How to be Good by Gary Cox

Author:Gary Cox [Cox, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350068391
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

3

THE REALITY OF GOODNESS

Meta-ethics

I have mentioned two or three times already that moral philosophy is not just about trying to work out what goodness and badness or rightness and wrongness are, but about trying to work out if these ‘things’ are real or not. In taking on that task, two key questions immediately arise: If they are real, in what sense are they real? If they are not real, what is ethics really?

This may all sound rather obscure and abstract and in some ways it certainly is. In our non-abstract, everyday lives we are very familiar with people trying to decide what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, but not at all familiar with people trying to decide if there is any such thing as right and wrong or if good and bad really exist. Recall solipsism. We are very familiar with people trying to decide what a person is thinking, but not at all familiar, unless you happen to be a philosopher, with trying to decide whether or not any person besides yourself has a mind in the first place.

The area of moral philosophy that deals with questions of reality and meaning in ethics has the grand-sounding title meta-ethics. It sounds like the name of a grand ethical code for people who want to be especially good, but it is not that at all.

Meta means ‘of a higher or second-order kind’, and it is often said that meta-ethics deals with second-order questions in ethics. Normative ethics, meanwhile, deals with the kind of first-order questions in ethics about the right things to do and the right ways to live that formed the bulk of the previous chapter. Roughly, meta-ethics is asking and trying to answer questions about ethical questions. In his excellent book Contemporary Metaethics (2003) Alexander Miller says:

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