Meta ethics

Divine command theory

• It treats ethical statements as objectively true (cognitivist) but believes they have a transcendent source (non-naturalist)

• Right is what god commands, wrong is what god forbids

• Argues that whatever god commands to be good must be good because god is the source of all goodness and what he forbids is evil

Gods qualities in DCT

• Omnipotence: if God does not decide the meaning of right and wrong, there is something more powerful/fundamental than him

• Omnibevolence: he always commands out of love

John Calvin

• “The will of God is the supreme will of righteousness” - everything that god tells us to do must be morally right

• Our natural reason is useful but flawed due to the Fall - direct commands from God can redeem our reason and set us on the right path

Karl Barth

• “How can God be understood as the Lord if that does not involve the problem of human obedience?” - shows that mans obedience to god is the answer to all questions about ethics

Strengths of DCT

• It offers a sense of justice, God sees everything, therefore nobody gets away with wrong doing. The after-life is means of justice, reward and punishment.

• It offers a means of proof concerning what is right and wrong, Moral dilemmas can be assessed using the God's will e.g. the Bible.

• The moral maxims expressed by D.C.T are universal, this means they apply to everyone at all times, God does not change His mind. We have an absolute moral standard.

• It offers a motive to do good and avoid evil - the afterlife e.g. heaven, hell, purgatory.

Weaknesses of DCT

• Divine Command theory is unnecessary. Actions are morally good or bad in themselves since God will always command what is morally good, his role in moral decision-making is an unnecessary

• Goodness can be devalued - if goodness is solely that which God commands then it follows that it has no intrinsic value. A person does something good because God commands it, not because that action is something morally right. If God wills one person to do one thing and wills another person to do the opposite, then both acts, despite being contrary, would be morally good.

• Plato's Euthyphro dilemma: 'Is conduct right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is right' If you accept the first, God loses moral goodness. If you accept the second option, then God loses omnipotence. Either option shows that morality does not rely on God.

• Christians sometimes take a teaching from the Bible that doesn't talk about ethics and then apply it to an ethical problem. For example, "God made humans in his own image" is then applied to abortion and taken to imply that abortion is morally wrong. Some people think this is an illogical way to apply factual statements.

Ulitarianism

• Ethical naturalism - moral truths are facts - can be proved

• Right is what causes pleasure, wrong is what causes pain

• “Nature has placed man kind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure”

• Decisions about moral issues are to be based on what is good for the greatest number of people

• The hedonic calculus weighs up the pleasure and pain generated by the available moral actions to find the best option

John Stuart Mill

• Qualitative hedonism: focuses on higher and lower pleasures to identify a better quality of happiness

• “It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” - higher quality pleasures are worth the sacrifice of a large quantity of lower pleasures

• Discarding the hedonic calculus, he considers if a rule can be put in place that would suggest that everyone repeated the action, would it still bring happiness

Strengths of ulitarianism

• Makes ethical propositions true and factual

• Naturalism suggests that it can be measured objectively

• Provides guidelines and rules to follow

• Actions can be judged

Weaknesses of ulitarianism

• Happiness/ pleasure varies too much and is too subjective

• Consequences of actions are too unpredictable to guarantee happiness/ pleasure

Intuitionism

• Ethical statements are cognitive but cannot be reduced to natural statements

• Moral values are self evident

G.E. Moore

• Nothing intrinsically good about happiness or health, they are only good if we define them as good - such definitions of good are therefore subjective and dependent on each situation

• ‘Good’ can be defined no more successfully than ‘yellow’ - can only define it in terms of something else which possesses what we consider to be the quality or characteristics of yellow

• ‘Good’, like yellow, is a simple, unanalysable term

• Ethical values cannot be defined but are self-evident and can be known only directly by intuition

• Good is not a matter of opinion, but something that we can all ascertain through reason

• Intuitionist about ends - he believes the ethical goods we strive towards are self-evident

W.D. Ross

• Introduces prima facie duties (at first appearance) - suggests that in a moral dilemma, the various duties or obligations that we have are apparent

• Seven prima facie duties: duties of fidelity, reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement, non-maleficence

• Intuitionist about ends - he believes certain obligations are self-evident

Strengths of intuitionism

• Intuitionism allows for objective moral values to be identified and therefore proposes a form of moral realism

• It explains why we disagree about ethics while at the same time sharing certain common convictions

• No religion required as the source of absolute ethical principles as we have human intuition to discover them ourselves

• Non-naturalistic; morality is not dependent on the natural world, and ethical principles are independent of natural events. The theory is thus not guilty of the naturalistic fallacy.

Weaknesses of intuitionism

• There is no way to distinguish between moral truths which are actually right and those which seem right - in fact we often change our minds about seemingly obvious moral truths throughout our lives

• Ethical naturalists argue that our moral intuitions can generally be reduced to personal interests/social values and therefore naturalism still holds the superior explanation