This page contains A*/A grade level summary revision notes for the Meta-ethics topic.

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For AO1 you need to know:

Naturalism
Challenges to naturalism
Intuitionism
Challenges to intuitionism
Emotivism
Challenges to emotivism

For AO2 you need to be able to debate:

Whether ethical and non-ethical statements are the same
The extent to which ethical statements are not objective (cog = objective, non-cog = subjective)
Whether moral terms are intuitive
The extent to which moral terms are just expressions of our emotions
Whether Naturalism, intuitionism or Emotivism is superior to the other theories
The extent to which the different meta-ethical theories encourage moral debate

AO1 Meta-ethics content

Naturalism

Bradley & the utilitarians (Bentham & Mill) – realist & cognitive
Naturalism is the view that goodness is real and is some property or feature of the natural world – some thing in the physical world.
This means that moral statements (e.g. stealing is wrong) can be understood by empirically analysing the natural world.
This makes ethical language a cognitive expression of belief about (natural) reality that can be true or false.
Moral statements are objective truths and universal.
Bentham and Mill’s Utilitarianism is a form of naturalism because they claim that goodness is pleasure/happiness, which is a natural feature of natural creatures like us (brain chemicals). So, goodness is the natural property of pleasure.
Their argument is that it is human nature to find pleasure/happiness good – everything else we only value insofar as it brings happiness. Happiness is our ultimate desire so that’s all there is for morality to be about.
For them, moral statements express objective cognitive beliefs about whether actions maximise happiness.
F. H. Bradley is a naturalist but doesn’t agree with utilitarianism because it was too focused on individual happiness, ignoring that human nature doesn’t just desire our own individual happiness, we desire being part of a group – a community.
People have a need to belong, to be a part of something greater than themselves. (Bradley was very influenced by Hegel, who influenced Marx’s collectivist ideology of communism).
Bradley agreed with collectivism – the view that humans are best understood as part of a community, rather than as individuals.
Hagel thought we come to self-consciousness of our role in enabling the collective good through interacting with others.
Bradley called humanity part of the ‘concrete universal’ – meaning he thinks humanity is a concrete part of reality. So, humans and their communities are natural things – part of the natural world.
For Bradley, goodness is whatever actions reflect our duty based on our rightful place in our community. Since he understands communities as part of reality, this makes goodness – the rightful ordering of a person in their community – also a natural property.
Bradley proposes a different type of naturalism.
For Bradley, the important natural fact is not that humans feel pleasure but that we feel a sense of moral obligation.
Humans are not simply pleasure-seeking in our psychology. We have a ‘moral consciousness’ – an awareness of right and wrong.
This moral compass points more towards our duties to our community than it does towards our own individual pleasure.
This sense of right and wrong applies to the way we act over a period of time – not just particular actions.
We need to develop our moral awareness through self-realisation.
This involves coming to understand our place in society and the moral obligations that come with it.
Often this means sacrifices we have to make for the good of society – perhaps even sacrificing our own pleasure/happiness.
For Bradley then, goodness is the satisfaction a person can experience which comes through their self-realisation of their place in society.
So acting against society would be bad, but finding a place where you can contribute to society would be good.

