One version of the Old Testament myth of Adam and Eve is that Adam ate the
fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Assuming, that eating this
fruit gave Adam knowledge of good and evil that he didn't have before eating
it, paradoxically, to the extent that this was a sin, the original sin was
also the origin of knowledge of ethics, do's and don'ts.
This map of philo's section on "Meta-Ethics" is elaborated below.
CB
I Ethics
A. Preliminary Definitions
B Non-Normative Ethics
1. Scientific/Descriptive
2. Meta-Ethics
a. Investigates meaning of ethical terms and critically
examines conditions pertaining to their verifiability.
b. Conceptual analysis
i) Clarifying concepts via formulation of necessary and
sufficient conditions for their applicability.
ii) "Tool" by which meta-ethical investigations are
carried out.
c. Naturalism
i) Moral judgments are true or false, and such judgments
are reducible to concepts of some natural science
(psychology)
ii)Ethical prescriptive statements can be translated
into non-ethical descriptive statements.
d. Non-naturalism
i) Ethical statements possess truth value and are
ultimately irreducible to non-ethical statements.
ii)Some ethical terms can only be defined via other
ethical terms. This engenders problem of how truth of
ethical judgment is determined if there is no recourse
to non-ethical factors.
e. Non-cognitivism/Emotivism
i) Moral judgments are neither true nor false, and are
merely verbal manifestations of the feelings of those
who utter them and evocative of the feelings of those
who hear them.
ii)Ethical statements are used to evoke a predetermined
response or to encourage a predetermined behavior.
iii)Ethical statements are irreducible to matters of
psychology or other non-ethical statements.
iv)Naturalist: Ethical statements are subjective and
variable.
v) Emotivist: Ethical statements are subjective but not
variable
C Normative Ethics
1. Applied Normative Ethics
2. General Normative Ethics
D. Consequential/Teleological Theories
1.Ethical Egoism
2.Ethical Altruism
3.Utilitariaism
4.The Theory of Valuation:Dewey
E. Non-Consequential/Deontological Theories
1.Classified into 4 Divisions
a. Extreme
b. Moderate
c. Act
d. Rule
2. Intuitionism
a. Realistic Value Theory (G.E. Moore)
b. Idealistic Value Theory (Prichard)
c. Prima Facie Concepts ( Ross )
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