Metaethics

what is metaethics?

• the study of the nature of ethical concepts, propositions, and reasoning

• eg. can moral propositions be true? Is morality subjective or objective?

• asks about the nature of moral judgements

• does not result in value judgements

What are the three origins (‘rational bases’) for moral philosophy?

Reason - there are universal moral truths that can be discovered by reason. Some say we can use a posteriori reason do discover them (as scientists discover truths about the natural world). Others say we can use a priori reason to discover them (like mathematicians do to discover mathematical truths)

Emotion - there are no moral truths. Morality is an expression of our emotions and attitudes

Society - morality is not a matter of universal truth or an expression of emotion. Our moral principles are based on the society in which we live and have no objective force independently of society

What does cognition mean?

• refers to the means by which we acquire knowledge

• in meta-ethics there is a question about whether making a moral judgement is like acquiring knowledge (cognitivists say yes; non-cognitivists say no)

What do cognitivists argue?

• a moral judgement is like a belief/knowledge claim - describes the world in some way

• eg. if I morally judge that lying is wrong, then I BELIEVE that lying is wrong

• moral judgements are truth-apt

• mind to world fit

• kantian; utilitarianism

What does mind-to-world mean?

• cognitivism

• beliefs r in ur mind

• you only hold that belief because you want it to match up and fit what the world says

• what’s in ur mind should fit the world

What does world-to-mind mean?

• non-cognitivism

• desire - you want the world to correspond to what’s in ur mind

• eg. I want water

What do non-cognitivists argue?

• a moral judgement is more like a desire than a belief

• it does not describe the world

• cannot be truth apt

• if I morally judge that lying is wrong then I WANT there to be no lies

• world to mind

What’s an advantage of non-cognitivism? / disadvantage of cognitivism

• in claiming that moral judgements are more like desires, non-cognitivists can say that a moral judgment is necessarily related to motivation

• this is an advantage because eg. we do expect people who approve of helping the needy to help the needy - it would be strange if someone had the moral belief that it was right to help the needy but refused to help a person in need. They would be holding a moral value that they don’t act in accordance with

• moral value, according to non-cognitivists must make a difference to one’s actions

• if you hold a value it should motivate you to act in certain ways

• eg. if you were to say ‘i want water’ but you don’t drink water when offered it would be weird

• we think the same about moral judgements

What’s an advantage of cognitivism? /disadvantage of non-cognitivism

• in claiming that moral judgements are more like beliefs, cognitivists are able to say that a person’s moral judgements can be right or wrong

• this is an advantage because we do not think that moral judgement is a completely subjective matter and simply a matter of personal tase, such as that whatever a person thinks is right is right

• there is some objectivity (or at least perceived objectivity) to our moral judgements eg. disagreements and arguments over moral things like abortion suggests there is a right or wrong - we don’t have arguments sich as these over thinks we may desire/not like olives etc

• cognitivism allows there to be right or wrong in moral judgements

What are the diff meta-ethical theories?

Cognitivism + moral anti-realism: Error theory

Cognitivism + moral realism: moral naturalism; moral non-naturalism (intuitionism)

non-cognitivism + moral anti-realism: emotivism; prescriptivism

What do moral realists believe?

• just as blue is..

• these properties are a real…

• in order to establish whether a belief is true we…

• just as blue is a property of some physical objects, so good and bad are properties of people and situations, and right and wrong are properties of actions

• these properties are a real, mind independent part of the world, such as that moral judgements are true or false depending on whether they do or do not accurately reflect the existence of such properties in the world in the same way as eg. ‘the care is blue’ is true if the car in front of me is actually blue, irrespective of what our minds tell us. moral properties are similarly mind-independent actions of characters

• in order to establish that a belief is true, we go out and look out at properties in the real world. similarly, when making moral judgments, we go out and look into the world

What are the two moral realist theories?

moral naturalism: the moral properties are natural (in the sense that they are empirically observable eg. Bentham and Aristotle

Moral non-naturalism: the moral properties are non-natural (not empirically observable) eg. GE Moore

both agree that there are mind-independent moral properties

What does it mean for a moral naturalist to be a reductionist?

What is an example of reductionist moral naturalism?

