Transcript Metaethics and ethical language

Metaethics and ethical
language
Michael Lacewing
[email protected]
Normative and metaethics
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Normative ethics: theories about what is
right and what is good which we can use
in practical cases
Metaethics: theories about the concepts of
right and wrong, whether moral judgments
can be objectively true
Our interest today is in how moral
language works
Moore’s intuitionism
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The open question argument: no other fact, e.g.
greatest happiness, is the same as ‘good’ –
goodness is irreducible to any other (natural)
property
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We may meaningfully ask ‘Is doing what makes
people happy good?’
But ‘Is doing what makes people happy doing what
makes people happy?’ is not a genuine question.
Objection
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They could be two different ways of thinking of
the same thing.
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Water is H2O - ‘is water H2O?’ v. ‘is water water?’
Moore confuses concepts and properties - ‘good’ is a
distinct concept, but this doesn’t mean it is a distinct
property
Moral ‘intuition’
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How do we know about ‘good’ and ‘right’?
Intuition - this is not a type of sensory mode, but
a use of reason
Self-evident judgment
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No other evidence or proof than its own plausibility
Controversial, but difficult to do without, e.g when
giving reasons
Alternative: coherence between judgments
Facts and values
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Intuitionism claims there are ‘facts’ about values
But when we disagree about facts, we know how
to resolve the disagreement; disagreements
about values seem very different
There is a ‘gap’ between claims about what is
and claims about what ought to be (Hume)
Claims about values motivate us, claims about
facts do not
Ayer’s Verification Principle
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Ayer: in order to be literally meaningful, a statement
must either be
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analytic (true or false in virtue of the definition of the words); or
empirically verifiable (shown be experience to be true).
Because statements about values are neither
analytic nor empirically verifiable, they are not
literally meaningful
‘If I say to someone, “You acted wrongly in stealing
that money”…I am simply evincing my moral
disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, “You stole that
money,” in a peculiar tone of horror’
Developing emotivism
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The big objection: by its own standard, VP is not
meaningful.
Stevenson: the point about ethics stands - moral
use of words expresses emotion or tries to
arouse it in others, it doesn’t state a fact
Objection: there can be no rational moral
argument on this view
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There can be argument about the facts
There can be a ‘disagreement in attitude’, i.e. about
how to live
Hare’s prescriptivism
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Moral words are not emotive, but prescriptive
‘Right’ commands, ‘good’ commends
‘Good’ is always relative to a set of standards good teacher, good chocolate
The standard provides a descriptive meaning
(not any chocolate can count as good)
You can agree the example meets the standard
without caring about the standard, i.e. you don’t
have to prescribe it
Universalization
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You can prescribe whatever you choose, but you
are rationally constrained by consistency - if x is
good but y is not, there must be some relevant
difference between them
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If I think your stealing from me is wrong, but my
stealing from you is not, I must say what the
difference is
Universalization allows greater rationality - we
can argue about relevance and consistency
Two objections
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Emotivism and prescriptivism make values
subjective - so couldn’t we value anything
we chose to? But this makes no sense morality is not about just anything
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There is no logical constraint on what we can
value, but because of the type of creatures we
are, there is a factual constraint
Two objections
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Is morality no more than ‘taste’? We think
it has greater importance and authority
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Our moral feelings matter more than others
We shouldn’t say that there are no moral
values - this is itself an expression of
feeling/prescription, and one we
disapprove of