Ethics Chapter 2 Study Guide

Cognitivism is the view that moral statements:

can be true or false.

Suppose your culture endorses the view that all wars are wrong. It follows from cultural relativism that your culture:

cannot be mistaken about the morality of war.

Cultural relativism implies that the abolition of slavery:

cannot be regarded as moral progress.

Objectivists point out there is no necessary connection between tolerance and:

cultural relativism.

Some relativists think that disagreements among cultures about the morality of "female circumcision" are evidence for:

cultural relativism.

Emotivists can admit that thousands of innocent people were killed at the behest of Osama bin Laden and that Ted Bundy killed more than 100 women, but they cannot say that in these events:

evil occurred.

Subjective relativism implies that in the rendering of any moral opinion, each person is:

incapable of being in error.

Noncognitivism is the view that:

moral judgments are not statements that can be true or false.

Both objectivists and cultural relativists agree that:

moral judgments differ from culture to culture.

According to the relativist's main argument, if Culture X and Culture Y disagree about the morality of physician-assisted suicide, that shows that:

no view can be objectively correct.

Subjective relativism implies that when Jane says, "I think abortion is wrong," and John replies, "I think abortion is permissible," Jane and John are:

not having a moral disagreement.

Suppose a culture approves of beheading young women for merely holding hands with a man. According to cultural relativism, the beheadings are:

objectively justified

According to emotivism, to offer reasons for a moral judgment is to:

provide nonmoral facts that can influence someone's attitude

The conclusion of the most common argument for cultural relativism says that:

right and wrong are relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles.

Objectivism says that:

some moral norms are universal.

Objectivism is the view that:

some moral principles are valid for everyone.

Our commonsense moral experiences suggest that:

some things are morally good and some things are morally bad.

A common criticism of emotivism is that:

the emotivist's notion of disagreement is radically different from our ordinary view.

Objectivists argue that the diversity of moral judgments across cultures may indicate NOT that there's disagreement about moral beliefs, but that:

there are divergent nonmoral beliefs.

Emotivism implies that:

there is no such thing as moral goodness and badness.

Cultural relativism may be nearly impossible to apply to moral issues because:

there is no way for us to choose which society we belong to.

For a cultural relativist, when two people in the same culture disagree on a moral issue, what they are really disagreeing about is:

whether their society endorses a particular view.

Cultural relativism implies that the civil rights leader and social reformer Martin Luther King Jr. was:

wrong about his moral reforms.

For the emotivist, the moral utterance "Lying is wrong" signifies something like:

"Lying-boo, hiss!"

Subjective relativism is the doctrine that:

an action is morally right if one approves of it.