• to be a reductionist is to claim that things in one domain are the same as, or can be explained fully in terms of things in another domain

• moral properties according to reductionists are really just natural properties that can be identified empirically or through sense experience

• reductionist moral naturalists can claim that what is wright and wrong is to be determined empirically and objectively

• Utilitarianism: reduces moral properties to the natural psychological property of happiness. Does not say that happiness is the only thing that is good - it says that happiness is goodness - they are the same property. Similarly, maximum happiness is the same thing as rightness

What do non-reductionist moral naturalists claim?

What is an example of non-reductionist moral naturalism?

• moral properties are natural ini the sense that they are an expression of the natural capacities of human beings, but they are not saying that moral properties are the same as the capacities

• idea that the moral has something more to do with us than j the natural

• neo-Aristotelianism: Julia Annas argues that natural facts about human nature (psychological capacities, physical abilities etc.) help us gain a clearer understanding of what human flourishing is

• But human flourishing cannot be explained entirely in terms of these natural facts and empirical investigation will not on its own tell us what the good life is

• it is a natural fact that we are rational animals, but a scientific investigation of our rational animality will give us little guidance as to how we can achieve eudaimonia

Explain Moore’s non-naturalism (but still cognitivism, moral realism) with his ‘open question’ argument’:

• against reductionism

• a ‘closed question’ only has one answer and is confused eg. ‘is a bachelor an unmarried man?’ is a closed and confused question bc the answer is always ‘yes’

• an open question has more than one answer and is sensible eg. ‘is Peter a bachelor?’ is an open question and is sensible because the answer could be yes or no

• If goodness was necessarily co-instantiated w/ pleasure, then ‘is pleasure good?’ would be like asking ‘is pleasure pleasure?’. The answer is always yes, therefore it would be a closed, confused Q

• But the answer to ‘is pleasure good?’ can logically be ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It is an open, sensible Q

• therefore goodness is not always necessarily co-instantiated with pleasure

• and the same goes for any other kind of natural or non-natural property we claim is co-instantiated with goodness

Explain Moore’s naturalistic fallacy

1. argues against..

2. attacks the statement

3. when is it fine to say it and not

4. ‘hand is red’

5. conflating contingent/necessarily co-instantiated

6. to claim that… is to be guilty of the naturalistic fallacy

• argues against reductionism in certain kinds of moral naturalism in particular

• Moore mainly attacks the statement ‘pleasure is good’

• it is fine if all that is taken to mean that a pleasurable thing has the property of goodness (attributing goodness to a natural thing - namely pleasure)

• However Moore does not believe it is fine if we mean that pleaure is the same as goodness. Then we would be saying the two properties are identical and that ‘good’ can be defined in terms of the natural property we refer to when we use the word ‘pleasure’.

• When we say ‘my hand is red’, what we mean is that my hand has the CONTINGENT property of redness and not that my hand and redness are the same.

• Moore is accusing the naturalist of conflating the way in which a property contingently belongs to an object with the way in which a quality is necessarily co-instantiated with an object

• to claim that moral properties and natural properties are identical is to be guilty of the naturalistic fallacy

Explain the objection to Moore’s open question argument:

• in the case of ‘is pleasure good’ Moore assumes that analytical naturalism is false in order to reach his conc that this is an open question

• The fact is that the question is only closed if you interpret good naturalistically, but not non-naturalistically

• Moore effectively argues that the naturalist is wrong to claim the question is closed because naturalism is wrong - without giving us an independent reason for believing that naturalism is wrong

• (Moore also assumes that analyses of concepts are uninformative such that if you were to ask whether concept X is concept Y when X and Y are conceptually related, you would be showing that you don’t understand X. But that is questionable.)

How does Moore’s intuitionism work with goodness?

• what argument does he use to prop this up

• what does he infer from that argument

• analogy with yellow

• Moore uses the ‘open question argument’ to support the idea that goodness is a simple, unanalysable property

• like the world ‘yellow’, the word ‘good’ cannot be defined in terms of natural (empirically observable) or non-natural properties. I can show you yellow things and good things but yellowness and goodness have no constituent parets in terms of which I can define yellow and good. But unlike yellow, which is a natural property, goodness is a non-natural property

Explain intuitions

1. some of the moral props we know are..

