Expressivism & Quasi-realism

1. Moral Attitudes We represent natural facts but not moral facts Moral belief starts as an attitude. The input is action, character, situation. The output is attitude/pressure on attitudes. INPUT natural fact ------ ethical sensibilities ------OUTPUT moral attitudes Reactions can be other moral reactions - If i disapprove of X, I approve of other people who disapprove of someone who approves of X Objection: The many attitudes problem - belief, desire, wonder, hope, fear

2. Projectivism and Quasi-realism 3 ways of showing relationship between moral prop and beliefs 1.Moral properties part of genesis of moral beliefs 2. Only natural properties exist, we construct moral concepts from them 3.Projectivism: we hold moral attitudes and project these onto the world. Quasi-realism is the project showing that we project our attitudes as though the have distinctive properties e.g. turnips are disgusting. Meta-ethical view. Ethical sentences do not express propositions, they project emotional attitudes as though they were real properties.

3. Expressivism (usually non-cog in the lit) Moral anti-realism: Moral sentences represent no moral facts. Moral terms have no moral properties. Simply - I express my disapproval of X Non-cog: Valuing something is not describing it. Valuing is a natural state of mind - essential phenomenon of ethics. This rejects popular theory of meaning - truth-conditional semantics (reference) According to non-cog, moral statements have no truth conditions

4. Advantages of non-cog Ontology of value:Doesn't have to defend idea that there are values in the world. Asks no more of the world than we know is there. Epistemology: If values are not properties of objects in the world, then no issue of how we come to know them. Motivation: Answers the motivation problem i.e. moral attitudes are desire like and have a direction of fit. Moral language, meaning of moral terms: Challenge: Revisionary proposal. Doesn't make sense of our moral thought/talk?