ABSTRACT
In the 1930s, a school of philosophy arose called logical positivism, concerned with the foundations of knowledge. It developed a criterion for when a statement is meaningful, called the principle of verifiability, also known as the verification principle. The verification principle claims that the only alternative to knowing something analytically is to use empirical experience. This chapter discusses moral realism which is a form of cognitivism, as it claims that mind-independent moral properties make moral judgements true or false. It focuses on applied ethics and considers the application of three normative ethical theories – utilitarianism, Kantian deontology and Aristotelian virtue ethics – to four practical issues, stealing, eating animals, simulated killing, and telling lies. The chapter also focuses on metaethics and considers two families of theories: cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Cognitivism claims that ethical language expresses beliefs. Non-cognitivism claims that ethical language does not express beliefs, but some other, non-cognitive mental state.
