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Meta-ethics

Section 1Non-cognitivism, Prescriptivism and

Projectivism

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Moral Non-cognitivism

Moral judgements are neither true nor false, & cannot be known.

Moral judgements express emotions or prescriptions.

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Naturalism

Ethical truths are derivable from facts.

G.E. Moore rejected such ethical naturalism.

See Section 5 of this Chapter for a fuller discussion of naturalism.

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G.E. Moore

Naturalistic Fallacy:

A fallacy is committed when one attempts to reason from facts to moral claims, & thus attempts to define moral terms.

Moral terms, such as ‘good’, cannot be defined.

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G.E. Moore

The naturalistic fallacy unintentionally prepared the way for non-cognitivist theories of ethics.

Note: Moore himself was a cognitivist.

Cognitivism holds that moral claims can be known (see Section 3 of this Chapter).

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Problem

The argument for the naturalistic fallacy assumes its own conclusion.

Thus it fails to establish that ‘good’ can’t be defined, or that naturalism is fallacious.

Nor can it be used to support the view that ‘ought’ can’t be derived from ‘is’.

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Emotivism

Moral language doesn’t make statements but has ‘emotive meaning’.

Moral language expresses emotions & generates emotions in others.

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Problems with Emotivism

Insufficient scope for moral reasoning.

Fails to capture the way in which such reasoning can move from relevant grounds to well-grounded conclusions.

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Further Problems

Emotivism faces problems that can be expressed in J.L. Austin’s terminology of illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.

(Illocutionary act: necessarily performed in uttering the relevant sentence, such as stating or asking.Perlocutionary act: performed through making such an utterance, like persuading someone.)

But the meaning of a moral claim cannot consist in the perlocutionary acts contingently performed through uttering it.

Besides, the meaning of a moral claim doesn’t depend on whether the illocutionary act of expressing one’s feelings is present or absent.

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Prescriptivism

Requires that the makers of moral judgements be committed to acting in line with the implicit prescriptions of their judgements, which are universal.

R.M. Hare: moral judgments are universal in the sense that each similar case must be judged alike.

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Strength

Recognizes the universalizability of moral judgements.

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Weaknesses

Fails to account for cases of weakness of will.

Combination of universalizability & prescriptivity not a sufficient condition of judgements being moral ones.

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Projectivism

Moral judgements result from people projecting their emotions onto features of the world.

Moral beliefs depend for their existence on such projections.

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Simon Blackburn

Seeks to secure for projectivism entitlement to appropriate the language of moral realism (quasi-realism).

Realism: treats moral properties as independent of people’s mental states (see Section 3 of this Chapter).

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Problems

Encounters some of the same problems as emotivism.

Implies nothing would be valuable if there were no valuers.

Quasi-realism, if successful, collapses into realism.