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.

• The Bible offers many Divine Commands that appeal to our intuitive sense of right and wrong. For example, the Golden Rule "love your neighbour as yourself" is followed even by atheists.

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.

• The rules of the Old Testament are later contradicted by the New Testament.
  For example, the Old Testament establishes that no work should be done on the Sabbath, but Jesus himself breaks this rule. Therefore DCT gives an inconsistent account of the meaning of right and wrong.

Utilitarianism

• Ethical naturalism - goodness can be reduced to pleasure

• 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 - principle of utility

• 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 utilitarianism

• Naturalism does seem to explain almost all of human behaviour. It seems that we hardly ever do anything if there is no hope of pleasure emerging from it. For example, even people who put themselves through pain and suffering often do it with future pleasure or the pleasure of others in mind

• All human beings experience pleasure and pain so, unlike DCT, it is a definition that appeals to all human beings regardless of beliefs.

• There is a clear application to decision-making so the definition is useful for real life, beyond philosophy.

Weaknesses of utilitarianism

• Happiness/ pleasure varies too much and is too subjective

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

• It can be argued that not all pleasure is good: for example, is sadistic or greedy behaviour, which generates great amounts of pleasure, to be defined as 'good'?

• Bentham commits the naturalistic fallacy - this is considered the most damning objection to naturalism

• Bentham does not make it any easier to have moral discussions as there is no way we can agree on things if we have different pleasures

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.

• Intuitionism helps us to accept why we find it difficult to express and discuss moral feelings - if they can't be defined it is naturally frustrating to talk about them.

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

• Intuitionism does not offer an explanation for the origins of morality, or for why intuitions differ across cultures

The naturalistic fallacy

The logical mistake of assuming you can argue from a descriptive claim to a prescriptive/ moral claim