‘Ethical Language is meaningful’ Discuss

The great discussion within Ethics is trying to unravel the meanings of essential terms, such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, this differs from normative ethics, which tries to decide which things are good and bad and gives us a guide for moral behaviour – it’s the analysis of ethical language, but this also arises a question that many Ethicists and Philosophers have been asking for centuries - how meaningful is ethical language? This is known as Meta ethics. Ethical language has two separate approaches it can take – cognitive language which is realist and objective, being able to come up with ethical statements from nature and believing it to be true. For instance, if I said that rape is wrong, then I have given rape the property of wrongness, so according to a cognitivist my statement is objectively true or false and applies to everyone. On the other hand, you are able to follow a non-cognitivist route which is anti-realist and subjective. So they don’t agree that when making a moral statement it applies to all, but you are rather expressing feelings or telling people what to do, they are not descriptive so they can’t be described as true or false – they are subjective.
The debate begins with Bradley who falls under the cognitive approach. He believes that we derive moral values from our society, we look at our community and from that we learn how to behave, so we use those morals that we have learnt and put them into practice in our society and outer world, so it becomes almost like a cycle. An example of this, is if our society that we are brought up in teach us that racism is wrong, we adopt that moral value and that statement becomes objectively true to everyone else in the same community. For Utilitarianists, such as Bentham would observe how much pain and pleasure would occur if an action took place and from weighing both of