far-fetched
Emotivism
believes that there are no moral truths - moral statements are based on feelings of approval or disapproval
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Ayers emotivism
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his weak version of it says that we should only view statements as meaningful if we are able to say how we could verify them
moral statements are neither logical nor provable by the senses this means that they are factually meaningless
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