To what extent is Ethical Language meaningful?
To what extent is Ethical Language meaningful?
We often hear of people being told how they should behave and they should live their lives; sometimes through advice and sometimes via the governments of countries. However, we can never truly know what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is, there is nothing that confirms or denies what each of these mean, there is only your opinion. Looking at the meaningfulness and usefulness of ethical language is known as Meta ethics. It also sets out to understand terms used in descriptive ethics. Ethical language is divided into cognitive language, which is both realist and objective, drawing ethical statements from nature and believing it to be true fact. On the other hand there is non-Cognitive language which is anti-realist and subjective. Ethical Naturalists and Logical Positivists believe only Cognitive language is true as it describes facts. While Descriptivists and Prescriptivists argue, although when referring to ethical language it may be subjective, it still has significance and has meaning.
Ideas on morality can only be understood as opinion. Eighteenth century philosopher David Hume suggested that ethics amounts to sentiments and ideas on morality can only be understood as emotional opinions. Ethical opinion is simply subjective and only when a situation arises where harm of some form comes into play, it shouldn’t matter what other people decided to do. An example of this is abortion, many people say that abortion is bad full stop as it is taking away an innocent life, but this would be a subjective statement that cannot be tested.
However, Ethical Naturalists argue that ethical language can be understood by non-ethical and natural terms. Therefore they represent facts and can be proven to be either true or false. For example, ‘abortion takes away innocent lives’ this is saying that abortion is effectively murder and ending an innocent life is morally wrong. In this sense Ethical Naturalists would argue ethical language is
We often hear of people being told how they should behave and they should live their lives; sometimes through advice and sometimes via the governments of countries. However, we can never truly know what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is, there is nothing that confirms or denies what each of these mean, there is only your opinion. Looking at the meaningfulness and usefulness of ethical language is known as Meta ethics. It also sets out to understand terms used in descriptive ethics. Ethical language is divided into cognitive language, which is both realist and objective, drawing ethical statements from nature and believing it to be true fact. On the other hand there is non-Cognitive language which is anti-realist and subjective. Ethical Naturalists and Logical Positivists believe only Cognitive language is true as it describes facts. While Descriptivists and Prescriptivists argue, although when referring to ethical language it may be subjective, it still has significance and has meaning.
Ideas on morality can only be understood as opinion. Eighteenth century philosopher David Hume suggested that ethics amounts to sentiments and ideas on morality can only be understood as emotional opinions. Ethical opinion is simply subjective and only when a situation arises where harm of some form comes into play, it shouldn’t matter what other people decided to do. An example of this is abortion, many people say that abortion is bad full stop as it is taking away an innocent life, but this would be a subjective statement that cannot be tested.
However, Ethical Naturalists argue that ethical language can be understood by non-ethical and natural terms. Therefore they represent facts and can be proven to be either true or false. For example, ‘abortion takes away innocent lives’ this is saying that abortion is effectively murder and ending an innocent life is morally wrong. In this sense Ethical Naturalists would argue ethical language is