Meta-Ethics

The point of this topic is about whether or not morality exists and how we categorise it. We will be looking at categorising morality in two ways.

1. The Metaphysical: What is the nature of goodness? There are two opposing views on this:

Moral realism: There are mind-independent moral properties and facts.
Moral anti-realism: Mind-independent moral properties and facts do not exist.

2. Linguistic: What is the meaning of ethical language? There are two opposing views on this:

Cognitivism: Moral judgements express cognitive mental states, moral statements are true or false
Non-cognitivism: Moral judgements express non-cognitive mental states, do not aim to describe reality, and are not capable of being true or false

Ethical Naturalism

Ethical Naturalism is a cognitivist and a realist theory
Ethical naturalism holds that moral judgements express beliefs that are capable of being true or false (cognitivism), and that moral properties objectively exist (realism).
Ethical naturalism is typically a reductive theory meaning that moral properties such as “good” can be reduced to non-moral natural properties.
"Murder is wrong” expresses a cognitive belief that murder is wrong and wrongness refers to a real natural property (perhaps because murder brings about the natural feeling of sadness / pain etc).
Utilitarianism is an example of a naturalist ethical theory because goodness can be reduced to pleasure, and badness can be reduced to pain.
Pleasure and pain are natural properties of the mind and therefore Utilitarianism is a naturalist theory.
John Stuart Mill argues that happiness is not merely a good, but the only intrinsic good. Other things we value, such as truth or freedom, are valued because they form part of what happiness is. Mill claims that the only evidence that something is desirable is that people, in fact, desire it
Aristotle’s virtue ethics can also be understood as a form of ethical naturalism as goodness is linked to human flourishing (eudaimonia) which is grounded in facts about human nature and function.

Problem: The Is-Ought Gap

Hume’s is-ought gap attempts to show that moral judgments cannot be inferred from facts.
Hume said ethical naturalists talk about the way things are and then jump with no apparent justification to a claim about the way things ought to be.
You cannot deduce a value from a fact. You can’t get an ought from an is.
So to criticise Utilitarianism:

P1. It is human nature to find pleasure good (fact – ‘is-statement’).

C1. Pleasure is good and we ought to maximise pleasure.
Hume’s says this is not a valid deduction. This conclusion is not justified by the premise.
The fact that it is human nature to find pleasure good, only means that it is human nature to find pleasure good. It does NOT mean that pleasure is good and that we ought to maximise it.
Hume proposes that ethical language express an ‘active feeling or sentiment’.
Response: Ethical naturalists may argue that Hume’s is–ought gap only undermines deductive attempts to connect morality in natural facts. Utilitarians can respond that there is strong inductive evidence that pleasure is good, based on widespread human experience and observation. Moral conclusions are not arbitrary, even if they are not deductively entailed by factual premises. They are observed.

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Integration: Hume is attacking the claim that moral truths can be logically derived from purely factual (natural) statements.

Weighting: It's a serious challenge to ethical naturalism, but it is not fatal. It successfully undermines deductive versions of ethical naturalism, but weaker inductive versions survive.

Problem: The Naturalistic Fallacy

Moore developed Hume’s is-ought gap into the naturalistic fallacy: it is a mistake to assume that because something is natural, it must therefore be good.
Ethical naturalists appear to commit this fallacy. For example, Bentham assumes that because humans naturally desire pleasure, pleasure must be good.
Moore argues that this move is unjustified: the fact that something is desired or natural does not logically prove that it is morally good.
Moore concludes that all attempts to define goodness in natural terms (e.g. pleasure) rely on unsupported assumptions and therefore commit the naturalistic fallacy.
As a result, Moore argues that goodness cannot be defined.
Moore compares goodness to the colour yellow: it cannot be defined or explained, only recognised when it is experienced.
In the same way, humans know whether something is good or bad through moral intuition, rather than through reasoning or definition.

Problem: The Open Question Argument

Okay! This one can be quite confusing.

Ethical naturalists argue that moral terms can be defined in natural terms. “Good” means pleasurable (utilitarian) or “good” means promotes human flourishing (AVE).
So once you identify the natural property, you have fully explained what “good” means. That means that property is equal to goodness and there is no information left over. Ethical Naturalists treat goodness as reductive, it can be identified completely as something else.
However, G.E. Moore then asks what he calls an open question: “Is pleasure good?”
If goodness really IS pleasure, then this question should be trivial and redundant as it would be the same as asking "is pleasure pleasure?" (because we have already identified that goodness is reducible to pleasure).
However, whether pleasure is good is actually open for debate and can have different interpretations which means that “good” cannot be analytically defined in terms of any natural property.
Response: We could argue that Moore’s Open Question only shows that the question is linguistically open, not that it is conceptually impossible to define good. Asking “Is pleasure good?” can remain meaningful even if “good” is identical to pleasure, because language allows us to frame the question in different ways. For example, we can reasonably ask "is H2O water?" despite them being the same thing.

