2.4A- Meta-Ethical theories Flashcards
(8 cards)
Absolutism and relativism
-Absolutists hold that there are fixed, unchanging truths about right and wrong.
-Relativists hold that morals are flexible and are not absolute. Right and wrong depend on what it right for the individual and society and the particular circumstances.
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 that we can tell what is right and wrong by looking at the world around us and using our reason. Morality us a feature of the universe that we can percieve.
-Aquinas was a ethical naturlaist. He thought that we could use our reason and our powers of observation to acces 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 (such as utilitarianism, situation ethics, or 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’ or an ‘honest person’ because of our observations. Virtues can be recognised. Just as we can see in the natural world whether an animal is an excellent example of its kind or is defective, we can also see excellence or defectiveness in the moral character of people.
Possible criticsms of naturalism
-Empiricists (those who believe that truth can be found through observing through our senses) criticise naturalism on the grounds that right and wrong cannot be experienced with the senses. We can see that hitting someone makes them unhappy, but we cannot see that making someone unhappy is wrong. Morality is not observable empirically, they argue.
-In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argued that moral judgements are likely judgements about heat or sound or colour or temperature. He said they come from perceptions and arise in the human mind, they are not facts that exist by themselves.
-Hume argued that we can see what there is, but we cannot see, as a result, what we ought to do. He argued there is no justification for moving from what is to what ought to be. This is often called ‘Hume’s Law’- ‘you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”’.
Intuitionism
-Intuitionism is usually associated with philosopher G.E. Moore.
-Moore wrote about the naturalistic fallacy. He argued that it is a mistake to try and define good in terms of something else. So if we say something is good because it produces the greatest happiness for thegreatest 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’s all.
-Moore compared good with ‘yellow’- yellow can’t be defined, or equated with something else, it just is 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 is the good thing to do, but the idea that we have a moral duty to do that good thing is adding something extra.
-Prichard thought that we know by intuition which of our moral obligations are more important than others.
-W.D. Ross was Prichard’s student and also thoguht that goodness could not be defined by making reference to toher things. He developed intuitionism by introducing the idea of ‘Prima facie’ duties- duites which seem the obvious course of action to take at first sight, when faced with a moral problem. These are followed unless there is an even more compelling duty which overrides it.
-Ross listed 7 ‘prima facie’ duties, although he noted he didn’t think this list was complete:
-Promise-keeping
-Repairing harm done
-Gratitude
-Justice
-Beneficence
-Self-improvement
-Non-maleficence
Possible criticisms of intuitionism
-If we know what goodness is just by intuition and it is possible to define, then it becomes impossible to resolve disagreements about what is right and wrong or good and bad. People might have different intuitions about what is good.
-It can be argued that intuition is not a faculty in itself but is the same thing as human reason. Intuition might be the way reason works when it needs to take a shortcut. If intuition is just short-cut reasoning then we might be expected to support our intuitions with some reasoned justification.
-Many people challenge the idea that we ‘just know’ whether something is right or wrong, by pointing out the fact that people can ‘just know’ moral rules which differ widely. For example, some people ‘just know’ that abortion is always wrong, and others ‘just know’ that in some circumstances it would be wrong to expect a woman to carry a pregnancy to full term against her will.
Emotivism
-Emotivists hold that ethics arise as the result of our emotional responses.
-Emotivism is an ethical non-naturalist position, because unlike naturalism, emotivism holds that there are no facts about right and wrong.
-According to emotivism, when we say thing like ‘stealing is wrong’ we mean that that stealing evokes in us emotions of 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, right and wrong are seen as expressions of our feelings, not as reference to any actual facts.
-A.J. Ayer was a leading emotivist. He held that statements such as ‘stealing is wrong’ cannot be about menaingful facts because they cannot be tested using the five senses. In Ayer’s view, a statment is only 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 I say ‘stealing is wrong’, I mean, ‘I dislike stealing and I encourage you to dislike it too’.
Possible 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 terible crimes oracts of great heroism or generosity. Statements such as ‘genocide is evil’ or ‘the Gates family have done good things in helping to eradicate malaria’ seems to many people to be far more than just ‘I happen to dislike genocide’ and ‘my personal preference is for saving lives’.
-If emotivism is accepted then there is no compelling reason for people to act morally. If an ambulance driver happens not to have a preference for doing her job properly and responding to an emergency call, there is no ‘bigger’ reason why she should.
MacIntyre’s criticisms of emotivism
Alasdair MacIntyre criticses emotivism for several reasons:
- Emotivists confuse meaning with use- for MacIntyre, what is important about moral language is the significance it has for those who use it.
-Stevenson presents the idea of an unpleasant world where people are trying to force their beliefs on each other- MacIntyre does not think that moral language and behaviour works like this.
-Emotivism is no help to us in making a distinction between morality and feelings about other things, such as our tastes in music or food.
