Metaethics Flashcards
(19 cards)
Cognitivism
‘Killing is wrong’
Cognitivists argue that sentences like these express beliefs and so are propositions which are ‘truth apt’, they have truth value (true or false).
Non-cognitivism
‘Killing is wrong’
Non-cognitivists argue that moral sentences are not propositions, neither true or false, but instead the have a function- like prescriptive commands.
About language
Cognitivism
Non-cognitivism
About the world
Realism
Anti-realism
Moral realism
Realists argue that there are ‘real’ moral properties or ‘real’ moral facts which exist independently of human minds.
Moral-anti-realism
Anti-realists argue that no such properties exist and and that moral terms refer to something else, for example the expression of an emotion.
Moral naturalism
Naturalism is a type of moral realism, arguing that moral properties/facts are natural properties of the world. Moral naturalism leads to a cognitivists view of moral language, since our ethical judgements are true or false insofar as they correctly or incorrectly refer to those natural properties of the world.
Utilitarianism
A common form of moral naturalism. Bentham argued that all humans aim to secure pleasure and to avoid pain- these psychological, hence natural, properties.
Virtue ethics
Based on natural facts but it is not a theory that reduces to moral terms to naturalistic properties.
- Aristotle says ‘the good’ is the thing humans most value, and and we can empirically determine this by looking at what people strive for, eudaimonia. This is a natural fact about human behaviour.
Moral non-naturalism
It is the claim that there are moral properties/facts in the world but these AREN’T natural properties. A form realism, and it leads to a cognitivist view of moral language, as our ethical judgements refer to these non-natural properties.
Intuitionism
Moore’s open question argument
The naturalistic fallacy
Issues- moral realism
- Hume’s fork
- Ayer’s verification principle
- Hume- moral judgements are not beliefs
- Hume’s is-ought gap
- Mackie’s arguments from relativity and from queerness
Moral anti-realism
Mackie’s error theory
Ayer’s emotivism
Hare’s prescriptivism
Mackie’s error theory
Ayer’s emotivism
Hare’s prescriptivism
Issues with moral anti-realism
- Can moral anti-realism account for how we use moral language?
- Problem of accounting for moral progress
- Does anti-realism because moral nihilism
