PHIL 2615 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Normative Ethics, Applied Ethics, Scientism
23 Jan 2018
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The term moral or ethical needs clarification. By ethics we mean the philosophical study of morality. The term moral has 2 different senses. One is a descriptive sense and the other is a prescriptive sense. Descriptive sense: sociology, anthropology, looking at society and their practices. Prescriptive sense: normative, using terms like ought, ought not, judgements about the rightness, wrongness of culture practices. What you get with the descriptive sense: empirical data, data to reflect on. Prescriptive sense: ethical theory (analogous to a political theory) Ethical theory is designed to provide general principles that guide our decision making in moral issues. Applied ethics: taking theoretical principles and applying them to situations. The different approaches that people take to see if ethics is even meaningful. Non-cognitivism (ayer), ethical or moral judgements have to truth value, cognitively meaningless, these statements are not true and not false. Abortion is bad: boo, abortion , don"t abort.
