Cognitivism
Moral judgement can either be true or false
Non-cognitivism
Moral judgements are neither true or false
Moral Realism
There are mind independent moral facts or properties
Moral Anti-Realism
There are no such things as moral facts or properties
Moral Naturalism
Moral properties are natural properties of the world
Moral Non-Naturalism
There are moral properties but they aren’t natural
Intuitionism (Moral Non-Naturalism)
Moral truths are self-evident intuitions
Emotivism (Moral Anti-Realism)
Moral judgements are expressions of emotion (boo, hurray)
Prescriptivism (Moral Anti-Realism)
Morals are things that prescribe the right course of action
Moore’s Open Question Argument
Asking whether a bachelor is an unmarried man is an unintelligible question because a bachelor is defined as an unmarried man, whereas asking whether maximising utility is good is an open question and makes sense to ask, therefore it is possible that it is not
Naturalistic Fallacy
- a term that is definable cannot be defined
- any attempt to define the undefinable is fallacious
- good is undefinable
- utilitarians attempt to define good in natural terms
- hence utilitarianism is guilty of naturalistic fallacy
Ayer’s Verification Principle
A sentence is meaningful if- it is true by definition, or - verifiable through sense experience
Therefore moral judgements are meaningless
Hume’s Is- Ought Gap
- judgements of reason describe what is the case
- judgements of value prescribe what ought to be the case
- judgements of reason and judgements of value are therefore entirely different from one another
- therefore, you cannot draw conclusions about value based on reason
This presents a problem for the cognitivist view that moral judgements are fact
Mackie’s Argument From Relativity
- there are differences in moral code from society to society
- there are disagreements between people about moral code
- this is either because: there is an objective truth about the matter, but people’s perceptions are distorted, or there is no objective truth about it
- the best explanations of moral disagreements is that there are no objective moral values
Mackie’s Arguments from Queerness
Metaphysical Queerness-
- moral realism is committed to a belief in a) the existence of strange objective moral properties in the world and b) that these peculiar moral properties are somehow able to generate a motivation for an action
Mackie’s argues that this is absurd, it is our needs, desires and hopes that motivate
Epistemological Queerness (argument from Queerness pt 2)
According to Mackie, the moral realist must also be committed to believing that we have a mysterious faculty which enable us to detect these peculiar moral properties. It makes more sense to say that there are no moral properties and so none to sense
Mackie’s Error Theory
Mackie’s Ontological Claim-
There are no objective moral values because something is objective if: it is either true or false, it is about the world ‘out there’, it describes something that is mind independent. Moral properties are none of these claims.
Mackie’s Error theory cont.
Mackie’s Semantic Claim
All ethical judgements claim to be objective, this is an error.
- it is an error based on our belief in objective, independent, moral properties that literally do not exist
- the error arises from the way we are brought up in society, which leads to a complex moral theory that we project onto the world as if it were true of the world
- this mistake persists because we believe that our projections of moral values onto the world are inherent of the world itself
