Meta-Ethics

Question 1

What is descriptive ethics?

Answer 1

• Descriptive ethics describes ethical practices in different ties, places and cultures, without making any judgment about these different practices.

Question 2

What is normative ethics?

Answer 2

• First-order ethical language.
• Normative ethics investigates that questions that arise when considering how we ought to behave.

Question 3

What is applied ethics?

Answer 3

• Applied ethics is the process of applying normative principles and arguments ot particular situations, for example, business ethics, medical ethics, legal ethics, animal ethics.

Question 4

What is meta-ethics?

Answer 4

• Second order ethical language.
• Examines what moral language is about, its origin and cause, and how it can be justified.

Question 5

What are the two meta-ethical theories?

Answer 5

• Ethical naturalism.
  o Morality is cognitive/factual.
  o Morality is found in the facts of nature.
• Ethical non-naturalism.
  o Morality is cognitive/factual.
  o Morality cannot be defined; it is intuitive or revealed by God.

Question 6

What is ethical non-cognitivism?

Answer 6

• ‘Good’ is not a factual property, our moral ideas are nothing more than wishes.

Question 7

What is Divine Command Theory?

Answer 7

• Non naturalist approach to ethics, moral facts are not found in nature or in human nature, but rather revealed by God
• Based on belief in the existence of God who is the source of good and whose moral commands are revealed through scripture and made clear by the Church.
• DCT argues that whatever God commands must be good, and whatever he forbids must be evil, people should therefore act in a way that reflects God’s will.
• DCT is ground in the belief that God is the creator and humans are made in God’s image, so there must be a link between creator and created.
• For protestant’s God’s commands are revealed in ‘sola scriptura’.
• Calvin argued that there is nothing more sublime than God’s will, so whatever God commands must be obeyed.
• Barth argued that all questions about good are settled by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Question 8

What are the strengths of DCT?

Answer 8

• For religious people, it grounds their moral behaviour in the teachings of a faculty-existing God whose commands must be good and promote good.
• The rules are universal, so are the same in all times, places, and cultures.
• DCT is clear about what is good and bad, and these are precisely defined in God’s commands.

Question 9

What are the weaknesses of DCT?

Answer 9

• Even if moral commands in the Bible do come from God, we cannot tell that they are as God gave them, there are too many errors in the text.
• The Bible contains immoral commands, for example, concerning slavery and homosexuality.
• Euthyphro dilemma seems insoluble.
  o Is conduct right because God commands t or does God command it because it is right.
  o There is no universally accepted solution to either ‘horn’ of the dilemma.

Question 10

What is Utilitarianism?

Answer 10

• Example of ethical naturalism, observe morals through nature and human nature.
• Bentham’s Utilitarianism.
  o Pain and pleasure as the ‘two sovereign masters’ of humanity.
  o We ought to maximise pleasure and minimise pain by seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
  o Observation shows us that pleasure can be measured objectively by its intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, productiveness purity and extent.
  o Consequentialist ethic, where the moral value of an action is measured by the results.
• Mill’s Utilitarianism.
  o Higher and lower pleasures.
  o Quality over quantity of pleasure.

Question 11

What are the strengths of ethical naturalism/Utilitarianism?

Answer 11

• Gives a factual basis for morality.
• Gives us guidelines and rules, e.g., Bentham’s pleasure calculus.
• We can measure the moral worth of people b how far they maximise happiness.

Question 12

What are the weaknesses of ethical naturalism/utilitarianism?

Answer 12

• Happiness is subjective and consequently hard to define, some may gain happiness from taking happiness from others.
• Consequentialist basis means that Utilitarian’s have to guess the future.
• The principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ ignore minorities.

Question 13

What is non-naturalism?

Answer 13

• Moore began by rejecting ethical naturalism ono the grounds that it commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, it attempts to derive moral values from facts.
• To avoid the naturalistic fallacy, Moore denied that moral values can be derived from facts about the world.
• Moore held that unlike naturalism, good is simple like yellow, we can recognise but not describe it, it is known non-naturally.
• Non-naturalism is a cognitive/factual theory, there are real moral facts, we just cannot define them.

Question 14

What is intuitionism?

Answer 14

• Intuitionism argues that our knowledge of right and wrong comes through fundamental moral intuitions.
• Intuitions do not need to be justified by reference to any other beliefs, they ‘stand-alone’ and are self-evident.
• The moral truths behind our intuitions exist independently of persons.
• The ‘trolley-problem’ is a good illustration of the difference between a naturalist/utilitarian approach to a dilemma, and an intuitionist approach.
• Ross clarifies the intuitionist approach by arguing that we are all aware of prima facie duties, such as duties to parents and the innocent, and where these duties conflict, Kant, and axe murderer, we balance one prima facie duty against others, moral intuition kicks in to provide and intuitive truth.

Question 15

What are the strengths of ethical non naturalism/intuitionism?

Answer 15

• Everyone has moral intuitions, and we use them to underpin our moral decisions.
• Intuitionism solves the problem faced by ethical naturalism, that there are so many conflicting definitions of the good that they cannot all be correct, for the non-naturalist, good cannot be defined only intuited in situations.
• It is still a form of realism, statements can be true or false, and it is realistic in explaining that our moral intuitions are not perfect because every moral situation is different, as Ross points out.

Question 16

What are the weaknesses of ethical non naturalism/intuitionism?

Answer 16

• Intuitionism does not give a satisfactory answer as to how we have moral intuitions, some call intuition a ‘faculty’ of the brain, but it is one that cannot be observed so might not exist.
• Intuition is a weak basis on which to argue, it stifles ethical debate, because people just pit one intuition against another.
• Intuition could in fact boil down to the unconscious influence of social norms, has we lived in the eighteenth century, we might have ‘intuited’ that slavery is right.