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AO1: Naturalism (realist & cognitivist)

Naturalism claims that moral properties are natural properties, meaning features or aspects of the physical world.
This makes naturalism a form of Moral realism, the view that moral properties (like goodness and badness) exist mind-independently.
Bentham’s utilitarianism is a form of meta-ethical naturalism because he claims that goodness is pleasure and that pleasure is a natural property.
Natural properties are features of the physical world, in this case a property of organisms like humans and animals.
So when we use ethical language to call an action right, wrong, good or bad, we express our belief about whether pleasure was maximised.
This makes Utilitarian naturalism cognitivist, which is the view that ethical language expresses beliefs that could be true or false.
E.g. if someone said ‘that act of stealing was wrong’, it means we think the action failed to maximise pleasure.

AO2: 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.

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.
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

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.
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.

AO1: Intuitionist non-naturalism (realist & cognitivist)

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.

AO2: 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.

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.

AO1: Emotivism

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.
Ayer concludes ethical language just expresses emotions. E.g. if someone says ‘stealing is wrong’ that just means ‘boo to stealing’.
Saying something is right or wrong is just a way of expressing how we personally feel.
Some criticise emotivism by criticising the verification principle, e.g. that it cannot itself be verified.
However, Ayer based emotivism on other arguments too, such as Hume’s motivation argument
P1. Only desires are motivating, not beliefs.
P2. Ethical language involves motivation
C1. So, ethical language expresses non-cognitive desires
Other emotivists like Stevenson are not even verificationists. So that criticism is not decisive against emotivism.

AO2: Moral nihilism

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.
Logical positivism and emotivism were influential before and around the Second World War, but thinkers like Foot later pushed back against their rejection of objective right and wrong.
Ayer thinks we can say that we don’t like what Hitler did, but there’s no logical way to say Hitler was actually wrong.

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.

AO2: Non-cognitivism vs Moral disagreement

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.

Question preparation

Revision paragraphs:

AO1: Naturalism
AO2: Naturalism vs Hume’s is/ought gap
AO1: Intuitionist non-naturalism
AO2: Intuitionism vs moral disagreement
AO1: Emotivism
AO2: Anti-realism vs Moral nihilism
AO2: Non-cognitivism vs Moral disagreement

Hard topic! Making the most out of my notes requires appreciating the nuance between these theories on the spec and Mackie’s theory – which shows that the meta-ethical questions are more complex than simply realist cognitivism vs anti-realist non-cognitivism.

E.g., Mackie criticises Moore’s realism – but not his cognitivism. Though technically, Mackie thinks we should understand cognitivism differently to Moore – not as expression of belief gained form intuitions of non-natural moral properties, but expressions of belief gained from social conditioning.

So:

‘moral realism’ includes multiple views: goodness could =

Pleasure (The utilitarian naturalism of Bentham & Mill)
Flourishing (The aristotelian naturalism of Aristotle, Foot & MacIntyre)
Non-natural Causa sui properties (Moore)

‘Cognitivism’ includes multiple views: Ethical language expresses beliefs because:

It is inferred from empirical observation of the amount of pleasure/pain actions cause (Bentham / Mill)
It is intuited from non-natural properties (Moore)
People are socially conditioned into believing morality is real (Mackie)

These views can then intersect. One could be a:

Realist cognitivist like Bentham: because goodness is pleasure which we observe, ethical language expresses beliefs inferred from those observations
Realist cognitivst like Moore: because goodness is a non-natural property which we intuit, ethical language expresses beliefs gained from intuition.
Anti-realist cognitivist like Mackie: because goodness is a social construct which people believe is real, ethical language expresses beliefs gained from social conditioning.

And of course there’s emotivism:

Anti-realist non-cognitivist like Ayer: because there is no good or bad, ethical language cannot be a belief about reality, but a non-cognitive expression of emotion.

Question types:

Questions could focus on:

Naturalism
Intuitionism
Emotivism
Whether ethical language is meaningless (Ayer).
Whether ethical language reflects only what is in the mind of the speaker (Ayer)
Whether ‘good’ can be defined
Whether we ‘just know’ within ourselves what is good/bad (intuitionism)
Whether ethical language have an objective factual basis (cognitivism vs non-cognitivism).

Can the word “good” be defined? [40]
General question

AO1: Naturalism (moderate AO1)
AO2: Naturalism vs Hume’s is/ought gap
AO1: Intuitionist non-naturalism (moderate AO1)
- Moore’s intuitionism: no goodness cannot be defined, bc non-natural Causa sui
AO1: Emotivism (moderate AO1)
AO2: Non-cognitivism vs Moral disagreement

Conclusion: Mackie shows how non-cognitivism fails, so Ayer fails to show ethical language meaningless, though Mackie’s anti-realism fails because we can defend aristotelian naturalism so the word good can be defined (as flourishing/eudaimonia).

Evaluate ethical naturalism [40]

AO1: Naturalism
AO1: Intuitionist non-naturalism (minimal AO1 mainly the open question argument and naturalistic fallacy as critiques of naturalism)
AO2: Naturalism vs Hume’s is/ought gap
- Hume’s is-ought gap is of the same variety of critique as Moore’s attacks.
- Aristotelian naturalism then might resolve them.
AO2: Intuitionism vs moral disagreement
- This argues intuitionism is not preferable to naturalism
AO1: Emotivism (minimal AO1)
AO2: Anti-realism vs Moral nihilism
- Gets back to Foot’s aristotelian naturalism being best.

