Meta-ethics — AQA A-Level Philosophy

This topic asks where moral principles come from. Three candidate sources are named. Reason: moral judgements are reached by rational reflection, as when someone works out that a principle must be applied consistently to similar cases. Emotion/attitudes: moral judgements express or arise from feelings, approvals and disapprovals, so calling something wrong reports or expresses a negative attitude. Society: moral principles are generated and sustained by social agreement, custom, upbringing or shared convention. A strong answer distinguishes these sources, explains how each would account for the authority of a moral principle, and notes that they can combine: society may shape the attitudes a person then reasons about.

This topic concerns what ethical language does. Cognitivism holds that moral statements express beliefs and so can be true or false; on this view 'lying is wrong' asserts something that may be true or false, and moral knowledge is possible. Non-cognitivism holds that moral statements do not express beliefs but rather express attitudes, emotions or prescriptions, so they are not truth-apt in the same way; on this view 'lying is wrong' expresses disapproval or a prescription rather than stating a fact. The distinction is about the nature of moral utterances, not about whether people happen to agree. A useful test: ask whether the statement is the kind of thing that could be true or false. If yes, cognitivist; if it merely expresses an attitude or command, non-cognitivist.

Moral realism is the meta-ethical view that moral properties and moral facts exist independently of any mind. On this view, when someone says that cruelty is wrong, they are reporting a fact about cruelty, not merely expressing a feeling or a personal preference. 'Mind-independent' is the key phrase: the wrongness would still hold even if no one believed it, approved of it or wanted it to be true. Realism is contrasted with anti-realist positions such as emotivism, which treat moral utterances as expressions of attitude rather than reports of fact. Realism itself is a broad family: it can be naturalist, holding that moral properties are natural properties, or non-naturalist, holding that they are sui generis. In an MCQ, identify the defining commitment: the existence of mind-independent moral facts, not the claim that everyone agrees about them.

Moral naturalism is a cognitivist realist position: moral statements express beliefs and can be true or false, and moral properties are natural properties, knowable in principle by the same broad kinds of enquiry as other natural facts. Because it is cognitivist, it holds that moral judgements are truth-apt. Naturalist forms of utilitarianism treat goodness as a natural property, for example the property of maximising pleasure or welfare; Bentham's hedonic calculus identifies right action with what produces the greatest quantity of pleasure over pain, a natural, measurable quantity. Naturalist forms of virtue ethics treat virtues and flourishing as natural features of human life, so claims about what a virtuous person would do report natural facts about human functioning.

Moral non-naturalism is a cognitivist view: moral judgements express beliefs and can be true or false, but the properties they describe are not natural properties discoverable by empirical science. Intuitionists such as Moore and Prichard hold that we grasp basic moral truths by rational intuition rather than observation or inference from natural facts. Moore's open question argument targets reductive theories that identify 'good' with some natural property such as pleasure or being desired. For any proposed reduction, it remains an open, genuinely meaningful question whether that property is good, so the identification fails. Moore concludes that 'good' is indefinable and that identifying it with a natural property commits the Naturalistic Fallacy.

This topic examines objections that arise for the metaethical theories studied, especially through Hume's Fork and Ayer's verification principle. Hume's Fork divides meaningful propositions into relations of ideas, known by reason and true by definition, and matters of fact, known by experience. Moral judgements appear to fit neither category, threatening their meaningfulness. Ayer's verification principle holds that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable. Ayer uses this to argue that moral judgements are not truth-apt but express emotion, supporting emotivism. Learners should assess how far these challenges damage non-naturalism and other realist theories, and how realists might respond.

Hume holds that moral judgements move us to act: to judge an action wrong is already to be against it. Beliefs, on his account, are inert representations of how things are; they tell us what is the case but do not by themselves push us to do anything. Motivation requires a passion or sentiment, a desire-like state. So if moral judgements motivated us on their own, they cannot be mere beliefs; they must involve sentiment. The argument runs: (1) moral judgements motivate; (2) beliefs alone do not motivate; (3) therefore moral judgements are not beliefs. A learner should be able to state each premise, explain the inertness of belief, and identify the conclusion. Note the argument's structure and what a critic would have to deny.

Hume observes that moral reasoners move from statements about what is the case, using 'is' and 'is not', to conclusions about what ought or ought not to be done, without explaining how the transition is made. He notes this new relation of 'ought' needs to be founded and explained, and that the inference from descriptive premises to a prescriptive conclusion is not obvious. The gap is the logical distance between descriptive claims and normative claims: no set of purely factual premises entails a moral conclusion without a further normative premise. A learner should explain what the gap is, why Hume flags it, and what it implies for attempts to derive morality from facts alone, such as from nature or from God's commands.

