Ethics Notes: A2 Religious Studies (OCR)

Meta-ethics
Ethical standpoints:
 Absolutism – morals are fixed and unchanging
 Relativism – moral truths are not fixed, changes according to time/place etc.
 They don’t disagree about what is moral, but what it means to make a moral statement
 Meta ethics – focuses on the language of ethics
o Concerned how we come to know morals
 Cognitive statements – when a moral can be shown to be true or false
o Generally something that is uncontroversial
 Non-cognitive – a moral statement that is subjective to one’s feelings
 Moral Realism – view that moral properties (good/bad) exist
 Moral anti-realism – the view that moral properties do not exist
Naturalism:
 Everything arises from natural properties and causes
 Morals are fixed absolutes
o Can be observed as part of the universe
 Aristotle – goodness is eudaimonia
o Flourishing is a factual feature of natural organisms – clear to see there is a difference
between a plant that flourishes and one that doesn’t
 Bentham – goodness = pleasure – it is a natural property of natural creatures
o Agreed w Aristotle -just removed telos as it is an unscientific concept
 F.H. Bradley and Phillipa Foot – morals can be perceived in the world the same way other features
are identified
 Good and Bad are absolute facts of the natural world
 Morals are not a matter of opinion
o They are objectively true
 Expressing a moral truth is a part of the reality of the universe
o Therefore not an opinion
 Link: Natural Law and Aquinas
o God-given natural order can be discovered through reasoning and observation
o Telos – goodness comes from fulfilling a natural purpose
 Bradley – morals are observable in the world
o Ethics are explained by concrete in reality
 Ethical statements and non-ethical statements are the same
o Non-ethical statement – Hitler was the leader of the Nazis
o Ethical statement – Hitler was a bad man
 Ethical statements are facts because of the empirical evidence
 A statement can only have meaning if it can be verified empirically
 Bertrand Russell – took Moore to have refuted naturalism
o Moral truths exits but nothing extraordinary is required for them to be true
David Hume’s criticisms:
 Moral good and evil cannot be distinguished through reason (reason is the slave of the passions)
 Factual statement based on observations cannot lead to a subjective moral statement
 The Is/Ought problem
o No amount of fact is sufficient to lead to an ethical decision
o Naturalism is not a valid deduction – doesn’t mean pleasure is good thus we ought to
maximise pleasure
Phillipa Foot’s defence:
 When we call a person ‘just’ or ‘honest’ we refer to something

, o Evidence backs these up
 Virtues are observed by watching how a person acts
o Honest person does honest things – thus we can perceive moral absolutes
 Draws on Kropotkin’s example
o Anthropologist who studied Malayan people under strict instructions to not take photos
o Anthropologist has the opportunity to do it but stops himself because of his promise
 Rules are natural and absolute
o Humans have developed ways to live well together and established rules to ensure people
live happily
Weaknesses of naturalism:
 Right and wrong are subjective not objective
o Humans must exist to determine how we should live
 Regardless of whether a situation may have evidence support that it is right, it may break the law
 Do ethical/moral situations have evidence?
 J.L Mackie – rules are not hard facts, accepted to varying degrees by all inside an institution
Intuitionism:
 G.E. Moore – believed that we should do the things that causes most good to exist
o If naturalism were true, the result would be illogical
o If goodness = pleasure, that is essentially saying pleasure = pleasure
 Moral truths are indefinable but self-evident through intuition
o Rejected utilitarianism – can’t quantify and define good
 Good is a simple notion – it is as simple as yellow
o Cannot break down good to anything more than good – ceases to be simple
o Good is indefinable – ‘good is good’
 Intrinsically good things exist for their own sake and can be recognised
 Attempts to define good as something that can be verified/falsified is to commit the naturalistic
fallacy
o Influenced by Is/Ought
 Cannot identify goodness with a natural quality
 H.A. Prichard – reason collects facts and intuition determines which course of action to follow
 Distinguished between
o General thinking (reasoning) – assesses the facts of a situation
o Moral thinking – immediate intuition about the right thing to do
 Recognised that different people have different intuitions about what is right
 W.D. Ross – what is right is unique
o One can never know all the facts of a situation – use intuition to make judgements
 Certain types of actions are right
o Prima Facie Duties – fidelity, reparation, justice and beneficence
Weaknesses:
 Moore doesn’t explain nor prove how we know good through intuition alone
 How can we be sure our intuitions are correct – what if they conflict
 J.L. Mackie – argues that morality is not about what a person believes is intuitively right
o Is focused around doing something about it
Emotivism:
 A.J. Ayer and the Vienna Circle
o Drew on the thinking of Hume
 Ayer believed there are three types of statements
o Logical (analytical), factual (synthetic) and moral
o Moral language doesn’t have absolute meaning
 Emotivism is ethical non-naturalism – rejects the view that morals tell you about the external world
 Morals cannot be verified through science or maths