pte - meta ethics key words

what are meta ethics?

focuses on the meaning and use of language of ethics - are there moral facts or claims that can be judged to be true or false

• is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.

• the area of philosophy which attempts to answer the question of what goodness actually is, including whether it even exists.

what is cognitivism?

refers to the mental process of knowing → believe that moral claims are a form of knowledge and can therefore be seen as true or false (moral facts can be declared true or false as they can be falsified)

• adheres to naturalism and intuitivism

what is non-cognitivism?

hold that moral truth claims cannot be known or demonstrated to be true or false

• moral statements are non-cognitive - rather than being knowable to reason, they are emotional expressions often aimed at commanding or urging others to do the same

• believe that moral statements are not truth-apt, and that moral knowledge is impossible

what is naturalism?

the idea that values can be defined based on natural properties in the world - leads to a more objective view of ethics as right or wrong may be observed in physical states such as pain or pleasure

what is a naturalistic fallacy?

the idea that it's possible to define the term "good" in terms of natural properties or processes

created by Moore in his book Principia Ethica

what is intuitionism?

goodness is a quality inherent in things; known by immediate apprehension

• there are objective moral truths that are independent of humans and can't be broken down into parts.

• that people can discover moral truths through a particular kind of intuitive use of their minds.

• not purely a matter of physical or empirical facts. 

e.g. Moore and Ross

what is Hume’s fork/guillotine?

a philosophical concept that states that it's impossible to logically derive a judgmental conclusion from a purely factual statement.

in his Treatise of Human Nature. Hume argued that there's a significant difference between descriptive statements about what is and prescriptive statements about what ought to be.

what is emotivism?

goodness expresses approval - a personal emotional reaction to facts

the theory that moral judgments are expressions of feelings, rather than statements of fact

what is the verification principle?

states that a statement's meaning is determined by how it is verified

• developed by Ayer to develop his own version of emotivism