2. moral intuitions are… (…)yet … (…)

3. they are … in the sense that…

4. they are… in the sense that…

5. not known…

6. cannot be…

7. we just know them…

8. their self evidence is…

9. OBjection

• Some of the moral propositions we know are intuitions eg. justice is good

• Moral intuitions are synthetic (true in virtue of how the world is) yet self evident (they prove themselves, are immediately true)

• they are synthetic in the sense that they are not analytically true (true in virtue of the meaning of the words)

• They are self-evident in the sense that they cannot be proven

  • they are not known inductively on the basis of experience, and they cannot be deductively inferred from other propostitions

  • we just know them without recourse to reason

  • they provide evidence of their own truth; they are self-justifying

  • their self-evidence is like that of a necessary propostition in maths or logic

What is a non-natural but real property? What is the moral intuitive faculty by which we come to know about such properties?

Hume’s fork 1

Explain the two kinds of knowledge that Hume thinks there are, and what Hume deduces from them

Matters of fact - proposition about what exists as known by sense experience eg. there are lots of daffodils or by causal inference eg. there are storm clouds so it will rain

Relations of ideas - propositions known to be true by pure thinking because they are analytically true eg. humans are mammals or because deductive reasoning has been used eg. 2+2=4

Because there are two kinds of knowledge we can make two kinds of judgements of reason corresponding to these

P1 Moral judgements are not relations of ideas

P2 Moral judgements are not matters of fact

C therefore, moral judgements are not judgements of reason

Hume’s fork 2

Expand on why Hume argues moral judgements are not judgements of reason and how it attacks cognitivism

1. p1,p2,c + link conclusions to knowledge

2. explain p1

3. short example that refutes p1

4. explain p2

5. short example that refutes p2

P1 Moral judgements are not relations of ideas

P2 Moral judgements are not matters of fact

C therefore, moral judgements are not judgements of reason

• if moral judgements are not judgements of reason then we cannot have knowledge of them. They are not true of false.

• P1: moral judgements cannot be relations of ideas because the negation of a moral judgement is not contradictory. The negation of ‘u shld keep ur promise’ is ‘u should not keep ur promise’ - not a contradiction. Not uniquely moral relations of ideas because not analytically or deductively true

  • What about ‘slavery is unjust’?

• P2: in the case of murder you can find certain matters of fact by empirical investigation and experience (eg. killing, rage, perpetrator, blood, revenge) , but you cannot find the wrongness of the murder

  • do we not just SEE that an unprovoked attack is wrong?

Hume’s fork 3

What would Moore/Bentham/Kant say about Hume’s fork?

Moore: It is misguided - moral propositions are synthetic and self evident so there are not just two kinds of knowledge

Kant: Moral propositions are synthetic a priori (about the world but not known through experience

Bentham/reductive naturalists: Moral propositions are matters of fact because they concern the natural property of happiness which is evident to the senses

Explain Ayer’s verification principle and how it attacks cognitivism + Moore’s intuitionism in specific:

• a statement is meaningful if it is empirically verifiable or analytic (true in virtue of the meaning of the words)

• eg. ‘there are a million flies in london’ is meaningful because it is empirically verifiable in principle ie. we know how to prove it true or false

• ‘ a bachelor is a married woman’ and ‘a bachelor is an unmarried man’ are both meaningful because they are analytic

• so there must be a possible way to show that a statement is true in order for it to be meaningful

• He applied this to moral statements (eg ‘lying is wrong’). In his view moral statements are neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true.

• Since they do not satisfy the verification principle, he concluded that they are not genuinely meaningful

• Ayer agreed with Moore’s opposition to naturalism but questioned his intuitionism. Moral statements cannot be reduced to naturalistic statements, but they are also not matters of intuition because non-empirical intuition could not help us decide against conflicting moral intuitions

What’s an argument against the verification principle as an attack on cognitivism?

literally self defeating smh

What’s Hume’s argument against cognitivism to do with morality and motivation?

p1. moral judgements can motivate actions

p2. reason cannot motivate action

p3. therefore moral judgements are not judgements of reason

P1: moral judgements can motivate actions

P2: Reason cannot motivate action

• this is because we are not motivated by relations of ideas or matters of fact, but by emotions and desires. Because relations of ideas and matters of fact have a mind-to-world fit, they are not particularly motivating. Knowing that water is H2O does not give rise to any particular motivations in me. In contrast, emotions and desires havr a mind-to-world fit because they motivates to act in a way that tries to bring the world in line with our motivations and desires

C: Therefore, moral judgements are not judgements of reason

• this is an argument against cognitivist view that moral judgements can be true or false - since only judgements of reason can be true or false

• Moral judgements for Hume are desires (must include motivation) rather than beliefs. This is an argument against moral realism because he is sating that moral judgements cannot be truth-apt because moral judgements are desires/motivations

What are some objections to Hume’s views on morality and motivation?

