As mentioned earlier, metaethics deals not with the substantive content of ethical theories or moral judgments but rather with questions about their nature, such as the question whether moral judgments are objective or subjective. Among contemporary philosophers in English-speaking countries, those defending the objectivity of moral judgments have most often been intuitionists or naturalists; those taking a different view have held a variety of different positions, including subjectivism, relativism, emotivism, prescriptivism, expressivism, and projectivism. At first the scene was dominated by the intuitionists, whose leading representative was the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958). In his Principia Ethica (1903), Moore argued against what he called the “naturalistic fallacy” in ethics, by which he meant any attempt to define the word good in terms of some natural quality—i.e., a naturally occurring property or state, such as pleasure. (The label “naturalistic fallacy” is not apt, because Moore’s argument applied equally well, as he acknowledged, to any attempt to define good in terms of something supernatural, such as “what God wills.”) The “open-question argument,” as it came to be known, was in fact used by Sidgwick and to some extent by the 18th-century ... (200 of 43,721 words)Metaethics
Moore and the naturalistic fallacy
Ethics
Alternate title:
moral philosophy
Written by Peter Singer
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