Ethical questions

A lot of people get into ethics by thinking about what’s good, bad, right, wrong, just, unjust etc.? And why?

To attempt to get down to fundamentals, they eventually inquire: Are statements of ethical judgment without meaning, like groans of dismay and roars of approval?
Are ethical judgments merely personal preferences? Are they arbitrary whims?

Once you’ve answered No to the above three queries, you may earnestly ask: Are ethical judgments ever true? Can they make sense?

Once – agreeing with me - you reply “Yes! because moral goodness is an objective property that can be detected by experience and experiment” then you see the need for a meta-ethics, along with a theory that results from it, and you really get down to it, and investigate:
Is goodness a property of things (or actions or people) or is it a relation between a thing (action, person) and a ‘beholder’ who makes a judgment?

Finally you discover the G.E. Moore/R. S. Hartman logical definition of ‘good’ as a second-order property: a property OF properties – namely, a quantifier of qualities.(* You understand then why it was so hard for the philosophers to see this for so many years. They were looking at it as a first-order property, like ‘yellow,’ ’hairy,’ or ‘flat,’ when all the time it was a second-order matter, like the logical quantifiers, ‘all’ and ‘some.’ I’m confident you will fully comprehend all this if you give it some serious study. With the illustrations the College Course textbook offers you’ll gradually (or suddenly if you’re really bright) come to understand the whole picture.
See: http://wadeharvey.myqol.com/wadeharvey/Ethics_A_College_Course.pdf

The questions you ask, and for which the Course supplies some suggested answers, have bothered more than a few philosophers. They are relevant to some of the underlying assumptions of ethics. What sort of thing if anything is “goodness”? What kind of judgments are moral judgments and how do they relate to empirical statements and to truth? The best answers may not fit too neatly with the conventional curriculum!

Once good and bad are understood, and once dimensions of value have been worked out, you are in a good position to analyze and answer questions about What is Justice? What names shall we put upon the differing parts of the justice spectrum – just as we name portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, saying one band is visible light, another is radio waves, etc.

You will hit on the insight that what is “right” is to do and be good; and what is “wrong” is to do and be bad, morally speaking. Hence the primary task is to define what value is – since good and bad are species of value.

That is where to begin: what underlying assumption is necessary to define “value”? What, then, is “value”? And what, in context, does “good” mean when we say of an X that it is good? What is a good X?

*) {As the book makes clear in Chapter Two, good is the all; rather than the some, i.e., the complete match (between attributes in the mind of a judge and properties possessed by an example of the concept under which the item being evaluated falls) rather than just a partial match.} plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/

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