Meta-ethics vs normative ethics

Normative ethics asks "what should I do?" Meta-ethics steps back to ask what moral words mean and whether moral claims can be true.

• Cognitivism — moral statements express beliefs; they can be true or false and describe moral facts.
• Non-cognitivism — moral statements do not describe facts; they express feelings or attitudes.

Hume's "is–ought" gap lurks underneath: you cannot logically derive a value ("ought") from a bare fact ("is").

Ethical naturalism

Ethical naturalism is cognitivist: moral properties are natural properties, so "good" can be defined in natural terms and moral claims verified like other facts.

• e.g. a utilitarian might say "good" just means "productive of the greatest happiness"; others define it in terms of human flourishing.
• Strength: makes ethics objective and knowable.
• Weakness: which natural property? Different naturalists disagree — and Moore says any such definition commits a fallacy.

Moore's naturalistic fallacy

G. E. Moore (Principia Ethica) argues you cannot define "good" in terms of any natural property — to try is the naturalistic fallacy.

His open question argument: for any proposed definition ("good = pleasant"), it always remains a sensible open question to ask "but is the pleasant actually good?" — which shows the two are not identical.

Moore concludes "good" is a simple, indefinable, non-natural property — like "yellow", it can only be pointed to, not analysed.

Whose fallacy?

Intuitionism

If "good" cannot be defined, how do we know it? Intuitionism says we grasp basic moral truths directly, by intuition — they are self-evident to a mature mind.

• Moore — we intuit what is good.
• H. A. Prichard — we intuit our duties; moral obligation cannot be argued for, only seen.
• W. D. Ross — we intuit several prima facie duties (e.g. fidelity, gratitude, justice) that can be weighed against one another.

Challenge: intuitions conflict across people and cultures, and "intuition" is not observable — so how do we settle disputes?

Cognitive or non-cognitive?

Emotivism: Ayer and Stevenson

Emotivism is non-cognitivist. Building on the verification principle, A. J. Ayer argued moral statements are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, so they state no facts — they merely express emotion. "Stealing is wrong" just means "Stealing — boo!" (the "Boo/Hurrah" theory).

C. L. Stevenson developed this: moral language expresses attitudes and, crucially, aims to influence the attitudes of others (the "dynamic" or persuasive use of language). Disagreements are clashes of attitude, not fact.

Challenge: emotivism seems to reduce ethics to feeling and make genuine moral reasoning and progress hard to explain.

Whose "Boo/Hurrah"?

The meta-ethical map

• Cognitivist: ethical naturalism (moral facts = natural facts); intuitionism (moral facts = non-natural, known by intuition).
• Non-cognitivist: emotivism (moral language expresses/influences attitudes).
• The debate hangs on whether there are moral facts at all, and how — if at all — we could know them.

Sort each theory

Tap a claim, then drop it under cognitivist or non-cognitivist.

Match the theory

Tap a description, then the thinker or theory it belongs to.

The big ideas to hold together

You can now place naturalism, intuitionism and emotivism on the cognitive/non-cognitive map and evaluate each. Press Finish to see your score.