Integration: This attacks reductive ethical naturalism by showing that moral terms like “good” cannot be defined in terms of natural properties, because any such definition leads to an open and meaningful question.

Weighting: A very strong criticism as it challenges the very possibility of defining moral terms as natural properties.

Ethical Non-Naturalism

This is a theory developed by GE Moore and it's known as Intuitionism.
Goodness is real but not natural. So this is a realist theory.
Ethical language expresses belief about the objective rightness or wrongness of an action. So this is a cognitive theory.
Morality is real just as numbers are real in some way. Something does not have to be a physical object for it to be real. Importantly, this also does not mean that goodness is something supernatural or divine.
Goodness is real in a non-natural form. This means that goodness cannot be reduced to things like desire, pleasure, needs or wants.
So just because there are problems with ethical naturalism it does not mean that also has to be the end of moral realism.
Moore argues that, rationally, we can directly reflect on the truth of moral judgements such as “murder is wrong”.
The truth/falsehood of such moral judgements is said to be self-evident.
Goodness is like the colour purple, we just know what it is. It is sui generis (unique).

Problem: Mackie's Argument for Metaphysical Queerness

J L Mackie developed an argument against moral realism. It sets up his anti-realist view.
There are two parts to his Queerness arguments.
1. Metaphysical Queerness:

If mind-independent and objective moral properties do exist, they have to be metaphysically unlike anything else that we have experienced.

Every other objective and mind-independent property exists just because they exist. Properties such as greenness and dogness exist objectively but they don't command, ask or do anything. They just exist as properties and nothing more.

So why is it that "goodness" and "badness", as properties, do demand things of us? It is hard to understand what exactly it is that gives these properties prescriptive power when they are just properties. Properties are supposed to describe, not prescribe.

There are no other properties that are objective, action guiding and intrinsically motivating.

An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it.

- J L Mackie

Problem: Mackie's Argument for Epistemic Queerness

If mind-independent moral properties exist, then it is a complete mystery as to how we would acquire knowledge of them.
Knowledge of natural properties can be explained in ordinary ways, such as perception, observation, and scientific investigation. Other objective properties simply be observed.
Moral properties are not observable in this way. We can't just go and see them.
If they were knowable, this would require a special kind of cognitive faculty unlike any other method we use to gain knowledge.

Problem: Mackie's Argument for Relativity

There is a vast discrepancy in moral views.
Mackie claims that moral statements only "reflect adherence to and participation in different ways of life".
The alternative to this would be that there was some objective moral fact but perhaps only some cultures can access it, meaning some cultures have inferior epistemic access to morality.
Mackie uses the example of monogamy within marriage. Some cultures value monogamy whereas other cultures do not. This can mean one of two things:

1. The first culture has access to the moral view that monogamy is good and the other culture lacks that access.

or

2. Monogamy just so happened to develop in one culture, but not the other, and the respective moral values emerged as a result of this.
Mackie favours the second explanation here. Morality seems to just be a social, cultural or anthropological projection rather than a series of objective facts.

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Is queuing really morally good or is it just a British thing?

Error Theory

This is J L Mackie's theory for cognitive anti-realism.
Mackie says that moral statements are beliefs and they are intended to be true or false but it is just that moral properties do not exist. This is why this is the weird combination of cognitive but also anti-realist.
When I say that stealing is wrong, I am expressing a cognitive belief that stealing is wrong. "Wrongness", however, does not exist and so the statement is false.
Moral statements try to state facts, they just fail.
There are no moral features in the world.
Since moral properties do not exist, all moral statements are false.
Response: Christine Korsgaard: "It's true that there are queer sorts of entities and that knowing them isn't like anything else. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist"
Response: Modern physics already accepts phenomena that appear very strange. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where two particles form a single joint quantum system such that certain properties belong to the system as a whole rather than to the individual particles. Prior to measurement, the particles do not possess definite individual properties, even though the relationship between them is fixed. This challenges the assumption that reality is fundamentally composed of separable, independently existing entities. If physics already requires us to accept such non-classical structures, Mackie’s appeal to queerness alone may be insufficient grounds for rejecting objective moral facts.

Emotivism

This is A.J. Ayer's theory and it is an anti-realist and non-cognitive theory.
Ayer claims that things are only meaningful if they are analytic (true in and of themselves) or empirically verifiable.
We can use Ayer's Verification Principle here. Things are considered meaningful if they are an analytic truth, or if they are empirically verifiable.
Ethical language is neither of these things: it is not analytic as it can be denied without causing a contradiction and it is not verifiable as we cannot observe or experience moral properties.
Ayer claims that ethical language is just an expression of emotions. If I were to say "murder is wrong" what I actually mean is "boooo! Murder :( "
Morality is just personal feeling and emotion.