Mackie defends moral anti-realism by two routes. The argument from relativity starts from the observed, persistent disagreement between cultures and eras about moral codes: what one society treats as obligatory, another permits or condemns. Mackie argues that the best explanation of this variation is that moral codes reflect different ways of life rather than a single mind-independent moral reality being detected, so realism is less economical than scepticism. The argument from queerness has two limbs. Metaphysically, objective moral properties would be utterly unlike anything else in the world: intrinsically prescriptive, action-guiding features that compel rational agents, with no analogue in natural science. Epistemologically, we would need a special faculty to detect them, and no credible account of such perception exists.

Moral anti-realism is the meta-ethical view that there are no mind-independent moral properties or facts. On this view, moral judgements do not report features of a world that exists independently of human minds, attitudes or practices. The key phrase is 'mind-independent': anti-realism denies that moral properties exist independently of us, not necessarily that moral talk is meaningless. Varieties include error theory, which holds that moral judgements purport to state objective facts but are systematically false because no such facts exist, and non-cognitivism, which holds that moral judgements express attitudes or prescriptions rather than beliefs about facts. Contrast realism, which affirms mind-independent moral facts, and relativism, which grounds morality in minds or cultures.

Mackie's error theory is cognitivist: moral statements express beliefs and so can be true or false, but they are systematically and uniformly false. Ordinary users of moral language presuppose objective moral properties that would make claims true, yet the world contains no such properties. Mackie supports this with the argument from relativity (radical moral disagreement is better explained by varying social codes than by imperfect access to one objective truth) and the argument from queerness (objective values would be metaphysically odd entities and would require a strange faculty of intuition to detect). He therefore recommends a fictional or revisionary attitude to morality: we may keep the language while abandoning belief in its truth. Distinguish this from non-cognitivism, which denies that moral statements express beliefs at all.

Ayer's emotivism is non-cognitivist: moral utterances do not express beliefs and are not truth-apt. On his verificationist view, 'Stealing is wrong' adds no factual content beyond describing the act and expressing the speaker's disapproval; it is like a sophisticated boo or cheer. Moral language functions to express feelings and to influence the attitudes and behaviour of others, so it has emotive rather than descriptive meaning. Because there is no moral proposition to be true or false, moral disagreement is disagreement in attitude, not in belief. Contrast this with Mackie's cognitivist error theory, which keeps truth-apt moral beliefs but calls them all false. In an MCQ, look for the option that denies both belief and truth, and that explains moral talk as expression plus influence.

Prescriptivism is Richard Hare's non-cognitivist meta-ethical theory. Non-cognitivism holds that moral judgements do not state facts and are not true or false in the way descriptive claims are; instead they express the speaker's attitude or commitment. Hare's distinctive move is to treat moral language as prescriptive: to say 'you ought to help' is to guide action, not merely to report a feeling. He also argues moral judgements are universalisable, so a speaker is committed to the same prescription in any relevantly similar situation. Learn to distinguish prescriptivism from emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson), which stresses expression of feeling, and to explain why Hare thinks moral reasoning is possible through consistency of universal prescriptions.

This issue asks whether anti-realism, which denies mind-independent moral facts, can explain the everyday workings of moral language. Anti-realists must account for three things: moral reasoning, where people weigh reasons and revise views; persuasion, where moral argument changes minds; and disagreement, where two people genuinely conflict rather than merely express different feelings. Emotivists such as Ayer face the objection that if moral utterances only express feeling, disagreement looks like a clash of attitudes with nothing to argue about. Hare's prescriptivism responds by appealing to universalisable prescriptions and logical consistency, allowing reasoning about whether one's principles can be universalised. Evaluate whether these responses succeed, using examples of moral debate to test each anti-realist account.

Moral progress is the apparent improvement of moral beliefs and practices over time, for example the abolition of slavery or the extension of suffrage. The problem is explaining what such improvement consists in. If moral realism is true, progress can be measured against a mind-independent moral reality: later views are closer to the truth, just as later science can be closer to the truth. The anti-realist must explain progress without that standard. An error theorist who holds that all moral claims are false cannot say that later beliefs are truer, only that attitudes or social arrangements changed. A non-cognitivist may say that moral sensibility, sympathy or social cooperation improved, but must show why that counts as progress rather than mere change.

Anti-realism denies that there are mind-independent moral facts. Moral nihilism is the stronger claim that there are no moral facts or truths at all and that moral discourse is empty or false. The question is whether every form of anti-realism collapses into nihilism. Error theory openly accepts nihilism: moral judgements purport to state facts but are all false. Non-cognitivism denies that moral judgements are truth-apt at all, so it avoids calling them false while still denying moral facts; whether this is nihilism depends on whether nihilism requires falsity or merely the absence of moral truth. Relativism holds that moral truths are relative to frameworks, so it retains truth within a framework and resists the nihilist label.