Meta Ethics

What is normative ethics?

Normative ethics deals with what things are right and wrong. It helps people to understand what is right and moral and wrong and immoral. Normative ethics tells people what to and not to do.

What is meta ethics?

Meta ethics deals with what it means to claim that something is right or wrong. It is like a foregin language as you have to know what the words in a statement mean to understand what is being siad. for example, in the statement 'this is a good gun.'. Normative ethics would explore whether the good is moreally good, whilst meta ethics would try to understand what we mean by it.

Cognitive views.

Cognitivism is the idea that statements are capable of being true or false. There are two views of cognitivism. The first view is naturalism. Naturalism is a type of moral realism and believes that there is such thing as right anf wrong and this can be worked out empirically with experience. The second type is intuitionism. Intuitionism believes that there is such a thing as goodness but goodness is not like other properties. It cannot be worked out or experienced but we have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. Naturalism agrees with intuitionism that there are moral facts however disagrees as to how those moral facts can be logically or empirically deduced. Intuitionists believe that moral facts are just known by intuition.

There are a number of different types of naturalism. What they have in common is that they beleiev that thigs yiu can observe in the world, lead you to moral truths:

- Mill believes that observatuon of pleasure and pain will lead you to moral truths.

- Aquinas believed that observation of God's purpose will lead you to moral truths.

- Bradley believed that observation of social norms will lead you to moral truths.

One problem with naturalism is the idea of naturalistic fallacy suggested by Hume. The naturalistic fallacy says that it is a mistake to identify a moral claim, about what is good, with something that is natural. For example, you have sharp teeth, It is part of your nature to eat meat. Therefore is it good it eat meat and wrong tot just eat vegetables? You cannot fraw the 'wrongness' just because it is not empirical.

G.E Moore…