Metaethics Essay, Research Paper

To make a statement on the ethical goodness or badness about some action can be neither true nor false due to the fact that this statement is merely an opinion of mine and not actually based on facts. This opinion is an extension of my expression that this action performed is wrong. I can express my opinion in many different ways such as body language or speech but none of these will make the opinion I have, or in this case the statement I make, true or false. There are also those statements in which we express our moral standards to others.

A large part of morality involves assessing people’s conduct and pronouncing judgments, such as “Ted is a good person,” “Bob did the right thing,” and “Feed the starving.” When we make these assessments, we rely on key terms such as “good,” “right,” “ought,” and “should.” Sometimes we use language to describe things, such as “the door is brown.” Other times we use language to accomplish something, such as “get away from that hot stove!” This is also the case with moral utterances such as “We should all feed the starving” which attempts to describe the notion of giving, and also attempts to accomplish something, such as to motivate us to feed the starving.

Lets say for example I see a homeless person on the street and the friend I am walking with tosses him a dollar. I turn to my friend and say, “ it is right to feed the starving”. By making this statement I am implying two things: 1. I am expressing my personal feelings of approval that it is ethically right to feed the starving, 2. That others ought to feed the starving. ,” you are describing the starving being fed as a good thing. You might also be describing feeding as the kind of act that makes people happy, or that increases the quality of your life. In either case, though, you are describing feeding by linking it to some quality.

This view is that of a subjectivist. “Subjectivity” is a term used to denote that the truth of some class of statements depends on the mental state or reactions of the person making the statement. In this case my opinion on the starving. When applied to ethics, subjectivism is the view that statements about a person’s character or their actions are not reports of objective qualities inherent in those things. Instead we are either reporting our own inner feelings and attitudes (by speech) or we are merely expressing our feelings (body language, tone of voice). Ethical judgments, such as “We should all feed the starving,” then, are mixtures of both descriptive (cognitive) and accomplishment-oriented (noncognitive) components.

Accomplishment-oriented or noncognitivism is the view that moral statements are neither true nor false statements about the world. They are, instead, expressions of feelings or emotions we possess at the time the statement is made. The key to noncognitivism is distinguishing between two types of statements: propositional statements, and nonpropositional statements. Propositional statements are either true or false statements about the world, such as the following:

? The dog is brown

? The truck is on fire

To test for whether the statement “the door is brown” is propositional, we need only to ask, “Is it true or false that ‘the door is brown?’” Since this question is intelligible, then the statement, “the door is brown” is propositional. Nonpropositional sentences, are statements which are not propositional. Examples of these are,

? What time is it?

? Oh, my aching head!

Although we understand what is being said by each of these statements, they are neither true nor false statements about the world. Moral statements are in the same boat even though they seem to prepositional statements they are actually “nonpropositional” statements which are disguised as propositions. This view is called noncognitivism since it contends that the truth value of moral statements cannot be known or proven. To make a moral statement such as “murder is wrong” is not true or false but merely an attempt to impose our view on someone else.

So why do we make moral statements if they have no validity one way or the other? A variety of answers may be given. We act morally or try to impose our morals on others to avoid punishment, to gain praise, to attain happiness, to be dignified, or to fit in with society. It is perceived that one is a good person if they act in an ethically sound way. So natural one would make statements about their actions or how others ought to act, to associate themselves with an ethically sound lifestyle.

To dispute this argument one would take the conventionalist approach and hold that there are ethical truths. They maintain that truths are true because someone says so. Conventionalists say we can true ethical statements because they are arbitrary decisions made by groups of people as a whole. This is ethical relativism. This states that what is right or wrong is determined by the society in which you live. If your society holds that poking children for fun is wrong, then it is wrong for you to poke little children, and it is true to say so.