3. Normative Ethics & Meta-ethics

It has become customary in 20^th Century to distinguish between normative ethics and meta-ethics. The mainstream of ethics, which constituted the whole of ethics from Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus to Kant, Mill and Moore was called “normative ethics”; while the new branch, which emerged in twentieth century, was called “meta-ethics”.

As defined by John Hospers, normative ethics is “the attempt to discover some acceptable and rationally defensible view concerning what kinds of things are good (worth aiming at) and what kinds of acts are right, and why.”[1]

 Meta-ethics, according to Hospers, is “the field of inquiry that considers the meaning (and inter-relations of meaning) of ethical words”.[2]

However, the scope of meta-ethics has further widened to include the nature of moral judgment, nature of moral disagreement, and nature of arguments, which can be given in support of or against a moral judgment, etc., in general, questions related to ethical method.

 We have already discussed Moore’s Principia Ethica in the last chapter. We may say now that Moore’s book is basically a book of normative ethics, though he has spent much time analyzing the meaning of “good”. His main problem is answering the questions of normative ethics: what kind of things ought to exist for their own sakes? And, what kind of actions ought we to perform?

C. L. Stevenson’s Ethics and Language, on the other hand, is a book of meta-ethics. Stevenson describes the scope of his work as follows:

This book deals not with the whole of ethics, but with a narrowly specialized part of it. Its first object is to clarify the meaning of the ethical terms – such terms as “good”, “right”, “just”, “ought”, and so on. Its second object is to characterize the general methods by which ethical judgments can be proved or supported.[3]

What, one may ask, is the relationship between normative ethics and meta-ethics? A. J. Ayer seems to have identified meta-ethics with the whole of ethics, when he says in his Language, Truth and Logic that only “propositions relating to the definitions of ethical terms, can be said to constitute ethical philosophy”.[4]

Whereas Stevenson takes a more balanced view when he says about meta-ethics:

Such a study is related to normative (or “evaluative”) ethics in much the same way that conceptual analysis and scientific method are related to the sciences. One would not expect a book on scientific method to do the work of science itself; and one must not expect to find here any conclusions about what conduct is right or wrong. The purpose of an analytic or methodological study, whether of science or of ethics, is always indirect. It hopes to send others to their task, with clearer heads and less wasteful habits of investigation.[5]

On this issue, I will go along with Stevenson. The problems of normative ethics are of fundamental importance. Meta-ethics is useful only to the extent it helps us to solve the problems of normative ethics. One must not get so lost in meta-ethics that one forgets the basic problems of normative ethics.

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