Meta-ethics practice questions.

If 'Lying is wrong' merely expresses disapproval, it is unclear what it contributes to 'If lying is wrong, then getting your brother to lie is wrong', where no disapproval is voiced at all. Which position does this embedding problem challenge?

• moral realism of the non-natural, intuitionist kind
• error theory, which denies that moral properties exist
• ethical naturalism, which identifies goodness with a natural property
• non-cognitivism, including emotivism and prescriptivism

Answer: non-cognitivism, including emotivism and prescriptivism

The Frege-Geach problem is about meaning rather than metaphysics: cognitivist theories explain the embedded clause easily because it states something truth-apt, so the burden falls squarely on views that treat moral sentences as expressions of attitude.

A student says: 'When I call factory farming wrong, I am reporting that I disapprove of it, and my statement is true provided I really do disapprove.' Which meta-ethical position does this analysis state?

• moral subjectivism, since the speaker's attitude makes it true
• emotivism, since the sentence vents rather than reports a feeling
• error theory, since no moral statement succeeds in being true
• cultural relativism, since the speaker's society sets the standard

Answer: moral subjectivism, since the speaker's attitude makes it true

Subjectivism is cognitivist: the sentence describes the speaker's own attitude and therefore has a truth value, whereas emotivism denies that anything is described at all. The single word 'reporting' decides which position is being stated.

Mackie holds that variation between moral codes is better explained by differences in people's ways of life than by their differing perceptions of objective values. In his argument, what does this explanatory claim support?

• that moral disagreement is always merely apparent
• that each society's code is true for that society
• that objective values are not needed to explain the variation
• that moral judgements cannot be given linguistic expression at all

Answer: that objective values are not needed to explain the variation

The argument from relativity is an inference to the best explanation, not a direct step from disagreement to relativism. Concluding that each code is true for its own society would be a further and different claim; Mackie's own conclusion is that moral claims are uniformly untrue.

Mackie's error theory holds that ordinary moral statements are

• expressions of attitude that are neither true nor false, since they make no claims at all
• true, but only relative to the standards of the community in which they are made
• meaningless, since no observation could establish or refute any of them
• genuine claims about objective values, and false as a body, because no such values exist

Answer: genuine claims about objective values, and false as a body, because no such values exist

The theory is cognitivist and anti-realist at once: it takes moral language at face value and then denies that the world contains what the language purports to describe. That is what distinguishes it from non-cognitivism, which denies that the claims were assertions in the first place.

Blackburn's quasi-realism sets out to show that an expressivist about moral language can nonetheless

• earn the right to talk of moral claims as true, as mistaken and as objects of knowledge
• prove that moral properties exist independently of any attitude towards them
• demonstrate that moral disagreement is always merely apparent
• dispense with the notion of attitude altogether in explaining what moral judgements do and mean

Answer: earn the right to talk of moral claims as true, as mistaken and as objects of knowledge

The project is to reconstruct realist-sounding talk from expressivist materials, so that saying 'it is true that cruelty is wrong' commits one to no more than the attitude does. Its chief test is the Frege-Geach problem, which asks how such judgements can figure unasserted in conditionals and inferences.

A moral naturalist holds that moral properties are natural properties, identified through inquiry rather than by conceptual analysis, in the way that water was identified with a molecular structure. This position answers Moore's open question argument by claiming that

• moral terms have no meaning, so no question about them can be significant
• goodness is definable as pleasure, and the appearance of an open question is a simple confusion, as Moore himself conceded
• the argument was never intended to apply to properties investigated by the sciences
• the identity is a posteriori, so a competent speaker can find the question open and the identity still hold

Answer: the identity is a posteriori, so a competent speaker can find the question open and the identity still hold

Moore's argument assumes that a correct definition would be transparent to anyone who understands the words. Post-Kripkean naturalism denies that assumption: 'is this water really H2O?' was once an open question for competent speakers, and the identity holds regardless.