AQA Philosophy A2 Level
Moral Philosophy
How do people justify their actions? How do we understand truth and the application to morality? If truth is external to the individual how do we respond to it? If truth is internal from the individual how we know what is really true? How should we apply these to moral situation?
This part of the course will look at the concept that moral concepts can be understood as being objective. These moral concepts are external to the individual. We need to take account of how the individual is to then respond to these moral truths.
What types of moral truths are there?
3. Relational Morality
Key themes
- Animals are killed is a natural fact
- We ought to not eat animal meat is an “ought with gap”
- We ought to not eat animal meat because of the suffering it causes to animals when they are killed is a moral reason which only relates to us as rational creatures.
- We are rational creatures who can evaluate reasons and come to a judgment!
- We can form objective moral truth from this.
- FACT = result of testing on dinosaur bones
- REASON = whether you think result leads to belief in existence of dinosaur bones
- You have to weight up the different reasons to come to the conclusion
- Whether you agree or not the result is still a fact and therefore objective. They are entitled Normative facts
- I.e. Facts about justification or reasoning
- Morality is therefore: ‘to say that something is wrong is to say that moral reasons against doing it are stronger than any moral reason in favour of it’
- Because this is a statement of (normative) fact – moral judgements can be true or false.
- Therefore we can bridge the is ought gap through studying the reasons about the natural facts