PHIL 0450 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Expressivism, Basic Norm, Meta-Ethics

• School: Brown University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 0450
• Professor: Larmore Charles

Document Summary

Summation of meta-ethics what we mean when we say something is right or wrong. Families of views: cognitivist judgments about good/bad as judgments that mean to get it right, with the assumption that there is a right answer. Ethical judgments fail but their intentions are to embody knowledge: expressivism - cognitivism misunderstands what moral discourse is like. Reminding us that language can do more than describe facts about the world. Judgments about value misunderstand the intention of judgments to suppose that they are trying to get it right. We are affixing good/bad to things the view is about the actual intention of ethical views and that there are no moral facts no objective goodness. We are expressing attitudes of approval or disapproval. One deep motivation that pushes others to expressivism because objectivity is inconceivable. Objective values are incoherent, nonetheless, we can understand the motivations that push people to suppose that there are objective value.