Meta-ethics
Meta-ethical Questions:
What does it mean to be good/bad?
What constitutes the nature of being
good or bad?
Cognitivism: The view that ethical
statements have a truth value.
Non-cognitivism: the view that ethical
statements do not have a truth value
A statement has a truth value if it is either
true or false.
Examples
Questions, exclamations, commands
Each of these types of sentences does not
have a truth value
Non-cognitivists hold that ethical statements
are like these—they look like descriptions
but they are really not.
Example: “pleasure is good” = “pleasure!
Goody!”
Types of cognitivism
Subjective descriptivism: moral statements
describe the psychological state of the
person making the judgment.
moral relativism: moral statements
describe the attitudes of the society or
culture the person making the statement is
in.
Divine command theory: Moral statements
describe the attitudes of a deity
An argument subjective
descriptivism
If SD is correct then sincere moral judgments
can never be wrong. No one can really disagree
with anyone else about ethics.
If Sally and Beth are arguing about abortion, and
both are sincere, then they are BOTH saying
true things when one says “abortion is morally
permissible” and the other says “abortion is not
morally permissible.”
Response
Perhaps moral disagreements are not
really about people having contradictory
beliefs, but about people having conflicting
desires.
If Sally thinks abortion ought to legal, she
desires that abortion be legal. If Beth
thinks abortion should not be legal, she
desires that abortion be outlawed. Both of
these desires cannot be fullfilled.
Another argument
If SD is true, then when Hitler says “we
ought to exterminate the Jews” he is
saying something true.
But that is absurd.
Therefore, SD is false.
An argument against Divine
Command theory
If divine command theory is true, then “x is
good” means “God approves of x”
There is nothing in the theory that limits
what God can approve of.
Therefore, if God approves of torturing
babies for the fun of it, it is good to torture
babies for the fun of it.
But this is absurd. So DC. Is false
Objectivism
Objectivism is the view that moral
statements have a truth value and the
truth value does not depend on
psychological states of individuals or
groups or even God.
If objectivism is true, “pleasure is good”
would, if true, describe something about
the nature of pleasure itself.
The argument from disagreement
People often disagree about what is the
right thing to do. Different cultures also
seem to have different standards about
what is right or wrong.
Therefore, it is reasonable to think that
there is no objective standard of what is
right or wrong
Responses
It is illegitimate to infer from “people disagree
about x” to “there is no fact about x”
Compare: People disagree about whether God
exists. Therefore there is no fact of the matter
whether God exists or not
It may be that the differences are not as great as
they seem when it comes to ultimate values: the
badness of suffering, the goodness of friendship,
etc.
The argument from queerness
Objective moral qualities would be
“qualities or relations of a very strange
sort, utterly different from anything else in
the universe”
These properties would require “some
special faculty of moral perception or
intuition, utterly different from our ordinary
ways of knowing everything else”
How are moral qualities strange?
Objective moral qualities would be action
directing. If you know x is good you would have
a motive or reason to do x” But Mackie thinks
there are no objective qualities that in
themselves motivate behavior.
Objective moral qualities are also strange in that
they are not perceived by the senses and are
not part of the scientific description of the world
Responses to Mackie
What is wrong with supposing that some
qualities can move a person to act? Does
not the apprehension of pain, for example,
in itself move a person to avoid the
painful?
There are many objective facts that are
also “queer” in Mackie’s sense:
mathematics and logic, for example.