SEP Metaethics

But at least part of Hume's concern seems to have been that no set of claims about plain matters of fact (‘is’ claims) entail any evaluative claims (‘ought’ claims).

Whereas if a certain thing is morally good it seems that everyone necessarily has at least some reason (perhaps overrideable or defeasible, but still some reason) to promote, pursue, protect, or respect it — at least if they recognize that it is good.

Moral Epistemology
6.

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Metaethics
First published Tue Jan 23, 2007

Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.

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Metaethics
First published Tue Jan 23, 2007

Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.

Naturalism, Non-naturalism, and Supernaturalism
4.

Between the beliefs we might have and the other attitudes we might form, no entailment relations hold at all.

As such, it counts within its domain a broad range of questions and puzzles, including: Is morality more a matter of taste than truth?

Thus those versions of non-cognitivism that see making a moral judgment as a matter of expressing some motivating attitude have an easier time explaining the internal connection (if there is one) between sincerely making a moral judgment and having an appropriate motive, while certain naturalist cognitivist proposals, for instance those that identify goodness with having the capacity to garner approval from someone who is fully informed, must hold that a person might sincerely judge that som...

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Metaethics
First published Tue Jan 23, 2007

Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.

They reflect the fact that metaethics involves an attempt to step back from particular substantive debates within morality to ask about the views, assumptions, and commitments that are shared by those who engage in the debate.

Others have thought that there is a connection, again, a necessary connection, between there being a reason for someone to act or be a certain way and that person being, or at least being able to be, motivated in a certain way.[13]

And it seems too that in asking the question she would not then be revealing any kind of conceptual confusion or incompetence.

Whether any view that is recognizably still a view about the nature and status of ethics could manage this is dubious.

Metaethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility.[1]

Of course leaving room for an account is not the same as actually providing one, and Moore himself does not actually offer much at all by way of an explanation of the normative authority (as we might call it) of moral properties.

On the practical side, many have pressed the difficulty of getting people to judge themselves and others impartially; others have worried that, while we have an interest in convincing others to conform to morality, we ourselves rarely have any reason, really, to conform; still others have thought that the sort of freedom morality assumes is not available to humans as they actually are.

As a result, they are commonly characterized as versions of naturalism and are contrasted with non-naturalist views that see morality as presupposing, or being committed to, properties over and above those that would be countenanced by natural science.

If, though, to think something good is different than thinking it pleasant, such thoughts (Moore assumed) must involve attributing distinct properties.

“The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms,” Mind 46: 14-31.

Non-naturalism comes with two distinctive burdens: (i) accounting for how the realm of moral properties fits in with familiar natural properties and (ii) explaining how it is that we are able to learn anything about these moral properties.

Moreover, conventions seem liable to arbitrariness in ways that threaten to undermine their claim to authority unless they are recognized (at least implicitly) as satisfying some convention-independent standard.

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Metaethics
First published Tue Jan 23, 2007

Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.

Essays in Quasi-Realism.

On still other accounts, moral judgments are such that only a sui generis epistemology would make sense of our capacity to acquire moral knowledge.

But at least part of Hume's concern seems to have been that no set of claims about plain matters of fact (‘is’ claims) entail any evaluative claims (‘ought’ claims).

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Metaethics
First published Tue Jan 23, 2007

Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.

What has always been attractive about Moorean non-naturalism is its capacity to combine the continuity and the difference into a coherent picture.

[4] But that does not mean that they think that the standards that serve to justify the demands of (some) conventions are mysterious.

Of course, Socrates's position brings along a suite of puzzles concerning the nature of these transcendent standards.

Whether any view that is recognizably still a view about the nature and status of ethics could manage this is dubious.

All of these views, conventionalist and not, identify various moral properties with non-problematic natural features of the world.

One plausible answer might be that God's perfect knowledge of right and wrong, or God's own moral perfection, explains why his commands serve legitimately as standards for us.

Moral Principles and Particular Judgments
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Moral Principles and Particular Judgments
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Such reflection quickly reveals the extent to which various aspects of morality might reasonably be seen as both intellectually and practically problematic.

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Metaethics
First published Tue Jan 23, 2007

Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.

By and large, the metaethical issues that emerge as a result of this process of stepping back can be addressed without taking a particular stand on substantive moral issues that started the process.

Many argue that, while Moore's argument shows that thinking something is good is different than thinking it is pleasant (or the object of a desire, or such as to conform to some norm that is in force), it does not show that being good is different from being pleasant (or the object of a desire, or such as to conform to some norm that is in force).

Are moral standards culturally relative?

“The Naturalistic Fallacy,” Mind, 48: 464-477.

Correspondingly, no amount of empirical investigation seems by itself, without some moral assumption(s) in play, sufficient to settle a moral question.

The Possibility of Altruism.

