In 1920, the U.S. introduced a nationwide ban on alcohol by passing the Eighteenth Amendment. It lated reconsidered and repealed the ban in 1933 with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment. In 2015, the killings prompted by the Charlie Hebdo cartoons made westerners acutely aware of prohibitions against representations of the Prophet Muhammed in Wahabbist Islam. Yet there exist examples of Islamic art from the 13th and 15th centuries, which freely contain such representations. And, lest we forget, the history of Christianity also features people like John Calvin, who not only banned representations of God, but, like the Taliban, forbade dancing as well, and condemned music as being sinful.
Extreme disagreements over what people consider morally permissible exist, yet despite all these recognised historical variations in conceptions of morality, people generally hold their moral beliefs to be correct. Stepping back and taking an anthropological point of view, we seem to be wired to have the capacity for morality, while allowing for variability in what is understood to be moral. What’s going on? Is it the case that every society which came before us, or which coexists with us, that has different moral beliefs, is mistaken? Or is there a more subtle and nuanced way to understand moral differences?
Metaethics is the study of what morality itself is, rather than the study of what morality requires. One of the central debates within metaethics concerns whether moral statements are even capable of being true or false. Statements which are capable of being true or false are known as “truth-apt”. Given a statement which is truth-apt, it is then a further question to ask what it is about the world which makes that statement true or false. Setting aside, for the moment, the question of what exactly grounds the truth of moral statements, it certainly seems as though moral statements are truth-apt. When we say “Lying is wrong,” that is generally understood as describing a fact — some kind of fact — of the world. Furthermore, we can make inferences from general moral principles, like “Lying is wrong,” to arrive at prohibitions of specific actions, like “It is wrong for you to tell your boss you are sick when you are not.” Indeed, our ability to construct arguments involving moral statements is one of the main reasons (due to Gottlob Frege and Peter Geach) for thinking that moral statements are truth-apt, a view known as cognitivism.
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"Morality as a social technology will take different forms because not all societies are attempting to solve exactly the same kinds of problems under the same kinds of constraints"
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