“Ethical language has an objective factual basis” – Discuss [40]
Focused question – on the cognitive view of ethical language (held by naturalism and Moore’s intuitionist non-naturalism).

AO1: Naturalism (moderate AO1)
AO2: Naturalism vs Hume’s is/ought gap
- Hume would say no – but virtue ethics naturalism would say yes
AO1: Intuitionist non-naturalism (moderate AO1)
- Would say yes,
AO2: Intuitionism vs moral disagreement
AO1: Emotivism (minimal AO1)
AO2: Non-cognitivism vs Moral disagreement

Conclusion: Mackie shows Ayer’s non-cognitivism is wrong, but Foot shows Mackie’s anti-realism is wrong, so the overall best theory is aristotelian naturalism which is cognitivist so claims ethical language is objective; grounded in facts about flourishing.

Weirdly worded questions:

“what is meant by the word ‘good’ is the defining question in ethics”- Discuss [40]

I would approach this as so:

All 3 theories agree about it being the defining question – but disagree about what is ‘meant’ by it, and disagree about why it is the defining question.

What we decide goodness means will have radical and foundational consequences for ethics:

AO1: Naturalism
- If the naturalists like Bentham are right, then goodness being pleasure will determine that utilitarianism is the right moral theory we should follow.
AO2: Naturalism vs Hume’s is/ought gap
- This then questions whether naturalists are indeed right.
- Could end suggesting aristotelian naturalism is right, so that goodness means flourishing, which means we should be virtue ethcisits of some description.
AO1: Intuitionist non-naturalism
- Non-naturalism (intuitionism) – goodness cannot be defined – this is the defining question in ethics because it shows that naturalism is false and then explains how we get our knowledge of objective morality through intuition of non-natural moral properties.
AO2: Intuitionism vs moral disagreement
- This then questions whether Moore’s intuitionist non-naturalism is right.
AO1: Emotivism
- If Ayer is right, then goodness being meaningless will make the whole of ethics meaningless and potentially pointless. So for Ayer it seems like the ‘only’ question in ethics.
AO2: Non-cognitivism vs Moral disagreement
- This neatly focuses on ethical language – which this question focuses on.
- Though you could use the nihilism critique instead if you prefer.

Conclusion: What’s meant by ‘good’ is eudaimonia – which is vital for ethics because it implies we ought to follow aristotelian virtue ethics as a normative theory, and in our application of ethics to applied issues.

Absolutism & relativism questions.
I wonder whether they would ever really do questions like this, but technically they could so it’s worth being ready. Once you see how absolutism and relativism relate to the standard theories in this topic, such questions aren’t so bad:

“Absolutism is more convincing than relativism” – Discuss [40]

Or:
Critically assess moral relativism [40]
Or:
How convincing is moral absolutism? [40]

Absolutism:

Absolutism is the view that there are objective ethical principles/rules which apply ‘absolutely’ – i.e., to all situations.
Naturalism believes in objective moral truths which are absolute.
So, Naturalism is a form of absolutism.
Bentham’s utilitarian naturalism claims goodness = pleasure – so an action is good if it maximises pleasure.
This principle of Utility is a meta-ethically absolutist claim. This is because Bentham thinks it applies absolutely – meaning to all situations.
Moore is technically a utilitarian, an ‘ideal utilitarian’, meaning he thinks there are other factors in addition to pleasure – e.g. beauty & friendship – which are also absolute goods – which we don’t calculate but instead intuit.
So his theory is still absolutist – but claims there are a plurality of absolute goods, not only one. The intuitions we get, however, only relate to the goodness of a specific action in a specific situation.

Relativism:

A relativist is someone who thinks that moral judgements (e.g. X is wrong’) are only true ‘for’, i.e., relative to, a culture or individual.
Mackie is a relativist – he thinks morality is socially constructed and that ethical language is cognitive.
Ayer is partly a relativist (relativism adjacent) – he agrees there are no objective absolutist moral principles.
Ayer is a relativist about the existence of goodness, but he is not a relativist about ethical language.
Ayer would not say that moral judgements are ‘relative’ ‘to’ a certain culture/individual – he would say they are meaningless expressions of emotion.
It’s not that ethical language is ‘true in the opinion of’ a person/culture – they can’t be true or false, not even in a relative way – since they merely express meaningless emotion.
E.g. ancient people thought sacrificing children was good.
Mackie would say they believed that was good because of their culture.
Ayer, however, would say they merely meaninglessly express emotion – not beliefs.

Relativism = anti-realism + cognitivism
Emotivism = anti-realism + non-cognitivism

So you can still do this structure:

AO1: Naturalism (moderate AO1 – showing how it’s absolutist)
AO2: Naturalism vs Hume’s is/ought gap
AO1: Intuitionist non-naturalism (moderate AO1 – showing how it’s absolutist)
AO2: Intuitionism vs moral disagreement
AO1: Emotivism (moderate AO1 – showing relation to relativism)
- Ayer is not a full relativist like Mackie.
AO2: Non-cognitivism vs Moral disagreement
- Shows Mackie’s relativism is more convincing than Ayer’s non-cognitivist emotivism.

Conclusion: Foot’s naturalism most convincing – which is a form of absolutism; that what makes an action good is that it is what a virtuous person would do, in the attainment of eudaimonia.