We might question if P1 (moral judgements can motivate actions) is convincing… if you make moral judgement X, does it follow that you should have some tendency to act in line with X?

What about P2 (reason cannot motivate action) … Reason can actually motivate eg. if someone chooses not to eat chocolate and when asked the reason they say ‘because it’s not healthy’. Isn’t that the reason that motivated them not to eat chocolate. moral judgements are based of reason, but still can be motivating as other types of reason are motivating. Hume’s counter argument might be that what really motivated her to refuse the chocolatewas that she WANTS to be healthy but I don’t buy this xx

The is-ought gap issue with moral realism

• hume argues that there is a logical gap between factual ‘is’ statements and evalauative ‘ought’ statements

• for example, he questions inferences such as ‘the lion in the zoo is stressed. therefore, the lion ought not to be kept in a zoo.’ The premise is a factual statement which says what is the case, while the conclusion is a value judgement which says what ought to be the case

• There is a logical gap between an ‘is’ statement and an ‘ought’ statement. Freely reasoning across this gap - as if the ‘ought’ statement necessarily follows from the ‘is’ statement, or as if a value judgement necessarily follows from a factual judgement, is problematic. You cannot derive a value from a fact

• This poses an issue for moral realism as moral realists ignore the difference between ‘is’ judgments and ‘ought’ judgements. For example, naturalistic realists such as utilitarians try to derive ‘Happiness is good’ from ‘People desire happiness’. Non-naturalistic realists such as Moore tries to derive ‘Justice is good’ from ‘We intuit that justice is good’.

How is virtue ethics both naturalistic and non-naturalistic

• rationality has been given to us by humans. Nature has given us the capacity to reason (first nature)

• it is a natural fact that the function of human beings is to use reason – in the same way it is a natural fact that the function of a knife is to cut things

• Culture enables us to develp our reason to use the virtues (second nature).

• our natural capacity to reason alone not reducible to being moral because you need to be cultured asw

Explain Mackies argument from relativity

• attacks moral realism without attacking cognitivism

• : he infers that there are no objective moral truths from the fact that there is moral disagreement between societies and between the same societies in diff time periods , e.g. the Greeks approved of slavery, we do not eg. some cultures think eating animals is wrong and some do not

• If moral realism is correct, there would only be one objectively correct answer to all of these issues. Why, then, is there so much disagreement on these issues? Cultures that are independent of each other tend to form completely different moral practices and beliefs

• if there were objective moral properties and facts (i.e. if moral realism were true), you would expect every culture to eventually discover these moral facts in a similar way to how every culture has discovered other objective truths such as “1+1=2”

• Mackie thinks there is no objective moral truth and no evidence on the basis of which such “truths” could be known. We hold the moral beliefs we do, not because we have evidence of objective values, but because of the ways of life we lead in the societies we inhabit. Our moral beliefs are caused not by evidence but by a way of life.

Explain the objections to Mackie’s argument from relativity

(1) Is Mackie exaggerating how much moral disagreement there is?

(2) We would not infer that there are no objective scientific truths from the fact that there is scientific disagreement between societies, e.g. primitive societies thought the earth was flat, we do not. Rather, we would say that there is an objective scientific truth and we know it because we have good evidence, and they did not know it because their evidence was inadequate. So why treat moral disagreement any differently?

Specific rules in one society may differ from those in another, but underlying the morality of all societies are the same very general basic principles and these can be considered to be objectively valid.  It might be said (for example) that all morality includes a principle of universality or the principle that what is right is what maximises happiness.

Explain Mackie’s argument from metaphysical queerness

• about both are about the idea that if mind-independent moral properties do exist, they would have to be really strange and motivating

On strangeness:

• he says objective moral values would have to ‘be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe’, and metaphysically like unlike anything else we have experience of.

• Because he thinks moral values are not natural properties (properties which can be discovered by the physical senses or sciences), he considers whether they could be non-natural (as intuitionists believe). But if moral values were non-natural properties they would have to be very peculiar and we cannot reasonably believe in such things.