In saying something is good or right or virtuous we seem to be saying something more than, or at least different from, what we would be saying in describing it as having certain natural features.

Metaethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility.[1]

Moral Relativity.

"Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 12: 317-345.

Metaethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility.[1]

Socrates, in contrast, rejects the idea that justice is a human invention and argues instead that justice provides independent and eternal standards against which human practices, conventions, and institutions can be judged.

These questions lead naturally to puzzles about the meaning of moral claims as well as about moral truth and the justification of our moral commitments.

General Observations

The range of issues, puzzles and questions that fall within metaethics’ purview are consistently abstract.

Metaethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility.[1]

As Moore saw things, to make a moral claim is to express a distinctive belief (that might be true or false) about how things are.

It is worth emphasizing that positive theories of moral epistemology are inevitably bound up with accounts of the nature of moral judgment and their metaphysical presuppositions and commitments.

Morals, motives, and reasons
7.

Whatever view one ends up adopting concerning the connections that hold (or do not hold) among moral properties, moral judgments, reasons for action, and effective motivations, no account is plausible as a vindication of morality unless it makes sense of how and why moral considerations might properly figure in practical deliberation that results in decision and action.

Are there moral facts?

While these views differed among themselves as to what goodness, rightness, virtue and justice might consist in, they shared a commitment to seeing morality as a wholly natural phenomena and they all saw moral judgment as a matter of thinking that actions, institutions, or characters had some particular natural property or other.

Metaethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility.[1]

A careful and clear-eyed study of morality will reveal, some argue, that morality is a myth; others argue that the various principles that are presented as authoritative standards for all are actually merely expressions of emotion or projections of the idiosyncratic attitudes of those advocating the principles; still others argue that in some other way morality is not what it pretends to be and not what it needs to be if it is to be legitimate.

One plausible answer might be that God's perfect knowledge of right and wrong, or God's own moral perfection, explains why his commands serve legitimately as standards for us.

Many have thought the right answers to these questions are found in an appeal to God.

Much of the Republic is then given over to Socrates’ attempt to develop first an account of the nature of morality (specifically, of justice) and then, second, to arguing that being moral is valuable regardless of the consequences.

A careful and clear-eyed study of morality will reveal, some argue, that morality is a myth; others argue that the various principles that are presented as authoritative standards for all are actually merely expressions of emotion or projections of the idiosyncratic attitudes of those advocating the principles; still others argue that in some other way morality is not what it pretends to be and not what it needs to be if it is to be legitimate.

Some metaethicists early in the twentieth century went so far as to hold that their own work made no substantive moral assumptions at all and had no practical implications.[2]

Socrates, in contrast, rejects the idea that justice is a human invention and argues instead that justice provides independent and eternal standards against which human practices, conventions, and institutions can be judged.

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Moreover, while (on these accounts) particular claims concerning value will prove hard to establish and controversial, there is no special puzzle about what we would be trying to discover or what would count as relevant evidence.

Much of the work in metaethics pursued a strategy of finding companions in guilt, of showing that the status of moral properties as non-natural and the attendant implications for what we must suppose about the nature of moral evidence, if we are to take ourselves as having any, did not leave morality any worse off than other respected fields of knowledge.

Yet conventionalist views such as Glaucon's have real difficulties fitting with the common idea that the fundamental principles of morality are universal.

Specifically, if morality is (as Glaucon's proposal would have it) constituted solely by a set of conventional rules we put in place to secure the benefits we receive from the restraint of others, it looks as if the only reason (and the only motive) we would each have for conforming to the rules would be found in the consequences we hope such compliance would secure.

Much of the work in metaethics pursued a strategy of finding companions in guilt, of showing that the status of moral properties as non-natural and the attendant implications for what we must suppose about the nature of moral evidence, if we are to take ourselves as having any, did not leave morality any worse off than other respected fields of knowledge.

These questions lead naturally to puzzles about the meaning of moral claims as well as about moral truth and the justification of our moral commitments.

But paying attention to the degree to which people count as moral (or immoral) not because of what they say or believe, but because of how they act, is important to appreciating both the nature of morality and what all a plausible account of moral knowledge must encompass.

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According to these views, moral properties were to be identified with some natural property or other (e.g. with what is pleasant, or what satisfies someone's desire, or what conforms to social rules that are in force).

But that answer assumes that standards of morality exist independently of God's will (either as objects of his knowledge or as standards in light of which He counts as morally perfect), in which case speaking of morality as consisting of God's commands will not explain the origin or nature of these independently existing standards.

Of course leaving room for an account is not the same as actually providing one, and Moore himself does not actually offer much at all by way of an explanation of the normative authority (as we might call it) of moral properties.

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How might moral facts be related to other facts (about psychology, happiness, human conventions…)?

Are moral standards culturally relative?