Ethics is primarily a descriptive discipline?

Answer 1

There is a distinction to be made in philosophy between description, prediction, normativity, explanation etc.

Many aspects of the sciences are descriptive and predictive.

Ethics differes from science because ethics is descriptive and sometimes normative.

When you make the moral statment 'X is good' you could be describing certain things such as;

- A property of X

- Properties of a possible world where X is the case

- Peoples attitudes towards X

or you could be making normative claims like;

- You ought do X

- You have a duty to do X

Which of these is the case depends upon meta-ethics. In the normative examples however it is not necessarily the case that you are describing anything when you say 'you ought do X'

For example non-cognitivsts / emotivists would take the claim 'X is good' to mean "hurrah for X!" such a utterence is no more descriptive then chanting "U!S!A!U!S!A!" at the Olympics to encourage the american swimming team.

Moral naturalists on the other hand believe that moral claims are about something in the natural world and are made true or false by the same sorts of real properties that make claims about scientific entities true or false. on this view "X is good" translates to a claim about natural propoerty P (say happieness) and X doing something to cause this natural property. This view is entierly descriptive where the moral motervation can be wholly seperated from the truth of a moral claim which makes a sharp distinction between the normative and the descriptive.

As far as I am concerned the only thing that stops moral naturalism from being fully scientific is that it is not predictive in any way and therefore cannot be concidered a proper scinece.

I hope this helped somewhat :)