Intuitionism

(non-naturalism)
G. E. Moore rejected Naturalism with his two arguments: the naturalistic fallacy and the open question argument.
The naturalistic fallacy is a development of the is-ought gap which Moore formalised into fallacy format. It claims that it is a fallacy to assume that something being natural means that it is good.
The open question argument claims that trying to state the informative claim that goodness is a natural property such as pleasure, is incoherently equivalent to stating the uninformative claim that pleasure is pleasure. What goodness is, is therefore inevitably an open question.
Moore concludes that goodness cannot be defined through being equated in terms of anything natural.
However, Moore does not agree with Hume that there is no right/wrong. He proposes instead that goodness is a non-natural property. This claims there is more to reality than just the physical world. There is a ‘non-natural’ aspect to reality. Goodness is non-natural. Moore makes an analogy with numbers which are not natural things but are real in some other sense. A non-natural sense.
Another analogy Moore makes is that goodness is like the color yellow. You can’t describe or define yellow, you just know it intuitively when you apprehend it. Similarly, we just know whether an action is good or bad through intuition, i.e., we immediately grasp the truth of moral propositions. We don’t have to calculate or figure them out through a process of reasoning.
Moore concludes our minds have an ability called intuition which can access the non-natural reality and lets us know whether moral propositions are true/false.
Intuitionism is cognitivist because it claims we gain knowledge about whether an ethical proposition is true or false through intuition.
Our statement of the ethical proposition is therefore an expression of a belief which could be true or false.
H. A. Pritchard developed intuitionism.
He claims that the sense of moral obligation gained through intuition shows that moral obligation must exist.
In other words, because we sense what is right or wrong, right and wrong must exist objectively.
Pritchard argued that if our moral views need justification, that would lead to an infinite regress because the justification would require justification too, which in turn requires further justification and so on forever.
Morality can only work if it is based on an intuition where we just ‘know’ intuitively, without justification, what is right wrong. That would avoid this infinite regress.
Pritchard claims there are two kinds of thinking:
general thinking – using reason and general knowledge to understand the facts about a moral situation
moral thinking – intuiting the right thing to do in that situation.
E.g. if you see someone stabbing someone – you might think that was bad – until your general thinking understood it was Hitler they were stabbing and then your moral thinking might intuit that it was a good action.

Emotivism

Emotivism is Ayer’s theory.
Ayer attacks moral realism and cognitivism.
Ayer’s verification principle states that a statement is only meaningful if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable.
Ayer broadly agrees with Hume and Moore’s approach to attacking naturalism. The naturalistic fallacy disconnects values from the natural properties we observe.
Nonetheless Ayer rejects Moore’s idea of ‘non-natural’ moral properties as unverifiable.
Ethical language is not analytic as it can be denied without contradiction.
Ethical language is not verifiable, because we do not experience moral properties.
So, Ayer concludes ethical language is meaningless, so it can’t be true or false.
He argues this is because it expresses non-cognitive mental states of emotion. So cognitivism is false.
The idea that moral properties are real is meaningless, making moral realism meaningless.
Some criticise emotivism by criticising the verification principle, e.g. that it cannot itself be verified.
However, Ayer based emotivism on other arguments too.
Other emotivists like Stevenson are not even verificationists.
Stevenson argued that some words have a purely emotive meaning – like ‘good/bad, right/wrong’. However some words like ‘stealing’ or ‘honesty’ have a part emotive and part descriptive meaning. The descriptive meaning of honesty describes the act of telling the truth. The emotive meaning involves our feeling that we like honest people, that we feel guilty if we lack honesty.
The value component of ethical language is emotive, expressing how we personally feel.
Hume’s motivation argument persuaded Ayer to conclude that ethical language expresses emotions.
Hume argues beliefs are inert, meaning they do not cause action. That requires desire.
E.g. A belief that it is raining outside might seem obviously motivating of the behaviour of carrying an umbrella. However, if a person lacks a desire to not get wet, that belief would not be motivating.
Believes can only be relevant to motivation if there is a relevant desire.
So beliefs are only indirectly connected to motivation.
Only Desires are intrinsically motivating.
P1. Only desires are intrinsically motivating, not beliefs.
P2. Ethical language is motivating.
C1. So, ethical language expresses desires, making it non-cognitive.
We can only explain the fact that ethical language is motivating if it expresses desires, since only desires motivate.
Ayer concludes ethical language just expresses emotions.
E.g. if someone says ‘stealing is wrong’ it’s as if they’d said ‘boo to stealing’, i.e., expressing negative emotion towards stealing.
If someone says ‘stealing is good’, it’s as if they’d said ‘hurrah to stealing’, i.e., expressing positive emotion towards stealing..
Saying something is right or wrong is just a way of expressing how we personally feel.
This is why emotivism is non-cognitivist.

AO2 Meta-ethics content

Naturalism vs Hume’s is/ought gap

Bentham’s argument for naturalism is that it is human nature to find pleasure good. We cannot help naturally thinking that pleasure is goodness.
Mill makes a similar argument, that happiness is our sole ultimate desire, which he claims is the ‘only proof’ possible that happiness is good.
Bradley similarly argues that human nature requires self-actualisation and taking one’s place in society, therefore that is good.

