From time to time it’s important to do something that’s hard for most people because it’s done so seldom: think. Yours truly is not immune from this.
Thinking is hard work. It’s easier to do a whole day of manual labor than to think and reason and learn all day.
But it’s worth doing at times because it makes the rest of the time that much easier. Especially when it’s about the basics — no, deeper than basics; something foundational.
Meta-ethics.
Meta-ethics isn’t some kind of Japanese monster movie, Godzilla vs. Meta-Ethics. Meta-ethics deals with the overarching principles of which things are “good” and “important”; the things to be valued; the worldview.
[Wikipedia] Meta-ethics addresses questions such as “What is goodness?” and “How can we tell what is good from what is bad?”, seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.
According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen,[1] there are three kinds of meta-ethical problems, or three general questions:
- What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments?
- What is the nature of moral judgments?
- How may moral judgments be supported or defended?
A question of the first type might be, “What do the words ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ mean?” (see value theory). The second category includes questions of whether moral judgments are universal or relative, of one kind or many kinds, etc. Questions of the third kind ask, for example, how we can know if something is right or wrong, if at all.
Why should we bother with such philosophical stuff? Isn’t it rather esoteric and removed from everyday life and ultimately unknowable?
It’s important because the meta-ethic determines what the ethics are. Morals are derived directly from ethics. These tell you what to do.
If you have a bad meta-ethic, you get bad ethics; bad ethics lead to bad morals; bad morals lead to bad actions. So, it’s important to start from the right place.
Here’s a (simple) example.
Meta-ethic: Life is universally good.
Ethic: Death is bad, because it deprives people of life.
Moral: Killing people causes death; therefore, you shouldn’t do it.
Starting from somewhere else leads to different results.
Meta-ethic: Freedom is universally good.
Ethic: Things or people that restrict freedom are bad, because it inhibits freedom.
Moral: Killing people who restrict freedom is ok, because it increases freedom.
Now the latter example is, in fact, ethical and consequently moral, because it is consistent with the stated meta-ethic.
It is consistency which determines whether or not something is ethical. Something is immoral if it is inconsistent with the ethic. It is the meta-ethic which determines what is good, or goodness itself.
Take politicians. (Please.) Jonah Goldberg writes:
[USA Today] Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is “being out of alignment with my values.” [...]
There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.
An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.
“PoMos” hold that there is no such thing as capital-T “Truth.” There are only lower-case “truths.” Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo’s telling, reality is “socially constructed.” And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that “privileges” the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.
Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness.
So next time you hear about some pharmaceutical company or some Bio firm who is experimenting on human embryos and justifies it because their Ethics board said it was OK, ask them: what’s your meta-ethic?
Cross posted at Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
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Meta-ethic: Life is universally good.
Ethic: Death is bad, because it deprives people of life.
Moral: Killing people causes death; therefore, you shouldn’t do it.
Actually, the proposition "life is universally good" is not a meta-ethic.
Its simply a proposition about what is or isn't worth valuing. Its ethics.
Meta-ethics doesn't propose particular ethical principles like the idea that "life is universally good" or "freedom is universally good". A meta-ethical theory would be, for example, an explanation as to why the proposition "life is universally good" is a universal moral truth. Or another meta-ethical theory might argue that there AREN'T any universal moral truth and that the proposition is, therefore, simply a declaration of the fact the the person himself values life highly.
A more accurate example of the distinctions between morality, ethics and meta-ethics would be:
Moral principle: eating meat is generally wrong.
Ethics: Eating meat is wrong because we don't need meat to live (in fact, vegetarians are generally healthier) and we should respect the right to life of other beings with minds and the will to live enough not to kill them when its not absolutely necessary.
Meta-ethics: Is there such a thing as moral truths? If so, why? If not, why not?
Those are just examples, by the way, I'm not actually a vegetarian myself. It is, however, an ethical question I'm currently interested in.
Thanks for your comment David. You are correct, my example did not start with a pure meta-ethic – I did conflate the ethic and the meta-ethic; thanks for pointing that out.
I should have started with: There are moral truths which can be known; There are moral truths which are universal. Life is universally good.
As far as eating meat goes, if we accept moral realism or divine command (or some such) as the meta-ethic, then the ethic should be amended to reflect that all food involves eating a living thing (animal or vegetable); we need food to live; therefore we must eat (recently) living things.
In the garden of Eden we ate only plants; after the Flood we also ate animals; therefore it is permissible. As long as we are not wasting food, I see no moral prohibition against eating animals.