PHL275H1 Lecture Notes - Moral Nihilism
Document Summary
Like hume, he denies that there are objective moral truths, when we are saying that x is wrong we can"t be saying anything true. he rejects moore"s non-naturalism but not as a matter of the meaning of moral sentences. Unlike the emotivists, he doesn"t claim that when we say x is right we are expressing an attitude, and we know that we are doing it. He thinks that when we make moral judgments we think that we are making a statement that could be true, but mackie thinks that all such judgments are false. Leads them to what is called an error theory -the claim to objectivity however engrained in our language of thought is not self-validating. Parallel with error theory about color properties, in saying that an apple is red, we"re asserting that there is a color property on the surface of the apple just like the color property that we see in our minds.