While Ethical Naturalists believe it holds great importance as it can convey facts and help us to understand ethical theories, there are those who strongly disagree with this. For example Intuitionists, such as Moore, believe that our intuition is more useful when wanting to know how to act morally than knowing the definitions of ethical terms. Although Non-Cognitive theories disagree with the factual content of ethical statements, it is clear that they still see some significance in ethical language. However rather than seeing it as facts, they accept that morality is subjective and suggest that the importance of ethical language is provided by the emotions conveyed in the phrases used. Perhaps more so than Emotivists, Prescriptivists see ethical language as fairly meaningful.
The answer to this question will vary. Some people are moral realists and hold that moral facts are objective facts that are out there in the world, these people believe that things are good or bad independently of us. Moral values such as goodness and badness are real properties of people in the same way that rough and smooth are properties of physical objects. This view is often referred to as cognitive language. 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.
Meta ethics tries to make sense of the terms and concepts used in ethical theories. Some people believe that ethical language is extremely meaningful as they argue it is essential to be able to define terms such as “good” and “bad” before we can even begin to discuss ethical theories. However others disagree with this and argue that moral statements are subjective so cannot be meaningful as they cannot be described as either true or false. Those who hold cognitive theories about ethical language would argue that ethical statements are meaningful as they are about facts and can therefore be proved true or false. Ethical Naturalism is a cognitive theory of Meta ethics which holds the belief that ethical statements are the same as non ethical ones, so can be verified or falsified in the same way.
Moore would say we can see these self evident truths when, in an argument, we are reduced to “it’s just wrong,” they require no further explanation, proof or justification. This seems a fairly logical conclusion, in order to justify what we do we look at it in basic terms, but such a process could not take place indefinitely without coming to a base truth which could not be broken down further. It’s the classic “it just is” situation in an argument, where the statement cannot be further simplified nor justified. The problem however is agreeing on what these basic moral truths are. Moore and WD Ross a fellow intuitionist agreed that pleasure, knowledge and virtue are all intrinsically good, and pain, ignorance and vice are intrinsically bad.
Dissoi Logoi contains opposing arguments that can be argued either way. Its relevance to Rhetoric is that it allows us as readers to see that no argument can be made both bad and good, just and unjust, seemly and shameless. In our own minds we know right versus wrong, but not everyone has the same vision of what is right and what is wrong. What is wrong to one can be right to another and vice versa which appeals to the logos aspect of rhetoric. These notion of contradiction within this writing are rhetoric.
Typical words that could be said when in an argument are “that’s not fair”, “you are wrong” and “how’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”.The point Lewis is trying to make is that all humans, whether intentionally or not, follow some standard of behavior and expect others to follow it just as well. If there were no standard for right and wrong then Hitler’s actions would be considered acceptable behavior. Fault would be non-existent without a source of truth. In other words there cannot be wrong unless is a standard of rightness to compare one’s behavior to. Another point C.S Lewis makes when in The Law of Human Nature is that this law applies to all humans in all places and at all times.
Augustine defends the god of theism by rejecting the existence of evil as a force or power opposed to god as it would reject the premise that god is omnipotent. Below are the ways in which he justifies moral and natural evil, which respectively mean evil caused by human acts, and evil events caused by the processes of nature. To justify evil, he solves the problem by defining evil as a ‘privation’ – which means when something is ‘evil’, it is not defined to contain bad qualities but is seen to be falling short of perfection, or what it is expected to be. Take a rapist as an example. Adopting Augustine’s idea of ‘evil’, we are to say that he is not living up to standards expected of human beings.
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
According to Nagel, there is a paradox in moral responsibility caused by two concept: moral luck and the Control Principle. Moral luck designates blame on someone for actions outside of their control. The Control Principle, on the other hand, is the belief that blame should only be designated on someone for actions within their control. These two ideas are in direct contradiction of one another and it would be foolish to believe both. However, Nagel argues that we cannot plausibly reject either of them.
When a deductive argument is invalid, it is automatically considered unsound. Inductive arguments are judged on whether they are strong or weak. If the premises of an argument are considered to be true and the conclusion is not likely to be false, it is a strong argument. If there is a possibility that the conclusion may be false but the premises are still true, then the argument is weak. When an inductive argument is weak, it is automatically considered