IB Philosophy 4.2 Meta-ethics Key Definitions

Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative is the supreme principle of morality, commanding unconditionally. Its first formulation requires acting only on maxims that could be willed as universal laws, and its second formulation requires treating persons always as ends in themselves, never merely as means.

Cognitivism holds that moral judgements express beliefs that are truth-apt (capable of being true or false), while non-cognitivism holds that moral judgements express attitudes, emotions, or prescriptions rather than truth-apt propositions.

Emotivism is the meta-ethical theory that moral statements do not express propositions but rather express the speaker's attitudes and attempt to influence others. Saying "stealing is wrong" is not stating a fact but expressing disapproval, sometimes called the "Boo/Hurrah" theory.

Ethical language refers to the words and statements used to make moral claims (such as “good,” “right,” “wrong,” and “ought”). Meta-ethics asks whether ethical language describes moral facts, expresses attitudes, issues prescriptions, or performs some other linguistic function.

Foundations for moral judgements are the sources of justification proposed for moral claims, including rationality, emotion, natural law, and environment. The foundation accepted determines whether moral judgements are universal or culturally relative, objective or subjective.

Human nature refers to the set of characteristics, capacities, and dispositions thought to be shared by all human beings, independent of culture, upbringing, or historical context, and that define what it fundamentally means to be human.

Intuitionism in moral philosophy holds that basic moral truths are self-evident and can be apprehended directly through a faculty of moral intuition, without the need for empirical evidence or deductive proof. Developed by W.D. Ross and G.E. Moore, the view grounds ethics in irreducible moral perceptions but faces the challenge of explaining persistent moral disagreement if such truths are supposedly obvious.

Moral sense is a theory originating with Francis Hutcheson and developed by Hume and Smith, holding that human beings possess an innate faculty for perceiving moral qualities through sentiment, analogous to the physical senses.

Moral values: standards or principles concerning what is right, wrong, good, or bad that carry a sense of obligation or authority; meta-ethics asks whether moral values are natural or cultural, universal or relative, subjective or objective.

Naturalism in meta-ethics holds that moral properties are identical to or reducible to natural properties discoverable through empirical inquiry, such as what promotes pleasure, satisfies desires, or contributes to human flourishing. The view promises to place ethics on a scientific footing but must answer Moore's open-question argument, which contends that no natural description can fully capture the meaning of moral goodness.

The naturalistic fallacy is G.E. Moore's term for the error of defining the property of goodness in terms of any natural property such as pleasure, evolutionary fitness, or social approval. Moore argued that for any proposed natural equivalent of "good" one can always meaningfully ask whether that property really is good, suggesting that moral goodness is a simple, unanalysable quality irreducible to empirical description.

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that moral statements do not express beliefs or state facts but instead serve to express emotions, issue commands, or voice attitudes, rendering them neither true nor false. Prominent versions include Ayer's emotivism, which treats moral utterances as exclamations of feeling, and Hare's prescriptivism, which interprets them as universalisable imperatives.

Objectivism in meta-ethics holds that moral values exist independently of individual opinions, cultural norms, or emotional responses, possessing a validity that is binding on all rational agents. The position implies that genuine moral disagreements have determinate answers, in contrast to subjectivism and relativism, which tie moral truth to the attitudes of persons or communities.

Utilitarianism is the consequentialist moral theory holding that an action is right insofar as it maximises overall happiness or well-being and wrong insofar as it produces the reverse, requiring agents to weigh the interests of every affected party impartially. Developed by Bentham and Mill, the theory provides a powerful framework for public policy but faces objections concerning the rights of minorities and the demandingness of always optimising outcomes.