IB Philosophy 4.2.3 Ethical Language Notes

What Is the Significance of Calling Something Right or Wrong?

1. Topic 4.2.1 asked what moral values are and where they come from. Topic 4.2.2 examined the foundations that might justify moral judgements, introducing the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism.
2. This final meta-ethics topic turns to the language of ethics itself, asking what we are doing when we use words like “good,” “right,” and “wrong” in moral contexts.
3. The IB syllabus asks: "What is the significance of calling something right or wrong?" This question may seem straightforward, but it opens onto one of the most contested areas of twentieth-century philosophy. When you say "Lying is wrong," are you describing a fact about lying, expressing a feeling of disapproval, issuing a command not to lie, or doing something else entirely?
4. The answer matters because it determines whether moral disagreement is genuinely possible. If moral statements describe facts, then when two people disagree about whether euthanasia is wrong, at least one of them is mistaken.
5. If moral statements merely express attitudes, then their “disagreement” may be no more than a difference of taste, like disagreeing about whether chocolate is better than vanilla.
6. Ethical language functions differently from purely descriptive language. The statement “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius” describes a physical fact that can be verified through observation.
7. The statement “Torture is wrong” appears to describe a moral fact, but its status is philosophically controversial: does it report an objective feature of torture, or does it express the speaker’s response to torture?
8. This question connects to the cognitivism/non-cognitivism distinction introduced in 4.2.2. Cognitivists hold that moral statements are genuine propositions that can be true or false.
9. Non-cognitivists hold that moral statements are not truth-apt; instead, they perform a different kind of linguistic function such as expressing emotions, issuing prescriptions, or committing the speaker to certain attitudes.

Implications: Authority, Decisions, and Moral Reality

1. The significance of calling something “right” or “wrong” also has a practical dimension. Moral language carries a special kind of authority: to call an action wrong is to suggest that others have reasons to avoid it, not merely to report a personal preference.
2. If moral language is purely expressive, this authority may be an illusion. If moral language is genuinely descriptive, then its authority is grounded in moral reality.
3. The overarching Unit 4 question, “How do we decide if a particular action is right or wrong?”, depends on how we understand the meaning of moral terms. If “right” means “maximizes happiness” (a naturalist definition), then we decide by calculating consequences.
4. If “right” is an unanalysable property (Moore's non-naturalism), we decide by intuition. If “right” expresses approval (emotivism), there may be nothing to “decide” in the cognitive sense at all.
5. This topic also connects to the philosophy of religious language (to be examined in 5.2). Religious statements (“God is good,” “It is God’s will”) raise similar questions about whether they describe facts, express attitudes, or serve other functions.
6. The tools developed in this meta-ethics sub-theme will prove directly applicable to the analysis of religious discourse.

The Meaning of "Good": The Central Debate

1. Moore's open question argument, examined in detail in 4.2.2, established that "good" cannot be reduced to any natural property: asking "X promotes happiness, but is it good?" always remains a meaningful question. This insight launched the modern debate about what moral language actually does.
2. A.J. Ayer challenged Moore’s intuitionism in Language, Truth and Logic (1936), drawing on the logical positivist principle that meaningful statements must be either analytically true (true by definition) or empirically verifiable.