You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Meta-ethics is the branch of moral philosophy that asks questions not about which actions are right or wrong, but about the nature, meaning and status of moral claims themselves. When someone says "murder is wrong," what kind of statement are they making? Are they stating a fact, expressing a feeling, or issuing a command? Can such a statement be true or false at all — and if so, what would make it true? These are the questions of meta-ethics, and within AQA A-Level Religious Studies (7062) the topic is framed around three named positions: Divine Command Theory, Naturalism (with utilitarianism as its example), and Non-naturalism / Intuitionism, enriched by the non-cognitivist theories of emotivism and prescriptivism.
It helps to distinguish three levels of ethical enquiry. Descriptive ethics reports what people in fact believe to be right. Normative ethics — the level of utilitarianism, natural law, Kant and situation ethics — argues about which actions actually are right and what makes them so. Meta-ethics steps back further still and asks about the language and reality underlying all such talk: what "good" and "ought" mean, whether there are any moral facts, and how, if at all, we could know them. Meta-ethics is the most abstract part of the course, but it underpins everything else, because one's view of what a moral claim is shapes how one understands every normative theory.
The connection to the normative theories is direct and examinable. Utilitarianism is, in meta-ethical terms, a form of naturalism (it identifies the good with a natural property, happiness). Natural moral law assumes a kind of moral realism and is vulnerable to the same naturalistic-fallacy charge. A commandment-based or strongly theistic ethic presupposes something close to Divine Command Theory. Kant's confidence that reason discloses an objective moral law is broadly cognitivist and realist, though non-natural. Recognising these links lets you use the normative theories you already know as worked examples of the meta-ethical positions — a powerful way to add depth and synoptic breadth to an answer.
Key term: Meta-ethics is the study of the meaning, nature and justification of moral language and moral judgements — what we mean by "good" or "wrong", whether moral claims can be true, and how moral knowledge (if any) is possible — rather than which particular actions are right.
The organising distinction in meta-ethics is between cognitivism and non-cognitivism.
| Position | Core claim | Moral statements are… | Can be true/false? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cognitivism | Moral statements express beliefs about how things are | Fact-stating propositions | Yes |
| Non-cognitivism | Moral statements do not express beliefs | Expressions of emotion, attitude or prescription | No |
Cognitivism holds that moral statements are truth-apt: they express propositions that are either true or false. To say "murder is wrong" is to make a claim — about the natural world, or about non-natural moral facts, or about God's will — that is, in principle, correct or incorrect. Non-cognitivism denies this: when I say "murder is wrong" I am not describing anything that could be true or false, but rather venting an attitude, or prescribing conduct. Every theory in this lesson can be located on one side or the other of this line, and stating clearly where each falls is the foundation of a strong answer.
An analogy helps. Compare three sentences: "the cat is on the mat" (a description that is true or false), "ouch!" (an exclamation that expresses pain but is neither true nor false), and "shut the door!" (a command that is neither true nor false). The cognitivist thinks "murder is wrong" is like the first; the emotivist thinks it is like the second; the prescriptivist thinks it is like the third. Seeing the dispute in these terms makes vivid what is really at stake — not which acts are wrong, but what sort of thing a moral judgement fundamentally is. The three named cognitivist theories on the specification (Divine Command Theory, naturalism, intuitionism) disagree among themselves only about what makes moral statements true (God's will, natural facts, or non-natural facts); they agree that moral statements can be true. The non-cognitivist theories deny even that.
Key term: A claim is cognitive (truth-apt) if it expresses something capable of being true or false; non-cognitive if it does not. The cognitivism/non-cognitivism debate is over which sort moral claims are.
Divine Command Theory (DCT) holds that moral statements are made true or false by the will or commands of God: an action is right because God commands it and wrong because God forbids it. "Murder is wrong" therefore states a fact — a fact about what God has commanded — so DCT is a cognitivist and realist theory. It is the most straightforwardly religious meta-ethical position, and it appeals to those who hold that morality must be anchored in something beyond human invention; a moral law, on this view, requires a moral lawgiver.
Key term: Divine Command Theory is the cognitivist meta-ethical view that what makes moral statements true is God's will: actions are right or wrong because God commands or forbids them.
The classic challenge to DCT is the Euthyphro dilemma, drawn from Plato's dialogue: is an action right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right? Each horn is awkward. If actions are right simply because God commands them, then morality looks arbitrary — had God commanded cruelty, cruelty would be good, which seems intolerable; and "God is good" threatens to mean only "God does what God commands", which is empty. If, instead, God commands actions because they are already right, then rightness is independent of God's will, and DCT is false as an account of what makes things right. Defenders reply, with thinkers in the tradition of Aquinas, that the dilemma is a false one: God commands what is good because God's own nature is perfectly good, so the standard is neither arbitrary fiat nor something above God, but God's own character. This "modified" or virtue-based Divine Command Theory — associated in modern philosophy of religion with writers such as Robert Adams, who identifies the good with God's own loving nature rather than with bare commands — is the standard reply, and it is worth knowing for the dialogue between ethics and religion. Whether the move truly escapes the dilemma, or merely relocates it (one can still ask whether God's nature is good because it is God's, or whether "good" names a standard God's nature happens to meet), is a central evaluative question.
A further difficulty is epistemological: even granting that morality is grounded in God's commands, how do we reliably know what God commands, given conflicting scriptures, traditions and interpretations, and the disturbing fact that terrible deeds have been done in the sincere belief that God required them? And there is the standard secular objection that DCT cannot guide non-believers, for whom talk of divine commands has no purchase — though a defender will reply that the truth of a moral claim need not depend on everyone's accepting its ground. Strengths of DCT, by contrast, are that it makes morality genuinely objective and authoritative (a real law with a real lawgiver), explains the felt sense of moral obligation as answerability to a person, and coheres with the convictions of the major theistic traditions.
