3. Meta-Ethics: Evaluation of Ethical Naturalism
- Created by: Alasdair
- Created on: 25-06-17 16:42
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- 3. Evaluation of Ethical Naturalism
- Strengths
- Based on what is natural
- Everyone can experience it
- Nature is universal so supports argument that morals can be universally known
- Fact
- Presents a solid guideline that ethics follow in every situation
- Based on what is natural
- Weaknesses
- Regardless of whether a situation may have evidence to support that it is right (euthanasia) it may still break the law
- Pointless
- Right and wrong are subjective not objective
- Need humans to exist to determine how we should live
- Do ethical/moral situations have evidence?
- What evidence do we accept/ignore?
- Hume's Law: Is-ought distinction
- We can gather information about the world around us through sense experience (empiricism)
- We cannot move from an objective factual statement about observations to subjective moral one
- E.g. Forensics
- A man is dead = verified but cannot find evidence of wrongness of murder
- E.g. Forensics
- Hume believed cannot move from a fact X is Y' or 'David is dead' to 'Do X instead of Y' or 'David is dead you ought not to kill'
- No amount of fact ever sufficient to imply ethical conclusion
- 'Is does not imply ought'
- Naturalistic Fallacy
- G. E. Moore
- Cannot identify goodness (ethical statements) with a natural quality
- Statement about the world (non-ethical statement)
- To claim moral statement can be verified or falsified
- Commit naturalistic fallacy
- Cannot infer a description of how the world 'ought' to be
- 'Is' are factual objective statements of value
- 'Ought' are ethical statements of value
- Cannot use facts to work out how we ought to act
- Regardless of whether a situation may have evidence to support that it is right (euthanasia) it may still break the law
- Strengths
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