Analytic ethics

« Analytic ethics Moral philosophy has traditionally been divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics.

Normative ethics concerns judgments about what is good and how we should act.

Meta-ethics, with which 'analytic ethics' istypically identified, seeks to understand such judgments.

Are they factual statements capable of being literallytrue or false ( cognitivism )? Or are they commands or expressions of attitude, capable only of greater or lesser appropriateness or efficacy ( noncognitivism )? Cognitivists focus on whether the facts to which they claim moral judgments correspond are discovered from experience, or whether they occupy a different realm, as domathematical facts.

Noncognitivists, in contrast, arguing that moral judgments are not fact-stating, ask if theysignal our feelings or commitments, or are imperatives of conduct.

Other questions concerning moral judgmentsinclude whether they are subjective or objective, and how they are connected to motivation.

Analytic ethicstherefore not only concerns the meaning of moral terms, but ranges over such areas as epistemology,metaphysics and the theory of action.

As a field it remains full of controversy.

It has developed approaches thatafford specific insights into morality, and contributed to our understanding of the functions of thought andlanguage.

1 From intuitionism to noncognitivism Prior to the twentieth century, questions about the nature of moral judgment were framed primarily in substantive terms: Which ‘faculties' are involved? What sorts of acts ortraits of character are morally good or bad, right or wrong? Some philosophers (such as Hutcheson and Hume)emphasized the role of sentiment, while others (such as Kant) stressed reason.

Some (Hume, Kant) took ordinarymoral practice as a touchstone, while others (Bentham, Mill) attempted to defend an ‘external standard' that couldreform moral opinion.

In the twentieth century, G.E.

Moore succeeded in founding a new tradition that came to insist upon a rigorous separation of questions of meaning from substantive questions.

In Principia Ethica (1903), he introduced the ‘open question' argument: for any purported analysis A of a moral concept in nonmoral terms (for example, ‘Good' = ‘Conducive to happiness'), consider the question, ‘Yes, I see that x is A (for instance, x conduces to happiness), but is x good?'; if this question is intelligible, and not as trivial as, ‘Is x, which is A, also A?', then even if we come to agree that A is good, A cannot simply be what we mean in calling something ‘good'.

Moore used this argument to advance his claim that ‘good' names a sui generis , non-natural property, known by a kind of rational intuition (see Intuitionism in ethics ).

Moore also believed that this property supervenes on natural properties: any two things with just the same natural properties would necessarily be equally good (or bad) (seeSupervenience ).

Natural properties were thus seen as ‘good-making', but Moore thought it a ‘naturalistic fallacy' to equate good with them.

Subsequent philosophers tended to agree that good cannot be analytically reduced to anatural property, but rejected Moore's rational intuition.

Logical positivists, for example, divided cognitivelysignificant propositions into two categories, the analytic, knowable a priori because tautological, and the synthetic,knowable a posteriori by empirical means.

Intuitionist claims of synthetic a priori moral knowledge fit neithercategory: the open question argument showed that substantive moral theories are not analytic, but the lack of anyempirical procedure for resolving fundamental moral disputes showed that they could not be synthetic either.

Loyalto the positivist bifurcation, A.J.

Ayer ( 1936 ) concluded that moral judgments expressed not cognitively significant propositions, but emotions (see Ayer, A.J. ).

C.L.

Stevenson ( 1944 ) endorsed this conclusion, though not for positivistic reasons, and moreover showed how emotivism could explain something intuitionism had made verymysterious - the seeming ‘magnetism' or ‘action-guidingness' of moral judgments.

Intuitionists see moral judgmentsas descriptions of a special realm of abstract qualities, such as moral rightness.

But description seems motivationallyneutral.

Why then is it odd for someone to say, ‘This is the right thing to do, but I'm in no way for it'? (Contrast thiswith the remark, ‘This is the tidiest thing to do, but I'm in no way for it.') Emotivists, on the other hand, seejudgments of moral rightness as expressions of one's approval of a course of action, establishing a necessary or‘internal' connection to the speaker's motivations.

Moral disagreement among speakers is seen as conflict inattitudes or commitments among speakers, given its special interest by the need for resolving the question, ‘Howshould I (or we) act?'.

Emotivism is one form of noncognitivism, which interprets moral judgments as expressions orimperatives, not as descriptions of ‘objective reality'.

Must noncognitivists therefore see moral judgments as ‘merelysubjective', immune to rational argument and liable to revision whenever the mood strikes? Stevenson, R.M.

Hare(1952 ) and others have argued that nothing in noncognitivism prevented speakers from seeing their attitudes as based upon straightforwardly cognitive, objective considerations, so long as this relation is not seen as an analyticderivation (see Hare, R.M. ).

Perhaps it is part of what makes an attitude moral that one is committed to universalizing the judgments it supports or giving certain kinds of impersonal reasons in its defence.

By the 1950s,noncognitivism's combination of explanatory power with freedom from metaphysical baggage enabled it thoroughlyto supplant intuitionism as the dominant position in analytic ethics.

2 Challenges to noncognitivism Not everyone was convinced that noncognitivism could adequately accommodate the cognitive aspects of moral thought andlanguage.

Peter Geach ( 1965 ) pointed out that noncognitivists failed to show how moral claims, construed as essentially non-propositional, could display the full logic and grammar of propositions, as actual moral judgmentsunquestionably do.

If, for example, ‘Stealing is wrong' expresses one's attitude of disapproval of stealing, then howare we to understand the conditional, ‘If stealing is wrong, then stealing without being caught is still wrong', whichcould be asserted sincerely by someone who does not disapprove of stealing at all? Recent noncognitivists, notablySimon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard, have taken up Geach's challenge, but it is fair to say that no fully satisfactorysolution has yet been given.

Critics like Philippa Foot ( 1978 ) and Geoffrey Warnock followed a different strategy against noncognitivism, in part by noting that the open question argument has narrower scope than previouslysupposed.

Understanding moral language, they argued, involves grasping certain contentful relations of relevance aswell as knowing how to use its expressive force.

Consider the remark, ‘This new petrochemical project is an ethicalmarvel; it will make our firm famous throughout the world! Of course, it will cause human dislocation and suffering -but what could that possibly have to do with ethics?' Such a remark would betray a very imperfect understanding ofmoral language, even on the part of someone indifferent to human suffering who nevertheless cared unconditionallyabout the fame of his company.

A plausible noncognitivism must at least allow that substantive norms of relevancegovern moral discourse and that descriptive content can thereby accrue to moral language in a secondary way.

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