Meta-ethical Theories

Question 1

What is Meta-ethics?

Answer 1

The study of the foundation of ethics and the meaning of ethical terms.

Question 2

What are 4 key meta-ethical questions?

Answer 2

• “is morality absolute - applying everywhere and for all time, or is it relative, specific to a time and place?”
• “Is there such thing as a moral fact?”
• “What do different ethical theorists mean by ‘good’?”
• “Is goodness a natural feature of the world to be accessed and measured (a bit like science)?”

Question 3

What is Absolutism?

Answer 3

The view that morals are fixed, unchanging truths that everyone should always follow.

Question 4

What is Relativism?

Answer 4

The view that moral truths are not fixed and are not absolute. WHat is right changes according to the individual, the situation, the culture, the time and the place.

Question 5

What is Naturalism?

Answer 5

• Ethical theories that hold that morals are part of the natural world and can be recognised or observed in some way.
• They are absolutists. E.g. Moral evil + goodness = facts of the natural world.

Question 6

What is Intuitonism?

Answer 6

Ethical theories that hold moral knowledge, is recieved in a different way from science and logic.

Question 7

What is the Vienna Circle?

Answer 7

A group of philosophers known as logical positivists who rejected claims that moral truth can be verified as objectively true.

Question 8

What is Emotivism?

Answer 8

Ethical theories that hold that moral statements are not statements of facr but are either beliefs or emotions.

Question 9

What is Hume’s Law?

Answer 9

• You cannot go from an ‘is’ (statement of fact) to an ‘ought’ (a moral).
• This creates an unjustified new relationship between the words.

Question 10

What is the Naturalistic Fallacy?

Answer 10

G.E. Moore’s argument that it is a mistake to define human terms with reference to other properties (a mnistake to break Hume’s law).

Question 11

Who was F.H.Bradley?

Naturalism

Answer 11

• An Ethical Naturalist.
• Lived 1846-1924

Question 12

What did F.H.Bradley write in Ethical Studies, 1876?

Answer 12

• Duty = universal + concrete as it is objective with real identity and it realises the whole person.
• ‘Identify others and ourselves with the station we fill; to consider that as good, by virtue of that to consider others and ourselves good too’

Question 13

What is a general criticism of Bradley?

Answer 13

• Is it correct to interpret social order as a fixed fact?
• In the 19th century, fixed gender roles + institutions like marriage + concepts of class.

Question 14

What was the influence of Aquinas’s natural moral law on Naturalism?

Answer 14

• Goodness links to divine will + the kind of creatures God made humans to be.
• E.g. Adultery = wrong. It prevents/limits human flourishing.

Question 15

What was Hume’s challenge to Naturalism?

Answer 15

• Moral claims not derived from reason, instead from sentiement.
• (A treatise of Human Nature (1738))
• Rejected idea that moral good + evil are distinguishable by reason. Only explainable through sentiment of observer.
• Morals exite passions + prodce/prevent actions.
• ‘wrongness’ of an action comes from sentiment not reason.

Question 16

What did Charles R.Pigden suggest?

Answer 16

“naturalists, in short resort to all sorts of supposed facts - socialogical, psychological, scientific even metaphusical or supernatural”

(Naturalism, In A companion to ethics , 1991)

Question 17

What was Philippa Foot’s challenge to Hume?

Answer 17

• Moral evil = ‘a kind of natural defect’.
• if a person = ‘honest woman’ you are referring to something, to a person who recognises certain considerations as things that are powerful, compelling reasons to act.
  -Therefore there are some absolute morals.
• These virtues are recognisedthrough observating how a person acts in consideration of that virtue.

Question 18

What was Aristotle’s influence of Foot?

Answer 18

• Natural world has good way of doing things.
  1. There is a life cycle consiting of self-maintenance and reproduction.
  2. Self maintenance and reproduction can be achieved differently in each species depending on how they do it.
  3. Certain norms can be deduced. E.g. swiftness of the deer, night vision of the owl.
  4. Apply these norms to indivial members of species and can be defined as effective or defective. E.g. Owl = defective if it has poor night vision.

Question 19

What was J.L.Mackie’s difficult with Absolute or Natural approaches to morality?

Answer 19

• Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977).
• Possible to describe an institution from the outside. (E.g. institution of promising), can also observe from the inside (E.g. ‘Don’t break a promise John’).
• ## Injunction to not break promises depends on the rules of the institution having been accepted to varying degrees by those inside.

Question 20

What is an issue with Mackie’s view?

Answer 20

• To what degree should moral rules be applied?
• Should we be more inclined to keep the promises we make to our family and friends than those we make to strangers?

Question 21

How do you resolve the issue with Mackie’s view?

Answer 21

• By using an institution. (Societal Expectations)
• (Mackie), moral rules can be observed but believed they are based on tradition rather than absolute constructs.