• For example, ‘good’ things would need to somehow have to-be-doneness built into them and ‘bad’ things would have not-to-be-doneness built into them. Like, the act of stealing itself would have to have the property of ‘don’t do this!’ built into it, which doesn’t make sense. It’s not possible for objective, physical, objects to relate to human motivations in this way (scientifically, metaphysically, or otherwise).

On motivation:

• given that moral judgements move us to act, the properties would have to be motivational. But how can a fact about the world necessarily create a desire in us (recall Hume)? In Mackie’s words, ‘if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong … course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it’

• For example, ‘good’ things would need to somehow have to-be-doneness built into them and ‘bad’ things would have not-to-be-doneness built into them. Like, the act of stealing itself would have to have the property of ‘don’t do this!’ built into it, which doesn’t make sense. It’s not possible for objective, physical, objects to relate to human motivations in this way (scientifically, metaphysically, or otherwise).

Explain Mackie’s argument from epistemological queerness:

• If mind-independent moral properties exist, then it is a total mystery how we would acquire knowledge of them

• We cannot gain knowledge of them in any ordinary way: through sense perception (according to Moore because he believe moral properties are non-natural), introspection, explanatory hypothesising, inference, logical construction or conceptual analysis.

• Mackie says we could know about them only via ‘some special faculty of moral perception or intuition’, but (against intuitionism) ‘the suggestion that moral judgments are made or moral problems solved by just sitting down and having an ethical intuition is a travesty of actual moral thinking’

Explain a possible realist’s objection to Mackie (queerness)

• naturalist would argue he is begging the question

Mackie’s criticisms are aimed at moral realism. But even if they are successful against non-naturalist types of moral realism (his main target is intuitionism), are they successful against all naturalist types?

A naturalist moral realist in the form of a utilitarian might argue that goodness is happiness, and happiness is neither metaphysically nor epistemologically queer because it is a natural psychological property the existence of which is easy for us to know (generally speaking, a person can know whether she is happy and whether another person is happy).

Explain Mackie’s error theory

• cognitivist and anti-realist

• cognitivitsm: if you study moral language, you will see we use it to try to make objective claims about a moral reality. Our moral judgements are assertion that aim at the truth. Therefore, moral judgements are presupposed to be truth apt. eg. heated debates show we assume there is an objective moral truth

• Anti-realism: there is no moral reality. There is nothing in the world to confirm any moral statement is true. So all of our moral judgements are false; none of them are true. Keeping your promises is right’ and ‘telling lies is wrong’ are both false because there are no mind-independent moral properties of rightness and wrongness. The error in ‘error theory’ means that all of our moral thinking and speech is built on a mistake. So, according to error theory, the statement “murder is wrong” expresses a cognitive belief that murder is wrong – but ‘wrong’ refers to a non-existent property and so the statement is false.

• We might compare moral language to fictional language. Let’s say we do not believe in ghosts but we are listening to a group of people who do. As they talk, they are making objective claims about ghosts (e.g. ‘The ghost was at the door’). We hold an error theory about their ghost-talk, because while we know they are trying to make objective claims about ghosts, all of their claims are false, because ghosts do not exist.

• Essentially, Mackie argues that the moral realist is correct about morality conceptually speaking—we are moral realists—but the moral realist is incorrect about how the world actually is

• (for arguments that defend his anti-realism u can look at relativity and queerness)

Explain the two objections to error theory

1: It does not make sense for Mackie to conclude to the fact that there is no moral reality that all moral judgements are false. If there is no moral reality, would it not make more sense to say (with the non-cognitivist) that moral judgements are not truth-apt? If a type of statement can never be true, then nor can it ever be false. When Mackie says that ‘all moral judgements are false’, does he mean that they are all necessarily false (in the same way that the statement ‘a bachelor is a woman’) is false, or that they simply happen to be false (in the same way that ‘the grass is red’ happens to be false). If he meant that they are all necessarily false then how can he be a cognitivist and believe that moral judgements are truth-apt? For if a moral judgement is necessarily false then it cannot be true, and if a judgement cannot be true then it cannot be truth-apt. If he meant that they happen to be false then how can he be an anti-realist? Can he believe that there happens to be no moral reality, but, were the universe different from what it happens to be, there could be - may not have a moral reality but could by logical possibility? This would be inconsistent with some of his other arguments, such as the argument from metaphysical queerness where he claims that the whole idea of mind-independent moral properties is too strange to believe - he basically rules them out in all other universes

2: By saying, all moral judgements are false, Mackie commits himself to the idea that both ‘lying is wrong’ and ‘lying is right’ are false.  But how can two contradictory judgements share a truth-value?  Mackie needs to become a non-cognitivist and stop saying moral judgements are truth-apt.  