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How would you use this in an essay?

- Both Hume's Theory of Motivation and Hume's Fork can be used to either criticise cognitive ethics (so, naturalism, intuitionism or even error theory) or they can be used as a supporting point for non-cognitive theories. The Theory of Motivation seems best suited to back up Ayer.

Support for Non-Cognitivism: Hume

Hume's Theory of Motivation states that moral judgements cannot be caused by reason.
Reason is "the slave of the passions". “Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of reason” Moral judgements instead are motivations to action which means we must desire a certain end. Hume claims that reason is.
Desires are what normally motivate us to act. Therefore because we are motivated to act or not act in certain ways, moral judgements must be the result of emotions.
Secondly, we can also use Hume's Fork to support non-cognitive ethics.
Moral judgements are not a relation of ideas because we can conceive of the opposite. You cannot deny a relation of ideas but I can quite happily imagine a world where stealing is morally acceptable.
Moral judgements are also not a matter of fact because we cannot empirically verify nor observe moral statements.

PPrescriptivism

This is R.M. Hare's theory and it is an anti-realist and non-cognitive theory.
Hare agrees with Ayer in that morality seems to evoke an emotional response in people and therefore moral judgements are expressions of emotions.
However, Hare disagreed that morality was entirely reduced to emotional sentiments and nothing more.
While morality does express emotion, it also attempts to express prescriptions. We are telling someone how we think they should act.
When someone says "murder is wrong" what they really mean is "don't murder".
When we express moral judgements we are attempting to prescribe that behaviour to everyone. We are attempting to universally prescribe that action in almost a Kantian way.
If I were to call someone a "good person" or a "bad person", what I'm really doing is listing a certain set of moral standards in my head and then judging that person against them and commending them or criticising them.

xfProblem: Nihilism

This is the view that because there is no right or wrong, morality is pointless.
The problem here is that if there are no objective moral properties then what's the point of trying to be a good person?
Phillippa Foot claims: "“in the face of the news of the concentration camps, I thought, ‘It just can’t be the way Ayer, and Hare say it is, that morality is just the expression of an attitude,’ Morality cannot just be subjective in the way that different attitudes...are subjective".
However, Foot's disdain here actually proves anti-realism's point. Perceiving extreme evils such as the holocaust causes a negative reaction and then causes us to apply the word "wrong" to it.
BUT: Foot argues that anti-realism is mistaken because it relies on the false assumption that moral statements are separate from facts (is-ought gap). Moral statements can be connected to observable facts about human flourishing. Nihilism arises only if we accept the supposed separation of values and facts. Morality is not merely emotional; it is verifiable and grounded in reality when assessed in terms of human well-being. Therefore anti-realism is wrong.

xProblem: Moral Progress

It seems obvious that there has been moral progress
Society used to accept slavery for example. Women used to be denied the right to vote.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice" - Theodore Parker
However: this criticism begs the question, the anti-realist does not have to accept there has been progress for something they don't believe in to begin with. There has been change, but that does not mean it has to have been moral.
Mackie would argue that morality is not changing becuase morality does not exist. What is changing is our beliefs that are shaped by values within society. Morality is just an illusion caused by evolution and changing history.
Ayer could say that enough people had an emotional reaction towards slavery that led to persuasion in changing the law.
Hare would argue that it's not morality that is changing but the rationality of what we wish to prescribe. The idea of slavery is an irrational prescription that cannot be universalised.

xProblem: How we Use Moral Language

Non-cognitive ethics seems to think that when we make moral judgements, we are not referring to statements capable of being true or false. Moral statements are just expressions of emotion or prescription. But this seems wrong given how we use language to talk about morality.
We use reason to form moral judgements: we infer conclusions about morality from the premises. We can revise our beliefs and face inconsistencies in them as well. For example, many people agree that causing animal suffering is wrong, but will eat meat. This is a logically inconsistent moral statement rather than an emotional conflict.
Moral disagreement also poses a problem for the non-cognitivist. When two people are debating a moral judgement, for example whether euthanasia is right or wrong, it seems that these debates go deeper than just emotional outbursts. We attempt to reason, refer to facts, point to empirical evidence to support us.
Persuasion also raises problems. When we morally persuade someone, we try to appeal to reasons, consistency with their other beliefs, consequences, fairness etc. This looks like rational persuasion, not emotional manipulation. If non-cognitivism were correct, persuasion would be attempting to change someone's tastes but that does not seem like the best explanation for how moral discussion works.