Revision:Religious and Ethical Language

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• The meaning and function of ethical language is the focus of meta-ethics. Can morals be proven like other facts or are they simply emotional responses?

• If there is no agreement about the mening of ethical language then ethical debate is pointless. Religious language, the communication of ideas about God and faith, faces much the same problem.

• Both ethical and religious language cause significant problems when it comes to their meaningfulness and the accuracy with which they communicate the concepts they are describing. Attempts to define 'goodness' usually end up with us defining it in terms of something else e.g. the principle of utility "the greatest good for the greatest number". Similarly the religious believer is faced with problems when trying to define God and trying to discern what is fact.

• The Logical Positivists considered the defininition of a fact and believed that for religious language to be a fact it must be able to be proven factual just as literal statements are, by sense experience. David Hume, who held a cognitive viewpoint, agreed with this. He felt that religious language is therefore vapid and meaningless, because there is no sense experience to prove that the way we talk about belief and God is valid.

• But the Verification Principle has come under much scrutiny since, ironically, the theory itself can not be verified by sense experience, and thus the theory "dissolves in it's own acid".

• Ayer tried to rectify this by arguing for a weak form of the verification principle, stating that it was sufficient just to be able to know what sense experience could be used to make a statement probable, but this still poses a problem for religious language.

• LP's attemted to solve the problem by stating that VP is more of a recommendation than a fact, but the same could be said for religious language- a way of conveying truth but not literally.

• Proponents in the belief that religious language is univocal believe that words about God have the same meaning when talking of other things - this lead to the Via Negativa, where we can understand what God is stating by what he isn't. But Brian Davies does not agree with this idea, stating that there are any number of things that we could say God is not, but this brings us no clear to discovering what he is.

• So far these arguments fail to provide valid reasons for the use of religious language,

• Thomas Aquinas recognised that there were difficulties when talking about religious language, he therefore considered it to be analogical rather than univocal or equivocal (which he believed brought God down to the level of mankind),

• RL being analogical enables us to attribute meaning to God universally even though God's attributes cannot be compared to ours. This approach has an advantage in that we can show how language can be applied to God, it is a matter of the relationship between the human use and the religious use.

• Anological language can be necessary for both religion and morality because of the nature of both aspects of human life. We gain understanding of what is good and Godly by comparision.

• This also highlights the relationship between ethics and religion, if ethics is based on religion it may well use fundamental principles from religion - if not then it will not be able to claim absolute universal authority.

• A recent development in the argument, The Falsification Principle, considers that a statement is only true if there is evidence to count against it. This would mean that religious language is indeed meaningless because there is no solid evidence to prove or disprove it's validity.

• Hare agreed that religious language may be non-cognitive, but he still saw religious statements to be meaningful, he regarded them as 'bliks' his term for unfalsifiable statements that still hold belief for the believer.

• Paul Tillich advocated that symbols were the best way for us to know of God, we can use symbols to represent a higher divine entity, which would otherwise be unknown to us.

• Ultimately whether religious language is meaningless comes down to the religious believer. Wittgenstein believed that we should focus on the individual believer and look at the use rather than meaning, He advocated that religious language is like a game and like all games it has its rules. None believers would not know the rules of a game and would therefore find all such talk meaningless. W's stance aims to protect the view of the religious believer from critique. Different religious belief systems have different rules therefore the meaningfulness of such language becomes a matter of individual interpretation. But this can of course present a problem with the communication of religious beliefs.

• But what of ethical language? If our morals are based on a religious belief system then ethics does become meaningful to a religious believer. Ethical language thus faces much of the same problems as religious language.

• Meta-ethics involves the study of trying to define the ethical language we use and offering explanations for its meaningfulness and vaility.

• F.H Bradley advocates Ethical Naturalism - the belief that a statement could only be factual and have meaning if it can be verifed empirically like literal statements

• But G.E Moore argues this would lead to Naturalistic Fallacy, and that an ethical statement is meaningful and factual because it is available through intuition. He famously stated 'good is good and that is the end of the matter'. But this idea of an innate sense of good raises the question of why people still behave badly?

• These two approaches offer cognitive explanations for ethical language, but subjective problems, as previously mentioned. Goodness not seen as an objective fact.

• Emotivism, expressed by Ayer, attempts to incorporate emotions into ethics, incorporating our own attitudes/beliefs which is arguably much of what ethics is, thus making it more meaningful.

• Ayer - when we state stealing is wrong we are simply saying 'boo' to stealing or 'yay' for other peoples property - it goes no further than this Boo-Hurrah theory.

• Prescriptivism incorporates this theory, but takes it further, claiming that we are 'prescribing' our beliefs to others.

• But - many hold the view that ethics is more than simply approving/dissaproving an action, problems over whose prescribed theory we should follow?

• So - ethical and religious language are both meaningful to individual believer but to the non-religious can be questionable. But arguably most of us do have an innate sense of what is right/wrong.

Comment

These notes are based on an essay plan for the topic of mortality and life and death for the OCR A2 Synoptic Philosophy and Ethics paper.

Originally written by AlmostInsane on TSR Forums.