Theistic Metaethics

“Is-Ought Question” and Aristotelian-Thomistic Metaphysics

Meta–ethics distinguishes from the field of ethics in focusing research on what makes ethics possible qua talis, rather than direclty dealing with the thorough foundation of specific ethical theories or, like in applied ethics, with some specific ethical issues.

Indeed my deep interest in metaethics is due to the relevance that the central question about God’s existence cannot be denied to play in order to establish ethics’ true foundation and essence. In particular — against the post–kantian ideological fashon that affirms an always more radical independence of ethics from ontology and metaphysics, a tendency further enhanced by what I hold to be the wrong interpretations of the so called “Is-Ought Question”— the main point of my research is that everything changes in ethics if God exists or if does not exist.

The question concerning the foundation of ethics is surely complex, but I think to have at least delineated the fundamental aspects of the thematic, by having enhanced the scope and conclusions of what I wrote in a long paper back in 2003 (in Italian). Here I will just hint at the present status of the ongoing project through the two following diagrams, within which the basic contents of the 2003 article and the new theoretical developements have been integrated.

sequenceDiagram

    Is/Description->Ought/Evaluation: Language phenomenology
    Note over Is/Description,Ought/Evaluation: Descriptive and evaluative state-
ments are interconnected
    Ought/Evaluation->Is/Description: Hume's Law
    Note over Is/Description,Ought/Evaluation: Ought cannot be derived from Is
(Mountain Range Effect)
    Is/Description->Ought/Evaluation: Eudaimonistic Teleology
    Note over Is/Description,Ought/Evaluation: Ontic interconnection between
substance/accidents = Finalism
    Ought/Evaluation->Is/Description: Ontic Vacuity's Aporia
    Note over Is/Description,Ought/Evaluation: No God no stable link between
the ontic standards of morality
and a whatsoever ethical value
    Is/Description->Ought/Evaluation: God's ontological simplicity
    Note over Is/Description,Ought/Evaluation: In His ontological simplicity one
can see the original and indistin-
guishable unity between Is and
Ought. Is/Ought question solved

    sequenceDiagram    
        Natural Theology->>Metaethics: Foundational Relation
        Note right of Natural Theology: No God no Ethics
        Metaethics-->>Natural Theology: Necessarily depends upon    
        Metaethics->>Natural Law: First principles of

– Section to be completed –