Counter

Factual statements about what ‘is’, do not entail moral ‘ought’ statements about value.
E.g., Bentham’s factual claim that it is human nature to find pleasure good, just means we like pleasure. It doesn’t mean that pleasure actually is good and that we thus ought to maximise it.
Applying this to Bradley – just because it is human nature to want to be a part of society and follow our moral consciousness – doesn’t mean that’s actually good.
Naturalists are making a completely baseless leap from is to ought.
Our ethical judgements, when we think something is right/wrong, could not have been rationally inferred from or justified by facts. So naturalist realism seems false.
Hume infers that our ethical judgements must instead come from our feelings.
So, ethical language is an expression of non-cognitive emotion. So cognitivism seems false.

Evaluation which defends naturalism

Hume may be right that values cannot be inferred from facts. But naturalism could instead claim that values are a type of fact.
Modern virtue ethicists take this approach, returning to an Aristotelian view of moral concepts.
Goodness is flourishing (eudaimonia), which is a natural property of organisms.
Ansecombe argues that ‘ought’ functions like ‘need’. Foot illustrated with a plant needing certain things to flourish and argued humans and their needs are no different.
So, when we call an action good or bad, we refer to its enabling or disabling of flourishing and whether it is what a virtuous person would do.
On this approach Foot concludes there is “no difficulty” in deriving ought from is, illustrating that it is a fact children need adults, so adults ought to protect children.
This approach is stronger than classical utilitarian naturalism as it doesn’t make the mistake of trying to infer ought from is.

Extra hard credit stuff:

As MacIntyre points out, modern society’s focus on abstract law uprooted moral concepts like ‘ought’ from their context in the facts of human communal practice. This left morality without foundation or apparent connection to fact, which motivated the anti-realists to question whether it was even real.
Returning to an Aristotelian view of moral concepts reabsorbes ought back into is.
This is the solution to the nihilistic directionless relativism of the modern world.

Intuitionism vs moral disagreement

Evidence for intuitionism is that there is cross-cultural moral agreement on a core set of moral codes.
All cultures have rules about killing and stealing and that education is good etc.
This suggests we share intuition of what is right/wrong.
Intuitionists like Pritchard argue that the intuition we get depends on our understanding of a moral situation, which depends on our general knowledge of the world.
He thinks this explains the moral disagreement which exists.

Counter

Mackie points out descriptive moral relativism, that there are vast cross-cultural moral disagreements.
He accepts this doesn’t prove meta-ethical relativism, that there are no non-natural moral properties.
It does provide an abductive argument against moral realism, however.
Intuitionists claim one side of a moral disagreement may have the correct intuition and be right, whereas the other side is wrong due to some kind of misinterpretation.
Mackie argues it’s simpler to explain disagreeing intuitions as adherence to different forms of life.
Our moral intuitions reflect our social conditioning.
So, we are justified in accepting anti-realism, that there are no objective moral properties.
However, Mackie is still a cognitivist. He thinks social conditioning is so strong people believe moral properties are real. So ethical language expresses beliefs about moral properties which don’t exist.
So Mackie would say Moore is a cognitivist for the wrong reasons. Ethical language doesn’t express beliefs gained from intuitions of non-natural properties.

Evaluation:

We can strengthen Mackie’s argument further by adding that moral agreement could just come from evolutionary drives and the practical requirements for a society to exist.
If a society allowed killing/stealing, it would fall apart.
So we don’t need to think there are some mysterious non-natural moral properties to explain cross-cultural similarities in moral intuitions. We have a much simpler explanation, which is that relativism is true.

Anti-realism vs Moral nihilism (use this if question focuses on ethical truth)

Moral nihilism claims morality is pointless.
Traditionally, morality has been thought obligatory and binding because it is objectively true.
Anti-realism says there is no objective morality, which destroys that foundation of moral obligation. It suggests morality cannot be legitimated.
The concern is that nihilism might cause people to stop following morality or law. This could end society or justify atrocity.
Ayer’s theory was very popular until world war 2. Philosophers like Foot criticised Ayer’s rejection of right and wrong when the holocaust footage emerged, arguing such thinking may even enable such atrocities.

Counter

However, potentially destroying morality and causing the end of society doesn’t make Ayer’s theory incorrect.
Ayer would argue Foot viewed the holocaust and had a negative emotional reaction which she expressed with the word ‘wrong’.
So the nihilism objection alone begs the question regarding the truth of moral realism, and might ironically simply illustrate Ayer’s emotivism rather than undermine it.

