Discuss the claim that ethical and religious language is meaningless.
Discuss the claim that ethical and religious language is meaningless.
The debate here is do ethics and religion deal with fact or opinions. There are two types of ethical statement descriptive and normative. Descriptive ethical statements such as "most crime is carried out by young men" are verifiable which means that they can be proved as fact or fiction.
Normative ethical statements such as "it is wrong to commit crime" are meaningful, they express something about a person's values however they cannot be verified and can be challenged with another normative statement.
The key areas pf philosophical debate during the 20th century concern meta-ethics and meta-physics, where the meaning of what is said takes central stage. For instance what is the nature of language and how can statements be shown to be true or false?
If we want to fully understand morality we must analyse the meaning of the key moral terms used, what it means, what it does and how it may be verified. Take the word 'good'; we may describe it in an absolute way, "this is a good essay" or in a relative way, "compared to the previous one, this essay is good". Or in a utilitarian way, "this essay will get a good result" However none of these uses or descriptions actually tell us what the word good means.
G. E. Moore stated that 'good' could not be defined in his book, Principia Ethica. You just know what is good by intuition; you can speak about something being good without knowing how to define it. A weakness of the view that ethical terms have a meaning that we can intuit, but not define, is how can we be sure that our intuitions are correct? Also, why, if my moral obligations are self-evident, do I have dilemmas over conflicting duties? The issue of verification is also raised; intuition may be considered to be a meaningless concept itself, since it is non-verifiable.
The meaning of language and the principle of verification was at the forefront of debate in the 20th Century movement known as Logical Positivism. Philosophers such as A.J. Ayer, writing in Language, Truth and Logic and members of the Vienna Circle, wanted to be able to break down language into its simplest components. All meaningful propositions were divided into two categories, analytic and synthetic. Analytical or tautological statements can be verified as true by definition i.e. "All bachelors are single men." Synthetic or empirical statements can be verified as true by observation i.e. "All thieves are men."
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The meaning of language and the principle of verification was at the forefront of debate in the 20th Century movement known as Logical Positivism. Philosophers such as A.J. Ayer, writing in Language, Truth and Logic and members of the Vienna Circle, wanted to be able to break down language into its simplest components. All meaningful propositions were divided into two categories, analytic and synthetic. Analytical or tautological statements can be verified as true by definition i.e. "All bachelors are single men." Synthetic or empirical statements can be verified as true by observation i.e. "All thieves are men."
All statements that express unverifiable opinions or emotions are rendered invalid, which includes all religious and ethical statements. For Ayer, the statement "abortion is wrong" is just making some primitive noise, it is without meaning. "A strictly philosophical treatise on ethics should make no ethical pronouncements".
This principle of verification certainly challenged the notion that ethical and religious statements have meaning, but the resulting debate brought out some significant weaknesses in the principle itself. The attempt to apply the principles of science and mathematics to all language statements are cognitive statements of fact. Metaphors, symbols and analogies are all used to express 'facts' of science. Some religious statements are verifiable in an historical sense and a major weakness was that the principle of verification failed its own test.
C.L. Stevenson in his work Ethics and Language, responded to the challenge of the logical positivists, by saying that an ethical statement is not primarily about meaning. Rather, it asks 'what is the statement for?' This view is known as Emotivism. Ethical and Religious statements express the feelings of the speaker and are intended to influence the hearer. Ethical statements have no rational meaning, but they can be meaningful in that they are instructive and can offer a recommendation.
There are however weaknesses to this point of view. Ethical and Religious statements are not usually judges according to the response of the listener, but on the claims themselves, which implies that those claims should have a cognitive meaning. If, as is suggested, ethical claims are contingent on emotions, then those claims would change as emotions change and could never be universal. Also there would be no was of judging the relative merits of a moral viewpoint. The weight of public emotion does not, in itself, make a statement right. The emotional force with which a moral view is expressed is no recommendation of its value. By saying that ethical and religious statements are just an expression of emotion/opinion is playing back into the hands of the Logical Positivists.
Another critic of the use of ethical and religious language is Antony Flew. He changed the direction of the debate by introducing the principle of falsification. If ethical statements or statements about God can be made to fit into any circumstances however challenging then they have no meaningful content. He used John Wisdom's Parable of the Gardener to illustrate his point and argued that such reluctance by believers to see their assertions challenged, sounded the death knell to religious and ethical language claims.
R.M. Hare however believed that the integrity of ethical and religious statements could be salvaged. In 'The Language of Morals' he emphasised what happens when someone makes a moral statement. He suggests that it prescribed a course of action. Hence the term Prescriptivism. He would say that, in ethical language, accomplishment is primary and descriptive secondary. 'Give to charity' has a good result, however it is described. It prescribes a course of action for the present and the future. The weakness of this view is that not all moral statements do recommend a course of action.
With regard to the integrity of Religious Language, Hare proposed that believers statements are 'bliks' - "way of regarding the world which are in principle neither verifiable nor falsifiable". Because a religious statement makes a significant difference to the life of the believer, it cannot be meaningless. It matters. Our moral statements also reflect our general understanding of life and how we value it. If it makes a difference to our lives, it cannot be without meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, after abandoning his picture theory of language, proposed that religious and ethical language is anti-realist or non-propositional. Writing in Philosophical Investigations, he said ethical and religious language can express something meaningful, without having to make a statement which can be verified as true or false. Language can serve a function other than that of making true/false claims. Meaning grows out of the context in which the terms are used. This is an important point in the debate, as it recognises the distinctive, non-cognitive nature of religious language and distinguishes it from other forms of language. Its weakness is that language games do not allow for the believer's claims to be objectively, cognitively true. However, the non-propositional, anti-realist view taken by Hare, Wittgenstein and Braithwaite, which says that ethical and religious language serves a function other than that of making true and false claims, does counter the challenges of verification and falsification which wants to limit meaning to a cognitive, empirically verifiable or falsifiable statement. The cognitive definition of meaning is very narrow and if a statement has to be empirical or analytic, there is little scope for the creativity found in ethical and religious language. Ethics and Religion are too complex to be confined to a language appropriate to science If a religious or ethical statement makes a difference to our lives, it cannot be without meaning.
