Charlie Matthews 12CAS
05/05/2007
January 2002
Foundation
- What is meant by meta-ethics
Ethics is the study of moral standards and conduct. For this reason, the study of ethics is also often called "moral philosophy," meaning “What is good?” “What is bad” etc. However, Meta-ethics is the study of this moral language and of what different people mean when they use ethical terminology.
There are many accepted schools of thought that give definitions of ethical language. Meta-ethics is the study of how these theories account for moral language. Take, for example, Ethical Naturalism; this theory takes it origins from the teachings of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that everything in the universe has a purpose, which he called its ‘final cause,’ for which it has been designed. In fulfilling this purpose things can achieve ‘goodness.’ From this Ethical naturalists believe that ‘good’ can be explained in terms of features of the natural world.
However, ethical non-naturalists believe that you cannot determine goodness in terms of natural phenomena. They believe that goodness is simply a term we use to describe something, not something which can be discovered within the nature of something. To ethical non-naturalists, ethical statements can be reduced to non-ethical ones, without denying that they are meaningful. G.E Moore accused ethical naturalists as committing what he called the ‘naturalistic fallacy;’ that is deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. To avoid doing this, Moore came to the conclusion that ‘good’ was not a term that could be defined or explained by anything basic, this makes him an ethical non-naturalist. Moore believed that ‘good’ was a term that we use to describe something, something that things can possess that we can recognise and understand, but not define; like the colour yellow for example: we know what it is and can recognise it, but cannot define or describe it. Moore’s ideas led to an approach called ‘intuitionism’ (although this was not named by Moore himself). Intuitionists not attempt to explain the word ‘good’ but argue that we know what goodness is through our intuition and hence that moral judgements are self evident. (The only problems with this is that different people will consider different things as good or bad whereas nobody would try and tell a painter that the wall he has painted is purple not yellow and so moral judgements will be self evident in different ways to other people.)