Evaluation

The only way to disprove Ayer is to prove that morality is actually real.
Foot followed up her presentation of the nihilism issue with the point that the ‘separation’ between facts and values was the foundational mistake.
So Foot presents the nihilism issue in its strongest form. She isn’t saying the holocaust proves Ayer wrong, just that it is illustrative of Ayer and Hume’s fundamental mistake of thinking facts and values are separate.
This defeats all of Hume & Ayer’s anti-realist arguments. If values are a sort of fact, then they are verifiable a posteriori. So Hume’s fork and Ayer’s verification principle cannot exclude moral judgements.
We can verify that the holocaust undermined flourishing and claim it was objectively wrong, without merely expressing emotion.
So, anti-realism is false because moral realism is true. Leading to nihilism doesn’t prove anti-realism false, but it is illustrative of why it’s false; its mistaken separation of facts from values.

Non-cognitivism vs Moral disagreement (use this if question focuses on ethical language)

G E Moore criticises non-cognitivism because ethical language seems to involve cognitive features.
Moral disagreement and debate can feature rational persuasion, involving logical argument and knowledge of facts. People provide logical arguments as reasons for their moral views.
Disagreement requires contrasting belief claims about reality. Emotions do not make claims, so they cannot disagree. ‘Boo to stealing’ cannot be said to disagree with ‘hurrah to stealing’.
P1. emotions cannot disagree
P2. ethical language involves disagreement
C1. Ethical language cannot reduce to the expression of emotion.
Ayer’s non-cognitivism seems to be false

Counter:

R. M. Hare’s version of non-cognitivism is in a stronger position than Ayer to address this issue.
He argued ethical language expresses non-cognitive prescriptions, not just emotions.
E.g. ‘stealing is wrong’ means ‘don’t steal’.
Prescriptions are universal, we mean that everyone in a similar situation should follow this command.
This requires us to reason and debate with ourselves and each other about whether we would follow a prescription in all cases, or whether it clashes with other prescriptions.
So, ethical persuasion, disagreement and reasoning is more plausible as an expression of prescriptive attitudes than merely of emotion.

Evaluation:

However, overall Mackie’s anti-realist cognitivism ‘error theory’ has the strongest position.
Mackie accepts there is some role for emotion and prescription in ethical language, as Hume’s motivation argument showed. But Mackie argues it also expresses beliefs, making it cognitive.
He illustrates: a bioweapons scientist struggling with the morality of their job.
He argues people don’t merely want to know how they emotionally feel about the action, nor whether they could rationally universally prescribe it. People want to know whether an action is actually right or wrong in itself.
Mackie’s argument is convincing because of the power of social conditioning.
Morality is relative to the culture which constructed it, but conditioning is strong enough to make people believe it is real.
Mackie concludes there is no right or wrong, but we talk about ethics as if it existed in reality. So our ethical language expresses beliefs about reality and is thus cognitive, but those beliefs are all false because anti-realism is true.

The issue of meta-ethical theories & moral debate

Naturalism would promote moral debate – because we need to debate what actions would maximise happiness (utilitarians) or enable us to take our place in society (Bradley).

Intuitionism would promote moral debate – intuitions can conflict if people have different practical knowledge or do not phrase their intuitions in the right way or at the right level of abstraction. So there is still important room for debate under intuitionism.

Emotivism also doesn’t seem to promote moral debate – because it says there is no right or wrong – there is no morality to debate about. If ethical language just expresses emotion, then moral debate isn’t possible – only emotional conflict is possible.

Debate which theory is right as normal – e.g., argue Naturalism is true, and therefore emotivism is wrong to discourage moral debate to the extent that it does, and intuitionism while right to encourage moral debate to some degree, does so on the wrong basis.

Whether ethical and non-ethical statements are the same

Naturalism: thinks ethical statements are empirical statements, so would be the same as all other empirical statements.

Emotivism: thinks ethical statements are non-cognitive, so are the same as all other non-cognitive statements.

Intuitionism: thinks ethical statements are cognitive expressions of intuitions gained from a unique non-natural property, so are not the same as any other kind of statement.

Evaluate the theories as normal to judge which one is correct. Then you can conclude that that theory’s views on whether ethical and non-ethical statements are the same is the right view.