Explain the response to the objection to Mackie’s error theory

1. falsehood in a philosophical context vs the erronerous perspective of ordinary moral discourse

Mackie is saying that from a philosophical perspective these two judgements are both false because there is no moral reality. Falsehood in this philosophical context means there is no moral reality to which they can successfully or unsuccessfully correspond. But from the erroneous perspective of ordinary moral discourse they are not both false. We then presuppose that one of them is true and the other is false because we presuppose that there is a moral reality to which one of them corresponds and the other does not.

Which arguments can be used to defend/attack diff theories

Moral naturalism: utilitarianism; virtue ethics but also as an objection; mill’s proof of utilitarianism; verification principle; ought-gap; relativity; queerness; naturalistic fallacy; open question

Non-naturalism: open question; naturalistic fallacy; intuitionism; verification principle; relativity; queerness;

Realism: naturalism; non-naturalism; queerness; relativity; verification principle; ought gap

cognitivism: error theory; naturalism - mill’s proof; non-naturalism - Kant; moral argument and reasoning; emotivism; prescriptivism

non-cognitivism: emotivism; prescriptivism; hume’s fork; hume on motivation; verification priniciple; moral argument and reasoning; mackie’s arguments for cognitivism; kant; utilitarianism;

Anti-realism: error theory; emotivism; prescriptivism; naturalism; non-naturalism; anti-realism; progress

prescriptivism and emotivism: prescriptivism; emotivism; arguments against realism eg. all of hume’s arguments; verification principle; arguments for cognitivism; arguments for realism; moral language and reasoning; nihilism

Explain emotivism

• AYER

• moral properties do not exist. Rests on verificationism - moral predicates neither empirically verifyable nor analytic so not truth-apt and cannot be used to express cognitive belief states

• moral judgements instead express emotions or attitudes of approval and disapproval. To say ‘Giving to charity is right’ is to express approval of charity-giving. To say ‘Smacking children is wrong’ is to express disapproval of smacking children.

• when I say ‘You should not have stolen the apple’, I am giving vent to my negative feelings. I am literally sharing my displeasure with you. To express my displeasure (which requires that I actually feel displeased) is not to report on my displeasure (which does not require that I feel displeased at the time of the report). To express my feelings is not to state any fact.

• non-contradictory for someone to say ‘liying is right’ and someone else to say that it is wrong - merely expressing sentiments.

• propped up by is-ought gap, fork, motivation

• stevenson develops it by talking a lot abt emotional persuasion - this is what is happening when there is moral disagreement

Explain prescriptivism

• non-cognitivist, anti-realist

• moral judgements do not express beliefs or state facts; they are not truth-apt

• moral judgements are prescriptions; they function like imperative sentences and are commands or orders similar to ‘turn left!’.

• R M Hare draws a logical distinction between descriptive language and prescriptive language. Descriptive language (eg the declaration ‘The flowers are red’) says how the world is. Prescriptive language (eg the imperative ‘Close the window’) says how the world should be.Through its prescriptive force, moral language says how the world should be by commending or opposing the existence of something in the world, rather than only describing it. So when I utter a moral statement I am prescribing and either commending or opposing. in the same way dr prescribing medicine is more commanding than describing

• for example, when i say ‘you shld not have told that lie’, I am not only describing that you told a lie, but I am opposing the lying

• our comendation/censure is not arbitrary but based on fundamental moral standards. people in the same community tend to share moral standards. They are not themselves objective thought, so were there to be a disagreement between two people who do not share the relevant fundamental standards, then there would be no resolution to their disagreement.

