The very idea
Key resources:
 Meta-ethics in a small nutshell (short)
 Meta-ethics in a much larger nutshell (longer)
 Lacewing – Moral cognitivism
 Lacewing – Moral truth
What do you think?
 Every woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy.
 Abortion is murder.
 Education is a universal right.
 The Taliban policy of preventing girls from attending school was
morally permissible.
 It is wrong to mutilate the genitals of children.
 Female circumcision is right for those cultures (e.g. among many
groups in the Horn of Africa) where it is a long established tradition.
 In addressing these questions it feels like something
hangs on the answer.
 Disagreements seem genuine – there’s a right answer,
even if it’s hard to get to.
 Moral disputes do not seem like arguments over the
taste of Marmite.
Meta-ethics
 Aim to understand the nature of moral judgements –
not the elucidation of a theory of what is good, right or
virtuous (normative ethics).

What does this involve?

What are the key issues and questions?
Key issues:
(1)
Meaning: is the semantic function of moral discourse to state facts?
(2) Metaphysics: do moral facts or properties exist? What are they? Are
they reducible to some other type of property or sui generis?
(3) Epistemology: can we possess moral knowledge? What can justify
our moral beliefs?
(4) Objectivity: can moral judgements really be correct or incorrect? In
what sense, if any, is there a moral truth ‘out there’?
(5) Moral psychology: what is the connection between forming a moral
judgement and acting? Does making a moral judgement necessarily
motivate a person to act?
A map of the positions
Do moral
judgements
express beliefs?
YES
COGNITIVISM
Sometimes
true?
YES – they
report the
facts
NO – they
express
beliefs, but
they are all
false
NO
NONCOGNITIVISM
Error theory
SUBJECTIVISM
Naturalism v.
non-naturalism
Reductionism v.
non-reductionist
approach
Hume
Emotivism
Moral realism: key claims
A robust, full-blown realism has these commitments.
(1)
Meaning: moral discourse aims to report the moral facts.
(2) Metaphysics: there exist moral facts (or properties) and they are
distinct class of facts (N.B differences among realists on type of facts
and reduction)
(3) Epistemology: We possess moral knowledge, which is to have
knowledge of (some of) the moral facts.
(4) Objectivity: moral facts are objective or independent of any
particular beliefs or thoughts we might have about them. Although
N.B the notion of objective will need to be carefully specified.
(5) Moral psychology: internalism v. externalism – more on this later
Realism…
So….
 Moral judgements as objective.
 There exist moral facts or properties
 We can possess moral knowledge.
Motivations…
Motivations - truth
 Realism accounts for the actual nature of our moral discourse –
our judgements look and function like any other declarative
sentence.
 The existence of moral facts explains why our moral judgements
are expressed in a truth-functional way. For example…
 The judgement that ‘hunting badgers is morally wrong’ has the
grammatical form of a sentence that is capable of being true or
false.
 It explains why some of our judgements are true .
Motivations - justification
 Realism explains why I am justified or not in expressing a
particular moral belief or forming a moral judgement.
 My belief that wanton cruelty is wrong is explained by the
fact that it is wrong – the belief is supported by the way
things are and (as with any other belief) it has the job of
reporting of how things are.
 …and why we can have moral knowledge – to know that p
is right/wrong is to have a justified belief about the fact
that p.
Justification – disagreement and progress
 Moral realism explains why moral disagreements are real.
 Just as we may dispute what the right answer is in science,
so too with moral questions.
 If morality is objective in this way, then it makes sense of
the idea of progress as well as the possibility of error.
 Parallel with scientific progress - things can improve
morally as we come to acquire moral knowledge.