Ethics Series Episode 1: Meta-Ethics a brief introduction

In this episode, Jacob gives brief introduction on meta-ethics.

 

Transcript: 

Hello and welcome back to season 2 of the reason through podcast. It’s been while and hope to get back to uploading more regularly. As a way of creating new content, I will be uploading introductory audio videos! The first series is going to be on ethics. We will going over how various philosophers have answered the questions of why be moral? Are there moral facts? Is Morality relative? In this episode we will be going over Meta-ethics. So let’s begin.

 

 

Now ethics, in general is a branch of philosophy that deals with right and wrong, good and bad. Moral knowledge. Contrasted with say, epistemology that deals with understanding the relationship between justification, belief, and knowledge. In general, from what I have found, is that most people, when engaging in ethics are endorsing some sort of moral philosophy. For example, have you ever had a moral disagreement with a person, and the person responds with “that’s just your opinion”. Now, at first glance this seems like this person may be endorsing some sort of subjective moral framework, but that needs to be discussed with said person to find out their view, so keep that in mind, don’t assume, ask questions to gain clarity.

 

Meta- ethics is not about assessing what one should do in a particular situation. For example, meta-ethics is not going to inform you should lie to Nazi’s or whether its permissible to lie. Meta- ethics is concerned with the following.

the semantic function of moral discourse, meaning when one makes a moral statement are they expressing a fact or emotion as an example.
Are there moral properties, do they exist? If they do, what are they like?
Can we have moral knowledge? How do we know our moral judgement is true or false?
Moral psychology, how does our motivation relate to moral action?
Can moral judgments be right or wrong? Is there a truth behind the matter?

 

These are the questions meta ethics seeks to answer. These questions are not exhaustive but are meant to give an understanding of the difference between this discipline and others. To further illustrate here are some examples of meta ethical theories. Moral realism, non-cognitivism, error-theory, and moral anti-realism.  In proceeding episodes, I will go over these theories in more detail as this is just a pre-liminary sketch of the philosophical terrain.

 

To start, there are typically two camps of moral judgment that informs a meta ethical theory. They are cognitivism one side, and non-cognitivism on the other. Cognitivists think when one makes a moral judgment, they are expressing a belief. This is crucial. If the cognitivists are right, say when make the utterance abortion is wrong or abortion is permissible. I am uttering a belief. If I am uttering a belief then this can be true or false, this is typically labeled truth apt. Beliefs fall under the category of being true or false. In contrast, the non-cognitivist will deny or not accept one is expressing a belief. Instead, when one is expressing a moral utterance, they are expression an emotion or desire. Desire and emotion are not truth apt. Therefore, moral judgments cannot be true or false. This might be a little tricky, so I will try to be clear, it may be true that one can have a desire, such as, I have the desire to learn moral philosophy it does not follow though that the desire itself can be true or false.

 

As stated earlier the cognitivists and non-cognitivists will inform which meta ethical theory one subscribes to. Each theory has its strengths and its weaknesses. I hope this overview has helped! When you find yourself engaged in moral discourse. Remember to ask questions, gain clarity on what the person is trying to convey whether or not they have thought about meta ethics.

 

In the next episode in this series. We will be looking at G.E. Moores attack on Ethical Naturalism. In short Ethical Naturalism is Cognitivist’s view that claims moral facts exist, and moral properties are reducible to physical facts and thus under the umbrella to be discovered by the empirical sciences. 

 

That concludes this episode. I will leave a transcript of what I’ve said in this episode. See you next time.