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Analytical approaches to ethics
Analytical approaches to ethics have concentrated on meta-ethics. They tend, that is, not to answer moral questions or to address substantive moral problems directly but rather to be concerned with the status of ethical judgements and the character of moral reasoning. Thus, they examine the meaning and nature of moral judgments about persons, situations and actions. Such examinations provoke questions including the following: Are moral judgments merely expressions of feeling, as David Hume seems to have thought, or do they rather capture something objective about the fabric of reality? Is it appropriate to think of moral judgments as being true or false? Are moral judgments specific to a culture, rather than culture independent? John Mackie's famous ‘ error theory ' claimed that although our moral judgments and language looked as though they involved truth and falsity, and as though they were about objective features of reality, this impression led us into we were making large scale errors:, and that in fact, morality was only the expression of subjective feelings. According to noncognitivism , about moral judgments they express the attitudes and desires of agents rather than the attempt to capture aspects of objective reality. On this view, cognitive states are beliefs, while noncognitive states include desires and various motivational states.
Analytical philosophy in the twentieth century devoted much space to what became known as the ‘ naturalistic fallacy '. Hume in the Treatise famously spoke of the mistaken attempt to argue from what is the case to what ought to be the case. For instance, someone might argue that a certain action maximises human happiness and minimises pain, and hence that it ought to be done. But, against this, G.E. Moore claimed that goodness was not a ‘natural' property, and hence any attempt to identify goodness with something natural such as the promotion of pleasure was a fallacy.
One influential attempt to answer the question of what makes an action right is the utilitarian one. According to the utilitarian, an action is right if it maximises ‘utility'. The latter is sometimes explained in terms of maximising happiness and minimising pain, though more neutral accounts are also offered in terms of maximising preferences. On this view it is right to rescue the drowning man because the overall consequences give more people what they want than if I were to refrain from coming to come to the rescue. Extensive debates in twentieth century analytical philosophy centred on the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarian approaches.
Another important strand of contemporary analytical philosophical coverage of ethics is the position known as moral realism. Moral realists think that which actions are right and wrong, and which situations are good or bad, are factual matters. These moral facts obtain regardless of what people think about actions and situations. If the realist thinks of reasons for the rightness and wrongness of actions, she may cite non-moral facts. She may claim, moreover,, and the idea that situations which that cannot be distinguished from each other in non-moral terms cannot be distinguished from each other morally either. This point links analytical philosophy of ethics to analytical debates about supervenience. Roughly speaking, the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral may be characterised as follows: If two actions are identical in respect of their non-moral properties, then they must also be identical in respect of their moral properties. However, two actions identical in terms of their moral properties need not be identical in terms of their non-moral properties. On this perspective, moral properties are said to supervene on non-moral properties. Supervenience has attracted an enormous and highly sophisticated literature.
Contemporary analytical philosophy has devoted much space to another universalising approach to the question of what makes an action right (etc.). This stems from Kant's ‘ Categorical Imperative ' – ‘act only on that maxim [principle] through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law'. So, for instance, I cannot will that promise-breaking would become a universal law since this would lead to a break- down in trust and indeed the ultimate destruction of the practice of promising.
An influential analytical philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, rejected the emphasis on right and wrong,, and on duties and obligations, and urged instead a focus on virtues. This harks back to Aristotle's view that the good for a human being is ‘activity of the soul in accordance with virtue'. The modern debate about moral particularism makes appeal to this tradition. Someone knows what to do, not by applying universal principles about right and wrong but by being a certain kind of person. They exhibit certain kinds of virtues. Neo-Aristotelianism of this kind has been a dominant feature of moral philosophy in recent decades.
The outcome of debates about ethics within analytical philosophy have has fundamental implications for moral education. For instance, the character and status of the our reasoning about how we should live and treat others depends crucially on the extent to which a moral realist approach represents an adequate account of morality. Or again, whether educators should focus on virtue, in contrast to concentrating on rights, obligations and duties, for example, is bound to have an important impact on the preferred approaches to moral education.
For further reading: See the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy online where there are : many relevant entries including: ‘Ethics', ‘Analytic Eethics', ‘Virtue Ethics', ‘Moral realism', ‘Moral Particularism' and ‘Ssupervenience'..
The Stanford Encyclopaedia of philosophy online has a substantial article on virtue ethics at http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/ethics-virtue/ .
http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/metaethics/ gives the Stanford entry on meta-ethics, which deals with aspects of the naturalistic fallacy among other things.
Jonathan Dancy's Stanford entry on moral particularism at http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/moral-particularism/ provides an authoritative guide, as Dancy is a leading protagonist in this debate.
For a discussion of the application of moral particularism to moral education , see David Bakhurst (2005) ‘Particularism and moral education' in Philosophical Explorations . 8., 3, pp. 265-279 .
Look at http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/kant-moral/ for the Stanford entry on Kantian moral philosophy.
http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/consequentialism/ , - the Stanford entry on consequentialism, provides material about the modern utilitarianism debates.
Some recent applications of issues in meta-ethics to education include:
Carr ( 1993) Moral Values and the Teacher: beyond the paternal and the permissive, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 27. , 2, pp. 193–207.
Steuteal, J. (1997) The Virtue Approach to Moral Education: Some Conceptual Clarifications, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 31., 3, pp. 395–407.
Wringe, C. (1998) Reasons, Rules and Virtues in Moral Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 32., 2, pp. 225–237.
Puolimatka, T. (2001) Democratic Values Education Reconsidered: A Moral Realist Case, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 35, pp. 299–308.
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