Religious Studies Essay - Assess the view that 'good' does not refer to any natural property
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G582 - A2 Religious Ethics (H573)
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OCR
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Oxford A Level Religious Studies for OCR
An A-Level Religious Studies Ethics Essay about metaethics answering the question: Assess the view that 'good' does not refer to any natural property. It was graded 37/40 (A*) by my teacher.
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Assess the view that ‘good’ does not refer to any natural property [40]
Overall, I disagree with the non-cognitivist view that ethical statements are meaningless and
are not part of nature. Although morality is contested and appears to be subjective there are
moral claims that all rational people could agree upon, and if they cannot, then this is because
they either not in possession of the facts which inhibits their ability to come to a rational
conclusion e.g. they have been conditioned by the state and through propaganda to consider a
minority group as not human and therefore not worthy of the same human rights as the rest of
us; or they have a medical condition which causes them to lack empathy for others. It is true
that many moral statements are highly subjective e.g. ‘abortion is wrong’ but I believe that
there are some which are inherently objective e.g. ‘murder is wrong’. Although it is clear that
murder does happen in this world most criminals will feel guilt for their action – or they have
been affected by one of the two reasons listed above.
F. H Bradley was a naturalist who believes that morals are objectively true because they are
absolute facts of the natural world which can be observed. Bradley’s naturalism defined good
as social obedience – carrying out your duties based on your position in the social order.
However, Bradley’s interpretation of how ‘good’ refers to a natural property is wholly
unconvincing. Social mobility is now seen as a good thing, and we also know that society is not
always right and things can improve when people challenge their station e.g. in the fight for civil
rights and women’s enfranchisement. David Hume would criticise Bradley for making the fallacy
of going from observing how the world is and deciding that that is how it ought to be. With the
benefit of hindsight, we can see that Bradley’s view is incorrect as we observe the unfairness of
his society and understand that that was not how it ought to have been. Bradley is also flawed
because it makes G.E. Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy by attempting to define good by something
else. Moore argues, convincingly, that good is good and that is that. Good is something that we
simply recognise but cannot describe and it is a fallacy to try to describe is as something else as
Bentham tried to do by defining good in terms of pleasure as it is clear that not all things which
are pleasurable are good. Bradley’s attempt to explain how ‘good’ refers to a natural property
is completely unconvincing; however, this does not mean that morality cannot be explained as
a natural property.
Emotivists, on the other hand, believe that morality is not a fact of the natural world and is
purely an expression of our emotions and are therefore meaningless. A.J. Ayer argues this on
the grounds that moral statements are neither of the two types of factual statements: the
analytic, which are true by definition, and the synthetic, which can be verified through empirical
methods. Moral statements cannot be verified and therefore he concludes moral language has
no meaning. C.L. Stevenson takes as similar view believing that moral statements are an
expression of a fundamental belief that a person holds, and nothing more. However, although
their arguments are very different from that of naturalists, I still believe that their view of
morality suggests that ‘good’ refers to a natural property because they fail to recognise that our
emotive response is also part of nature. Humans naturally have emotions, and even if the
feeling of sadness or anger that we experience when we whiteness something that we consider
to be ‘wrong’ is all moral language is based on, then it still points to morality being part of
nature as we have a natural reaction to the event. Even though our emotions may differ as a
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