Metaethics Flashcards
(37 cards)
What is (moral) realism?
The belief that moral terms refer to something real and observable in the world e.g pleasure, happiness, moral law etc.
What is (moral) anti-realism?
The belief that moral terms do not refer to anything real but are something else completely
What is A.J Ayer’s verification principle?
A sentence is meaningful if (and only if):
- it is Tautology -true by definition
- or it is verifiable through sense experience
Argues that moral judgements fail verification principle - they are not analytic truths or verifiable
so moral judgements are non-cognitive/meaningless
What is Mackie’s argument from queerness?
Metaphysical queerness:
- If the universe did contain objective values then they would be a very strange sort, unlike anything else ever encountered
- They would need to have some intrinsic prescriptively e.g ‘good’ would need have built into them ‘to-be-doneness’. This doesn’t seem possible - how could a physical object or action demand we act a certain way
Epistemological queerness:
-If the universe did contain objective moral values and we could become aware of them, and they are not natural, then in order to do this we would need to posses some mental faculty able to perceive this, of a very strange type utterly different from our way of knowing anything else and use spooky hypothesis to explain it.
What is objectivity?
On objective claim has the following features:
-it can be something we know
-it can be true or false
-it is independent of what we want or choose
-it is about something mind-independent
-it is about something that is part of the fabric of the world
but these claims are not equivalent
What is Moore’s ‘Open question’ argument?
Moore supports his claim that good is an unanalysable with this:
- ‘Is pleasure good?’ is an open question but ‘is pleasure pleasure?’ is a closed question
- Goodness and other moral properties cannot be the same property as any other property
What is response to Moore’s open question argument?
‘Is water H2O?’ is a closes question but water and H2O refer to the same thing
Pleasure and good can be an open question but still refer to the same thing.
What is Searle’s criticism of the is-ought gap?
Argued that it is possible to derive ought from is:
e.g P- You promised to pay back that £5
C- Therefore you outhitting to pay back that £5
there are some facts about humans that influence how we ought to act e.g Accepted contract of promise keeping
However a promise includes a moral obligation we ought to keep -we just need to include this in the premises
P- you promised to pay back that £5
(p- we should keep our promises)
C- Therefore you ought to pay back that £5
What is Mackie’s error theory in a nutshell?
- Moral judgements are cognitive -true or false
2However there are no objective moral properties - Anti-realist. - Therefore all moral judgements are fake
What is the issue of moral progress?
- Our morals have changed over time e.g slavery so if we take this as an example of moral progress then argument:
1. If moral anti-realism was true there would be no moral progress
2. There has been moral progress
3. Therefore anti-realism is false
Response to issue of moral progress
- Why should the anti-realist accept there has been moral progress when they wouldn’t accept the existence of objective morality in the first place
- Could also argue that morality has become more consistent or adapted to more knowledge rather than it has progressed.
What is cognitivism?
Claims ethical language expresses beliefs about how the world is
since beliefs can be true or false ethical claims can be true or false
claims ethical language aims to describe the world
Beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit - we fit our beliefs to the world
What is Mackie’s linguistic claim (Error theory)?
Claim 2:
- The mistake is not the result of misunderstanding how moral terms work - our moral judgements make a systematic mistake
- We believe in things that don’t exist (Moral properties of the world)
- We turn social arrangements into moral codes and claim they’re objective
- Moral statements are capable of being true or false but are always false
What is Mackie’s ontological claim in his error theory?
Claim 1
- related to the nature of existence
- Mackie claim’s there are no objective moral values
What is relation of ideas?
- Concerned with logic and mathematics
- we need sense experience to help form the concepts but our reasoning doesn’t rely on how the world actually is
e. g we don’t have to analyse every triangle in the world to know they have 3 sides - can understand that from the word itself
What is Hume’s fork?
There are two types of human enquiry (judgements of reason):
-relations of ideas
- matters of fact
Moral judgements are not relations of ideas- denying relations of ideas leads to contradiction
Not matters of fact since we don’t experience wrongness in the object/action but within ourselves
What are matters of fact?
Can only be derived by experiencing how the world is . We get this knowledge by:
a)observing how the world is
b) generalising from experience
We can never be 100% sure - we just have degrees of confidence/probability
most natural laws are based off observation but could change tomorrow
Explain Hume’s argument from motivation
P1 - Moral judgements can motivate actions
P2 - Reason cannot motivate action
C1 - Therefore moral judgements are not judgements of reason
Cognitivism claims moral judgements are true or false
The faculty for judging what is true or false is reason
so Hume is rejecting cognitivism
He says just knowing how the world is don’t motivate us to act - our passions do- the sources of moral judgement are passion. Which doesn’t reflect any truths about the world
What is Hume’s is-Ought gap?
Ought is a motivating moral statement which drives action whereas is relates purely to facts and doesn’t motivate us
The ability of moral statements to motivate us is what makes them distinct from purely factual statements or statements about beliefs
Hume argues you cannot derive what ought to be purely from what is
this could be because ‘is’ is cognitive and ‘ought’ is non-cognitive
What is Moore’s intuitionism
If-non-naturalism is right how do we find out about moral properties.
Moore claims we have intuitions - we cannot prove them but we know them to be true or false
they must be synthetic priori-true or false depending on what the word is like.
intuitions are self evident - provable with just ourselves
our ability to make these judgements needs to develop first
intuitionism doesn’t claim we have a faculty of intuition that detects goodness
Utilitarianism as naturalism
Claims the only good is happiness - can be interpreted as a form of a reductive claim
-Happiness is what goodness is (They are the same property)
because happiness is natural so is goodness
since maximising happiness is right -right is also a natural property
Moore says Mill commits fallacy of equivocation-people desire all weird things
Mill takes what people desire (A natural property) as being desirable(good) - doesn’t say goodness is the same property as being desired
What is reductive naturalism?
Natural properties can be identified through sense experience and science
what is non-reductive naturalism?
Morality is an expression of the natural capacities of human beings
Not supernatural or non-natural
but moral properties can’t be reduced to anything else
What is naturalism
The view that we can explain moral concepts such as good in naturalistic terms
