Meta-ethics

Meta-ethical Questions: What does it mean to be good/bad? What constitutes the nature of being good or bad?

Cognitivism: The view that ethical statements have a truth value. Non-cognitivism: the view that ethical statements do not have a truth value A statement has a truth value if it is either true or false.

Examples
Questions, exclamations, commands Each of these types of sentences does not have a truth value Non-cognitivists hold that ethical statements are like thesethey look like descriptions but they are really not. Example: pleasure is good = pleasure! Goody!

Types of cognitivism
Subjective descriptivism: moral statements describe the psychological state of the person making the judgment. moral relativism: moral statements describe the attitudes of the society or culture the person making the statement is in. Divine command theory: Moral statements describe the attitudes of a deity

An argument subjective descriptivism

If SD is correct then sincere moral judgments can never be wrong. No one can really disagree with anyone else about ethics. If Sally and Beth are arguing about abortion, and both are sincere, then they are BOTH saying true things when one says abortion is morally permissible and the other says abortion is not morally permissible.

Response
Perhaps moral disagreements are not really about people having contradictory beliefs, but about people having conflicting desires. If Sally thinks abortion ought to legal, she desires that abortion be legal. If Beth thinks abortion should not be legal, she desires that abortion be outlawed. Both of these desires cannot be fullfilled.

Another argument
If SD is true, then when Hitler says we ought to exterminate the Jews he is saying something true. But that is absurd.

Therefore, SD is false.

An argument against Divine Command theory

If divine command theory is true, then x is good means God approves of x There is nothing in the theory that limits what God can approve of. Therefore, if God approves of torturing babies for the fun of it, it is good to torture babies for the fun of it. But this is absurd. So DC. Is false

Objectivism
Objectivism is the view that moral statements have a truth value and the truth value does not depend on psychological states of individuals or groups or even God. If objectivism is true, pleasure is good would, if true, describe something about the nature of pleasure itself.

The argument from disagreement

People often disagree about what is the right thing to do. Different cultures also seem to have different standards about what is right or wrong. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that there is no objective standard of what is right or wrong

Responses
It is illegitimate to infer from people disagree about x to there is no fact about x Compare: People disagree about whether God exists. Therefore there is no fact of the matter whether God exists or not It may be that the differences are not as great as they seem when it comes to ultimate values: the badness of suffering, the goodness of friendship, etc.

The argument from queerness

Objective moral qualities would be qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe These properties would require some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else

How are moral qualities strange?

Objective moral qualities would be action directing. If you know x is good you would have a motive or reason to do x But Mackie thinks there are no objective qualities that in themselves motivate behavior. Objective moral qualities are also strange in that they are not perceived by the senses and are not part of the scientific description of the world

Responses to Mackie
What is wrong with supposing that some qualities can move a person to act? Does not the apprehension of pain, for example, in itself move a person to avoid the painful? There are many objective facts that are also queer in Mackies sense: mathematics and logic, for example.