Meta Ethics

From the Greek ‘meta’ (meaning ‘beyond’). Meta-ethics is the study of underlying ethical ideas or ethical language

Normative ethics is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when we think about the question “how ought one to act, morally speaking?” Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics because it examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, while meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts

Cognitivist is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false (they are truth-apt), which non cognitivists deny

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world.

A statement the truth value of which is determined by the meanings of its terms;e.g., "All squares are four-sided." It is sometimes said (e.g. by Kant), when a statement is in simple subject-predicate form, that an analytic statement is one in which the predicate (e.g., the property of being four-sided) is-"contained within" the subject (the concept of a square

A statement the truth value of which depends on 'the way-the world is; e.g., "New Orleans is the largest city in Louisiana."
Synthetic statements are all those statements which are not analytic, or in other words, any statement the truth of which cannot be determined by linguistic meaning alone

The key principle of naturalism is that goodness and morals can be derived from the natural world using similar definitive terms to those used in science. In contrast intuitionism states that we have an innate knowledge of goodness, but it cannot be defined in terms of anything else.

G.E. Moore likened it to the colour yellow in that it cannot be broken down any further

Non naturalism in theatre is a way of describing and portraying something that isn't necessarily there. It is obviously contrasted with naturalism. It argues the aspect of reality and pushes another dimension into it, either using space, time, object.

One was the realist thesis that moral and more generally normative judgements – like many of his contemporaries, Moore did not distinguish the two — are objectively true or false. The other was the autonomy-of-ethics thesis that moral judgements are sui generis, neither reducible to nor derivable from non-moral, that is, scientific or metaphysical judgements. It follows that our knowledge of moral truths is intuitive, in the sense that it is not arrived at by inference from non-moral truths but rests on our recognizing certain moral propositions as self-evident

Naturalistic fallacy – when what ‘ought to be’ is derived from what ‘is’; also known as a perspective which reduces the question of values to that of facts; logically classified as a fallacy of definition,Naturalistic fallacy was originally presented by G.E. Moore in his book Principia Ethics in 1903

There are two different types of thinking – intuition and reasoning
• Our reasoning gathers information about a moral issue and our intuition decides what is the right course of action to take
• People come to different ethical conclusions because not everyone is as morally enlightened

In the same way we
know what good means but cannot
define it.”

There are several prima facie duties that we can use to determine what, concretely, we ought to do. A prima facie duty is a duty that is binding (obligatory) other things equal, that is, unless it is overridden or trumped by another duty or duties.

Emotivism is a philosophical theory that analyses moral statements