• universalism about moral language: subject to consistency restraints that might not aply in non-moral prescriptive language. - when you make a moral judgement/prescription you would have it applied to a similar situation and you would apply it to any other agent in a similar situation. Suggests there is some rationality involved in moral decision making

Issue of moral language against emotivism

(ie that it cannot account for moral disagreement)

1. emotivists no disagreement…

2. ayer response

3. evaluation

• they cannot account for moral agreement/disagreement

• emotivist would have to say there is no real erational disagreement if I say meat eating is right and you say it is wrong. All you could do is express your feelings about meat-eating and try to influence my feelings. whether your argument is good depends not on whether it is rational or not, but if you manage to change my feelings. you could say anything as long as it influences me to adopt my attitudes. Surely this is more like manipulation than argument.

• ayer replied saying that we do disagree and argue about the facts relating to moral issues eg. we could disagree on the facts regarding to how animals are treated in farms, But if do we agree on the facts then there is no rational disagreement between us even if i approve of meat-eating and you do not

• But the fact that we engage in moral deliberation and do sometimes change our mind on the back of it suggests that we do reason about the moral (and not just the factual) aspects of issues.

Issue of moral language against prescriptivism

• ie. agreement and disagreement

• talk about standards

• and nazis

Cannot account for moral argument and disagreement: Hare believes that how we reason depends on what moral standards we adopt, but he does not think that the moral standards themselves are objectively correct. So if when we disagree about meat-eating you rely on the standard that animals have no rights and I rely on the standard that animals do have rights, then each of us does not count the other’s reason as a reason. Or, more dramatically, it seems that reason cannot show the Nazi to be immoral because the basic standards we reason from are different from those that the Nazi reasons from.

why does the issue of moral language to reason/disagree etc. not affect error theory

• They can say that moral argument involves giving reasons, drawing conclusions, etc.  However, we might think it would be rather pointless to do these things if error theory is right, because all our moral judgements are false and no matter how much we argue and disagree we will never get closer to the truth.  

issue for prescriptivism/emotivism of explaining moral language in terms of one purpose when we use moral language for many purposes

We do not always use moral language to express emotions or influence other people’s attitudes, as emotivism claims. Think of how different it is from advertising which is used to influence in this way.

We do not always use moral language to command, as prescriptivism claims. We ask moral questions, describe moral dilemmas, make moral admissions, construct moral arguments and (as the emotivist says) express moral emotions.

might respond by saying not always, but typically

offer a very “one dimensional” picture of moral language. The cognitivist can say that moral language can be used for different purposes but its meaning is connected to its fact-stating purpose.

issue of moral progress for moral anti-realism

1. if moral anti-realism is true, then there would be no moral progress since we cannot get better morally over time because there is no objective standard according to which we could understand what ‘better’ means in this context.

2. But there has been moral progress, for example the ancient Greeks thought it morally acceptable to keep slaves and we do not

3. Therefore moral anti-realism is false

Response to issue of moral progress

• The anti-realist might say we can progress by (1) understanding more of the facts relating to the issue (Ayer); or (2) we can become more consistent in our moral thinking (Hare).  So we can become more rational in our thinking even if our rationality is not governed by any objective moral truth

• All judgements of moral progress are relative to a particular moral code.  We can therefore believe that we have progressed from the Greeks, as long as what we mean is that according to our standards we judge ourselves to be better than the Greeks.  That is, we approve of what we do and disapprove of what they did.  But there is no objective progress.   

moral anti-realism is moral nihilism issue + objections

1. what is moral nihilism

2. why might moral anti realists be nihilistic

3. how might they respond to this

4. evaluate their response

Moral nihilism is the view that there are no moral values and principles, and so there are no duties or obligations as to how we should act, think and feel. At its most extreme nihilism proclaims that morality is pointless, and we should not be moral at all. Given that moral anti-realists deny that there is a moral reality or any objective moral values, they could be described as nihilistic.

Non-cognitivists can respond that just because there’s no inherent right or wrong, people still have moral attitudes and feelings. And the realisation that moral values are just expressions of feelings doesn’t mean we should (or could) stop having these moral feelings.

There may also be practical reasons to behave as if some moral judgements are true. For example, if you were always stealing from your friends, chances are they wouldn’t remain friends with you for very long.

Mackie might say we may not have objective values, but we can have subjective ones

But one might still want to ask whether doing these things would serve any purpose if the values that underpin them have no objective basis. Isn’t the whole reason why we express moral emotions and make moral prescriptions that we think it is possible to be right in this area?