Meta-ethics

Meta-ethics means “beyond ethics”, in other words, rather than asking whether an action is good or bad (normative ethics), meta-ethics asks “what does goodness or badness mean?” In meta-ethics we discover how language functions, and whether moral language is a special type of language.

Moral theories divide into two branches. Naturalists argue that goodness is a natural feature of the world  because it’s an observable property, a moral fact if you like, subject to empirical research and observation.   This was the position of the utilitarian thinkers.  Non-naturalists argue that moral goodness is not a natural feature of the world, but a subjective intuition, or an expression of emotion (emotivism), or a logical property of how we reason (prescriptivism and the ethics of Kant).

The debate really began with Hume, who argued that it is problematic moving from a descriptive statement to a normative statement, an “is” to an ought. Although Hume was himself an ethical naturalist (one of many paradoxes in this branch of ethics), he is the father of logical positivism, which itself produced the theory of emotivism in the 1920s and 1930s. Emotivists such as A.J Ayer are building on Hume’s insights and those of the Vienna School of empiricism, known as logical positivism. By concentrating on the language of morality these theorists hope to uncover something about the grounds of morality – and their hidden agenda, if you like, which turned their task into something of a crusade, was to destroy the meaningless (but dangerously authoritarian, as they saw it) grip of metaphysics.

Go to the weblinks section for a fascinating interview of the great emotivist A.J.Ayer by Brian Magee.

Go to the handout for an analysis of the fact/value (is/ought) problem and how this spawned emotivism (Ayer and Stevenson), intuitionism (Moore, Prichard and Ross) and prescriptivism (Hare).

Meta-ethics may seem at first an irrelevance, a strange obsession for the intellectuals in their ivory towers. But on closer inspection it is actually fundamental – if we are talking and thinking nonsense, or if our arguments are fallacious (invalid) then the human race really is doomed to lurch from one tyrannical thought system to another, or from one superstition to the next.

To be liberated to redeem our future we have to reason – but to reason we must be sure we know what we mean and believe something meaningful.

The best introductory treatment is found in Jones et al chapter 3 – see the bibliography (and be warned, A level textbooks in their desire to keep things nice and simple can be prone to serious error in this part of the course). The best slightly more advanced treatment is found in Pojman’s outstanding book Ethics – discovering right and wrong, (2006, chapter 11).