PHIL 150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Open-Question Argument, Meta-Ethics, Emotivism
Document Summary
Moral realism: there are moral properties, moral utterances attribute these properties to acts/agents, some of these attributions are correct. Cognitivism: morality is a matter of belief, moral statements are truth-apt. Non-cognitivism: moral statements are not true-apt; their semantic function is not to describe the world. Emotivism: moral claims express attitudes (i. e. emotions) not beliefs. Such attitudes lack cognitive content and are not truth-apt (a version of non-cogntivism) Verification principle: a statement is meaningful if and only if it is analytic or it is empirically verifiable. (the semantic principle of logical positivists) The open question argument synonymous: two properties are identical if and only if the predicates that they ascribe are, so, goodness is identical with a natural property n if and only if good" and n" are synonymous. If two terms are synonymous, then substituting one for the other does not change the meaning of a sentence.
