“Ethical Language is Meaningless.” Discuss

Ethical naturalists are one group of thinkers who argue that ethical language does indeed have meaning, as moral truths are objective and can be absolutely known - this is cognitivist. F. H. Bradley for example, came to the conclusion that doing ‘good’ can be defined as doing one’s ‘duty’ in life, which in turn can be discovered from looking at what society does. Bradley came to this conclusion on the basis of Hegel’s theory of the geist, is some kind of ‘force’ that ‘moves’ society ‘forwards,’ or at least is the cause of social change. The zeitgeist is whatever the current generally accepted worldview of society is, and within this is found the volksgeist, which is the spirit, or some kind of collective conscience of the people that make up society; the volksgeist defines morality. Therefore, what society considers (according to the volksgeist) to be ‘good’ – for itself and for the individuals that make it up – is ‘good.’ One flaw that could be pointed out in this argument is that it goes against Hume’s principle of the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy,’ which declares the necessity of separation of fact and value; that which ‘is’ is not the same as that which ‘ought’ to be, and therefore one’s societally-defined duty and what is morally ‘good’ are not automatically the same thing. However, the naturalistic approach to metaethics is still a valid one despite this, as it seems that where ‘good’ comes from as described here fulfils any and all purpose that it can or should in that it leads to a stable and safe society, and one in which individuals are happy to follow such a moral code, as they are themselves component parts of what has come to be defined as ‘good.’ Although it contravenes Hume’s ‘fork,’ it is not clear that there is any other purpose that ‘good’ can or should serve, and thus the blurring of the lines between fact and value in this particular context does not seem destructive to the argument. Furthermore, it could well be argued that such a state of affairs is the one found in civilisation now and throughout history: social attitudes change with the law and therefore what the state describes as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tends to be in line with what the majority of the populace would also describe as ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ From either an atheist or a theist standpoint, the naturalist argument for the origins of morality seems to fit perfectly with what we actually experience, generally-speaking, morality to be: punishment or reward given by others, or guilt or happiness induced by what we feel others think of our actions. We can therefore know ‘moral truths,’ as they are defined by society and are objective in their truth (until the geist moves things around). Ethical language does have meaning in that it defines the (albeit contemporary) moral truth.                                                                                                 Another approach to pinpointing the origin of what ‘good’ is, that results in ethical language indeed having meaning is intuitionism. G. E. Moore is an example of such a thinker, who postulated that ‘good’ is undefinable because “good is good,” and there is no more to it. Moore came to the conclusion that moral truths are known innately and by intuition alone, and this is because all attempts to define ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are subject to the Open Question Argument, which asks whether a ‘good’ something is necessarily ‘good.’ For example, one might suggest that pleasure is morally ‘good,’ but clearly this is not necessarily the case when most humans intuitively feel that some pleasure is inherently not ‘good;’ the act of rape would be a good example of this. Moreover, acts such of kindness and generosity seem to feel ‘good’ for no particular reason other than that they just are ‘good.’ This argument fits in with the fact that certain acts are seen universally across cultures and times as intrinsically immoral. If murder is seen as morally ‘bad’ throughout human civilisation, then such a conclusion must come from inside humans themselves, either purely naturally or through some divine action or voice in our conscience. For an intuitionist, ethical language has meaning in that it translates man’s common innate senses into something communicable, which allows for the creation of a safe and moral society.                                                                    However, some argue that ethical language cannot have meaning, such as the emotivist and logical positivist A. J. Ayer. Ayer wrote that a statement cannot be meaningful unless it is verifiable, and that knowledge can only be found through either synthetic or analytic reasoning; this approach to epistemology is known as logical positivism. This means therefore that moral truths are intrinsically unknowable, because by their nature they are unverifiable in that they cannot be empirically studied or deconstructed to pure logic given their inherent ties to either that which is beyond the rational (should one believe morality comes from God), or to emotion. Therefore, all ethical language can only be ways of depicting human emotion, and nothing more – it cannot be objective in truth and is not meaningful as a result. There are several flaws in this line of argument however. Most importantly, Ayer postulates that statements are not meaningful if they are not verifiable; this statement is itself entirely unverifiable, and therefore by is hoisted by its own petard in that it must be meaningless. Fundamentally, this argument is entirely self-defeating.                                                                   To conclude, the given statement is wrong in its assertion that ethical language is meaningless. Cognitivist views of the origin of morality seem to be far more compatible with the real experience that humanity has of how moral ‘truths’ are manifested in society, and were the opposite view that morality is subjective and therefore that the language that surrounds it is meaningless true, it seems that total social breakdown is inevitable; why should one follow ethical rules if what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms of outcome from one’s actions are based purely on the emotions of others? Ethical language must have meaning, because of the existence of widely-agreed, universal moral ‘truths,’ and because arguments that come to this conclusion are compatible with the genuine experience of morality in their postulations of where it originates from.