Meta ethics acts as the main alternative for normative ethics (practical theories that discern what is right/wrong), offering little practical advice, but postulating essential questions that have impact on normative ethics also. "meta", meaning beyond, is a branch of ethics concerning the language of morality, asking what we mean when we say something is 'right' or 'wrong' - is this our opinion, or is it fact? If an ethical statement is considered to be a fact it may be called cognitive, if it is an opinion, non-cognitive.
NB: I made this post so as to do some extra revision for my A2 exam, so this is all relevant for anyone else studying the OCR A2 Level "ethics" paper. Some terms have not been fully explained as they are fairly low level, but any questions on what terms mean are welcome via comments :). Also I apologise for how long it is, I was trying to remember what the theories were but simultaneously practice critically writing on the theories.
There are 2 main theories that argue for the cognitive nature of ethical statements, naturalism and non-naturalism, aka intuitionism (shall be called non-naturalism from now on as this is much easier to spell!). Naturalism proposes that ethical statements are factual as you can base your statement on empirical evidence, something that is widely accepted, and asked for, in our enlightened society. It is this evidence that underpins your fact, and defines an action as right or wrong.
For example, the statement "murder is wrong" contains factual knowledge as evidence proves your assertion to be correct (a) the victim gave no consent to the ending of their life (b) the law will have been broken (when considering the UK, at least), (c) it will cause third parties such as family and friends harm; plus more reasons. It is this empirical evidence that defines an action as moral or immoral. Aristotelian thinking concurs with this idea, as a moral action achieves a moral consequence, much like Aristotle's final cause.
Further, there are 3 individual takes on naturalism:
- Hedonic - Perry.
An action is moral if it is conducive to harmonising society. Very much similar to a utilitarian viewpoint, so also carries the same problem, that harmonising society means going with the majority's views, but these may not be moral views.
- Social - Bradley
If we can understand our position in society then we can function morally. This has strong links to the ideas of Piaget and Kohlberg concerning conscience, where they argue from ages 5-10 (approximately) we have heteronomous morality, that depends on other people to know what is right and wrong. Once we reach full cognitive development, age 10, we have autonomous morality where we can deduce our own morals, and understand where these morals stand within the society we inhabit.
- Theological - Aquinas
Gods will and scripture determine what is right and wrong, and you can develop your own specific moral codes through the use of the Primary Precepts (live in society, worship God, preservation of life, reproduction and educate the young). Naturally this theory has very strong links with Natural Law, Aquinas' theory, that outlines the 5 Primary Precepts. We must note thought that this branch of naturalism does rest upon the existence of God, something that has been far from proven.
Hence Naturalism allows us to establish cognitive facts about morality, and if we use Aquinas' thinking we can in fact develop specific morals, much like a normative ethical theory. This gives us strength behind what we say when we comment on ethical issues, as we are not postulating an opinion. Moreover the many types of naturalism make it attractive to both secular and religious people, and is the most practical meta-ethical theory.
G.E. Moore pointed out a crucial, a priori, logical fallacy within this argument however. Naturalism relies upon the fact that murder is wrong because it goes against the law. It lays out the premise "murder goes against the law", and so concludes "murder is wrong". This is what Moore dubbed the naturalistic fallacy, as this jumps from a fact to a value (not a logically coherent type of argument).
E.g. it is wrong to use the premise "I painted my nails this morning" to conclude "painting nails is wrong", yet this uses the same logic as naturalism - moving from a fact to a value.
This naturalistic fallacy promoted Moore to develop his own, competing, cognitive theory, non-naturalism. He argues "good is a non-definable property", meaning that it cannot be broken down further, much like the colour yellow. We all know (except the few with more rare forms of colour blindness) what yellow looks like, and can recognise it, but cannot explain it to anyone else (try it - not very easy at all!). 'Good' is like this too - a property in something we all have innate knowledge of, and can recognise, but cannot explain or break down. Hence we know by our intuition what is right or wrong, and as we all know this, our ethical statements are facts rather than opinion. However Moore has not accounted for when people are confused as to what to do, or whether something is right or wrong - if our intuition told us we would have clear defined opinions on all ethical issues. Further people come to different decisions, which should not be possible if we all have the same innate knowledge of good.
This was developed further by W.D. Ross with his notion of Prima Facie duties. There are 7 duties that should all be adhered too, but some may need to take precedence over others in certain situations - our intuition tells us which. Our moral statements are used to justify our actions, and change others opinions. Prichard also developed Moore, arguing we cannot define "ought", instead we should use reason to collect facts about ethical dilemmas, and let intuition decide what the moral course of action is. They have both overcome the issue of different people reaching different decisions by arguing some are more morally enlightened than others, but neither scholars offers an explanation as to who these morally enlightened are. Thus they don't offer any more practical advice than Moore as we have no way of telling who is right and who is wrong about an ethical issue (synoptic link here to Falsification and R.M. Hare, who offers his own theory later on meta-ethics; Parable of the Lunatic and Dons. One sane group believes Dons are teachers and friendly, one sees them as trying to kill them, the insane group. Again gives no way of distinguishing who is right).
Ergo non-naturalism offers improvements on naturalism as it is a logically sound argument that 'feels right' - we would all argue there are certain things that we just 'know' are wrong. But we must remember that this becomes an issue if we live in a very multicultural society, where many opposing moral opinions are offered - we may not know which is right by our intuition alone.
So as to not make this too long the non-cognitive theories shall be outlined in the next post...........
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