Ethical language is subjective. Discuss. ( 35 marks) This statement is asking whether the meaning of terms like good/ bad right wrong exist independent of us or whether they are simply expressions of an individuals’ mood, experience or perception. Having studied a number of meta ethical approaches: I disagree that ethical language is subjective and side with intuitionism, that ethical knowledge is objective, yet indefinable like the colour yellow. G.E Moore begins by rejecting ethical naturalism, the belief that ethical knowledge is based on empirical evidence.
Those who oppose cognitivists are called non cognitivists and they believe that when someone makes a moral statement they are not describing the world, but they are merely expressing their feelings and opinions, they believe that moral statements are not objective therefore they cannot be verified as true or false. In this essay I will be discussing the multiple branches of cognitive theories and non cognitive theories in order to answer the Janus-like question whether or not moral statements truly hold objective meaning. Ethical naturalism is just one branch of a cognitive theory in which naturalists believe that ethical statements are the same as non-ethical ones, meaning they are all factual and can
Moral Relativism cannot and does not accept the idea that an objective moral system exists. If it did, you could evaluate other ethical systems meaningfully. A moral relativist would ask such questions as ‘what do we mean by wrong?’ when making a decision on something deemed wrong. Relativism is in direct contrast with absolute morality that is deontological, referring to looking at the action in itself. A moral relativist would believe that there is no definite set of rules that apply universally.
The modern development of virtue ethics is often linked back to a paper by G. E. M. Anscombe entitled ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. In this paper Anscombe questioned whether there could be moral laws if there was is no God. What do wrong and right mean if there is no lawgiver, she suggested eudaimonia is the obvious answer as it is not dependent on God. Other modern philosophers such as Alasdair Macintyre believed that ethical theories just resulted in disagreements and that morality should be seen
As a further definition, Mackie posits that an objective moral value has the quality of ‘ought-to-be-pursued-ness’, it is something one should or ought do because it contains an inherently normative aspect. If Mackie’s argument is to succeed, it must prove that this supposed normative aspect has no existence within any act in itself, but has its origin in the agent of said act, and as such, all moral claims are false. Mackie’s exposition of moral relativism comes in the form of two main arguments, the first being his ‘argument from relativity’, the second, his ‘argument from queerness’. It is with the argument from relativity that I shall be here concerned. The argument from relativity is based around the purely ‘descriptive’ idea that it is an empirically observable fact that there seems to be
In searching for what nonconsequentialist believe, I found that it is the opposition of consequentalism. One view that is in opposition to consequentialism is deontology. Alexander describes dentology: In contemporary moral philosophy, deontology is one of those kinds of normative theories regarding which choices are morally required, forbidden, or permitted. In other words, deontology falls within the domain of moral theories that guide and assess our choices of what we ought to do (deontic theories), in contrast to (aretaic [virtue] theories) that—fundamentally, at least—guide and assess what kind of person (in terms of character traits) we are and should be. And within that domain, deontologists—those who subscribe to deontological theories of morality—stand in opposition to
Some people believe that culture is a way that morality can be established, but morality differs from culture to culture. In Doing Ethics, Lewis Vaughn talks about cultural relativism and lays out an argument for it. In the second premise it states “If people’s judgments about right and wrong differ from culture to culture, then right and wrong are relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles” (Vaughn 26). He makes it clear that he does not support this premise and explains his points as to why this is false. Cultural relativism is the idea that the moral principles someone has are solely determined by the culture one lives in.
Thus, since cultural relativism states that we can’t judge other cultures moral codes, then we must be tolerant of them. The Cultural Relativism theory generates an argument in a form of proposing a conclusion about morality based upon facts of a culture. For example, infanticide is a moral code of the Eskimo society. The Eskimo’s believe that infanticide is morally acceptable while American’s view infanticide as iniquitous. As a conclusion, infanticide is not right or wrong because it depends on the cultures opinion and beliefs about infanticide.
James Rachels, in his The Challenge of Cultural Moral Relativism, argues that cultural moral relativism, the standard y which people find things acceptable or not depending on their own cultures, is not a relevant and ethical way to judge cultures and their practices. His arguments aim at explaining why, just because a practice or belief is held to be true by a society or culture at large, does not make it right or ethical ultimately, or free from criticism. Perez 2 Upon learning of a certain ethnic or socioeconomic group discriminating or otherwise persecuting another group, weather drawing lines of distinction based on racial or other criteria, most people recoil in distaste and reproach. From the Indian caste system, which relegates some people to menial, undesirable positions of labor, to the German Third Reich, which decided weather people lived or died depending on their ethnic and religious background, exterminating millions of people, what is and has been seen
This essay aims to prove ethical objectivism by using the form of moderate objectivism. I will first prove the truth of the various premises of this argument and then consider the strongest objection against moderate objectivism that is the queerness argument. The queerness argument put forth by Mackie is in favour of error theory. Firstly, there is a need to establish that there is a common human nature; there is a common set of interests that is independent of cultural influences. A common human nature is an ambiguous term to use and it is impossible to establish that everyone have the same interests.