Calling something “good” may assert that it possesses a moral property, express the speaker’s approval, or prescribe how people should act. The correct interpretation depends on the meta-ethical theory.
Meta-ethics examines the meaning, truth, and justification of moral language. Its division is between cognitivism, which treats moral judgments as truth-apt propositions, and non-cognitivism, which treats them as expressions or prescriptions rather than factual claims.
| Meta-ethical position | Meaning of “X is good” | Truth status |
|---|---|---|
| Moral naturalism | X has a natural property, such as promoting happiness or well-being. | Objectively true or false. |
| Moral non-naturalism | X possesses an objective but irreducible property of goodness, recognized through intuition. | Objectively true or false. |
| Emotivism | The speaker expresses approval: roughly, “Hurrah for X!” | Not truth-apt; it expresses an attitude. |
| Prescriptivism | The speaker recommends X and directs others to choose it. | A universal prescription, not a factual report. |
Consider “Helping a stranger is good.” A moral naturalist may interpret this as “Helping promotes human well-being.” A non-naturalist, such as G. E. Moore, argues that goodness cannot be reduced to a natural property. His open-question argument states that even after showing an action promotes happiness, it remains meaningful to ask, “But is it good?”
An emotivist interprets the claim as approval, whereas a prescriptivist reads it as “Help strangers, and accept that everyone in relevantly similar circumstances should do likewise.”
A common misconception is that every moral statement merely reports personal opinion. This is incorrect: cognitivists claim that moral judgments assert propositions capable of truth or falsity; non-cognitivists explain moral language’s practical force without treating it as fact-stating.
Exam Technique
In an IB Philosophy response, define the theories, apply each to the same example, and evaluate whether moral language is truth-apt. Distinguish meta-ethics, which analyses moral meaning, from normative ethics, which determines what actions are right.