Ethical naturalism holds that moral properties are natural properties — that moral facts are a kind of natural fact, and moral statements can therefore be known in broadly the way other facts about the world are known, by observation and reasoning about human life. "Good" is definable in natural terms, so "X is good" reduces to some claim about, for example, happiness, flourishing or the satisfaction of desire, which can in principle be investigated empirically.
Key term: Ethical naturalism is the cognitivist view that moral properties are (or reduce to) natural properties, so that moral statements are factual claims about the natural world, knowable by observation and reason.
The specification's chosen example of naturalism is utilitarianism. When Bentham or Mill identify the good with happiness or pleasure, they are treating a moral property (goodness) as a natural, empirically-tractable property (the balance of pleasure over pain), and reducing the moral question "what ought I to do?" to the factual question "what will maximise happiness?" This is naturalism in action: morality becomes, in principle, a matter of measurable fact. Other naturalists locate moral facts elsewhere — the idealist F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), for instance, grounded morality in the individual's concrete duties within their community and social roles ("my station and its duties"), holding moral claims to be objectively correct or incorrect — but utilitarian naturalism is the example to know for this specification.
The great strength of naturalism is that it keeps ethics objective and knowable, and ties it to the recognisable facts of human welfare. Its central difficulty is the one identified by G. E. Moore.
G. E. Moore (1873–1958), in Principia Ethica (1903), mounted the most influential attack on ethical naturalism. He argued that any attempt to define "good" in terms of a natural property — pleasure, happiness, what is desired, evolutionary fitness — commits what he called the naturalistic fallacy: it confuses the property of goodness with whatever natural thing happens to be good, and tries to reduce the former to the latter.
Key term: The naturalistic fallacy (Moore) is the alleged error of defining "good" in terms of any natural property. Moore held that "good" names a simple, unanalysable quality that cannot be reduced to anything else.
His argument for this is the open-question argument. Take any proposed definition, say "good = pleasant". If the definition were correct, then "is what is pleasant good?" would be a closed, trivial question — like asking "is what is pleasant pleasant?" — to which the answer is settled merely by understanding the words. But it is not trivial: it remains a genuine, open question whether something pleasant is really good, one we can sincerely ponder and meaningfully dispute. Since the question stays open for every proposed natural definition, "good" cannot mean any natural property; goodness is, Moore concludes, indefinable. He compares "good" to "yellow": you cannot define yellow in non-yellow terms, yet you know it directly; likewise you cannot define good, yet you can recognise it.
It is worth noting that "naturalistic fallacy" is sometimes used more loosely for the is–ought gap identified by David Hume — the point that one cannot validly infer an evaluative "ought" from purely factual "is" premises. The two are related but distinct: Hume's is a point about inference, Moore's about definition. Both, however, press hard on naturalism (and on natural moral law), and strong candidates distinguish them.
The naturalist is not without replies. Some argue that Moore's open-question argument assumes what it sets out to prove: it takes the fact that a definition does not feel obviously correct to show that it is false, but complex or theoretically-discovered identities (water = H₂O; heat = molecular motion) are also not obvious, yet are true. Perhaps "good = what conduces to flourishing" is a substantive, discoverable identity rather than a transparent one, in which case the question's remaining "open" to the untutored shows nothing. Others abandon the attempt to define good in natural terms while still holding that moral facts are natural facts (a view sometimes called non-reductive naturalism), thereby sidestepping the fallacy as Moore framed it. Whether these replies succeed is debated, but they show that naturalism is not simply refuted by Moore, and a top answer notes the rejoinders rather than treating the naturalistic fallacy as a knock-down blow.
Having argued that "good" is real but not a natural property, Moore concluded that it must be a non-natural property — objectively there, but not part of the empirical, observable world, and so known not by the senses but by a kind of moral intuition. This position is non-naturalism or intuitionism: it is cognitivist and realist (there are objective moral truths) but denies that those truths are natural facts.
Key term: Intuitionism / non-naturalism is the cognitivist view that objective moral truths exist as non-natural facts, known directly by moral intuition rather than by sense experience or argument.
For Moore, we apprehend the indefinable, non-natural property of goodness directly: we simply "see", intellectually, that certain things (he instanced the pleasures of friendship and the enjoyment of beauty) are good in themselves. Just as the simple quality yellow is known by acquaintance and not by definition, so good is known by intuition.
H. A. Prichard (1871–1947) applied intuitionism specifically to obligation — to "ought" rather than "good". In his 1912 essay "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" he argued that the search for a proof of our moral obligations is itself misconceived: we do not, and cannot, derive our duties from some more basic principle. Rather, when we attend carefully to a particular situation, we simply apprehend immediately what we ought to do, by an act of moral thinking that needs no further justification. Demanding an argument for why one ought to keep a promise, he held, is like demanding an argument for why the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles — once you see it clearly, no proof is needed or possible. Prichard also noted that moral intuitions can be sharpened by experience and mental maturity, while insisting they remain underivative.
W. D. Ross (1877–1971), in The Right and the Good (1930), developed intuitionism into a workable account of how we handle conflicting obligations. He held that we intuitively know a plurality of prima facie duties — duties that are genuinely binding other things being equal, but that can be outweighed by a weightier duty in a particular case. His (non-exhaustive) list includes:
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.