First, I’d like to apologize for my hiatus. I’m not going to start making any excuses, but I genuinely want to commit myself to posting regularly on this page! Anyways, I thought it would be fitting to bring it back to my roots and talk about some philosophical foundations that were noticeably lacking throughout my posts.
I like to think of ethics as a tree (I know, cliché right) with three main branches. The first branch is normative ethics, i.e. Kantian ethics, which seeks to guide moral action. The second is applied ethics, which, as delineated in the name itself, deals with the applications of ethics and morality to real world issues, i.e. controversial topics such as abortion, capital punishment, war tactics, etc. Personally, I find applied ethics especially interesting since I feel like its tangible real-world relevancy helps to ground often abstract conceptualizations of philosophical thought and ethical questions. Lastly, the branch which we will be focusing on today is metaethics, or the study of the nature of ethics and morality itself. Funny enough, the distinctions I am making between applied, normative, and metaethics themselves is a form of metaethical analysis.[1]
While ethics grapples with the idea of what behaviors or actions are right or wrong, metaethics studies the foundations of these ideas themselves, through questioning what morality is at its core. In official terms, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines metaethics as “the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice. It seeks ultimately to comprehend and evaluate the nature of ethical properties and analyses. Therefore, this brings up questions such as: Do objective moral facts exist? It is sensical to discuss moral progress? What do moral judgements mean to different individuals? Do moral judgements motivate us to action? What is the meaning of moral language?
There are two main subcategories subsumed under the broader idea of metaethics. These distinctions are mostly semantic, dealing with the meaning and intentionality behind moral terminology and statements. The first is cognitivism, which holds that moral statements express propositions[2], meaning that they are truth-apt. Thus, moral statements have the capability of being objectively true of false since they are descriptive of some external reality in the world. For example, if I say killing is morally wrong, that is making a cognitivist statement of truth. On the other hand, non-cognitivism rejects the notion of moral declarations being truth-apt. Rather, it views moral discourse as a way to express attitudes towards certain actions. This view can be famously found in Humean thought, which assigns moral distinctions to affect/emotional appeal rather than objective rationality. For example, if I yell “Boo! Killing,” I am not making a statement of truth or falsity but merely expressing my emotional sentiments towards the behavior (Ayer). Some cognitivists believe that moral statements that presuppose moral properties are false, thus resembling a sort of amorality in which they do not associate actions as being either wrong or right. However, they can still assign truth value to statements, i.e. they can still view the statement “killing is wrong” as true despite not articulating whether killing is necessarily wrong or right. This view, also known as error theory, was introduced originally by Mackie.
Cognitivist thought encompasses two primary beliefs. The first is relativism, whose central thesis is that there exists no universal truth, but rather that all moral judgements are subjective based on differing contexts and perceptions. Essentially, it implies that all moral judgements are equally correct, which is somewhat infinitely regressive since that would mean no theory is necessarily true or false, thus being rather self-defeating in terms of following cognitivist thought. Nonetheless, it still assigns truth value to moral statements. Beneath relativism lies multiple forms. The first is cultural relativism, which says that morality is defined by cultural elements. Agent relativism bases morality on the individual and their actions, and speaker relativism focuses on the speaker and their claims. The second primary view of cognitivism is moral realism, which is statistically the most popular form of metaethics among philosophers. Contrary to relativism, it claims that there are such things as moral facts and values that are objective and independent of individual orientations towards them. Naturalism lies under this theory, arguing that morality is derived from the natural world and thus can be reduced down into natural properties that constitute a posteriori (empirical) knowledge. On the other hand, non-naturalism believes that moral values are independent of nature, rather characterizing natural actions or behaviors as good or bad.
Beneath the umbrella of noncognitivism also lies several different varieties. Emotivism, popularized by A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson, holds that ethical declarations express solely emotions, specifically those of approval or disapproval. Another type, prescriptivism, claims that moral statements serve as universalizable imperatives or commands meant to influence the behaviors of all others. For example, the proposition “murder is wrong” actually means “Do not kill!” Expressivism, rather similarly, argues that moral statements do not assert any objective fact, but rather express an attitude. Another interesting term beneath this umbrella is Quasi-Realism, originally defended by Simon Blackburn, which states that ethical statements behave as factual claims that can reasonably be assigned some sort of truth value. Nonetheless, they cannot be called realist since there exist no ethical facts for them to associate with or correspond to.
Though metaethics seems to operate in rather abstract terms, it is extremely useful in pragmatic deliberation when explaining whether or not individuals are morally accountable for actions they take or fail to take. John Green presents an interesting scenario in his video on metaethics which goes as follows: You are a thief trying to rob the house of an old lady. The doors are all locked shut, so you decide that the only way to get in is through breaking the windows. However, what you didn’t know is that the old lady is lying on the floor in critical condition due to a carbon monoxide leak in her house. Thus, when you broke the windows, you let out the toxic gas, consequently saving the lady’s life. Since the cops come, you don’t actually end up stealing anything. This brings up a few ethical questions. Did you do the morally righteous thing by technically saving the lady’s life? Or was your attempted act of stealing immoral nonetheless? Does the fact that you did not end up stealing anything diminish the immorality of the act, or is the intentionality more important? Thus, complicated yet real-life scenarios like these involving intentionality, consequences, and moral application explain why metaethics is so necessary in deciding whether or not moral actions should be accompanied by a degree of accountability. Furthermore, this sense of implied responsibility or a lack thereof brings up the subject of free will, and whether or not responsibility presupposes free will. In the context of politics, metaethics can help us explain (or complicate) toleration in liberal democratic societies. Are certain moral differences intolerable? On a paradoxical level, is it possible to tolerate intolerable actions? Some relativists take these conflicts into account and explain that morality should thus be acknowledged as a subjective concept. Nonetheless, this runs into further issues as cultures of extreme intolerance, i.e. Neo-Nazism can be rationalized as equally as moral as any other perception of morality, thus likely promoting a sense of intolerance while diminishing any remnant of what is actually tolerable or “good.” After all, ethics are complicated, especially when viewed on a meta level.
[1] That’s so meta!!
[2] An assertion or declarative statement
Conscient Thoughts 