Metaethics: Moral language and beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 12-21
Keyword(s):  
Moral Language

Reality and Morality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Dunaway
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Realist View

This book develops and defends a framework for moral realism. It defends the idea that moral properties are metaphysically elite, or privileged parts of reality. It argues that realists can hold that this makes them highly eligible as the referents for our moral terms, an application of a thesis sometimes called reference magnetism. And it elaborates on these theses by introducing some natural claims about how we can know about morality, by having beliefs that are free from a kind of risk of error. This package of theses in metaphysics, meta-semantics, and epistemology is motivated with a view to an explanation of possible moral disagreements. Many writers have emphasized the scope of moral disagreement, and have given compelling examples of possible users of moral language who appear to be genuinely disagreeing, rather than talking past one another, with their use of moral language. What has gone unnoticed is that there are limits to these possible disagreements, and not all possible users of moral language are naturally interpreted as capable of genuine disagreement. The realist view developed in this book can explain both the extent of, and the limits to, moral disagreement, and thereby has explanatory power that counts significantly in its favor.

scholarly journals Playing ethics and teaching morality: how wittgenstein could help us to apply games to the moral living

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Janyne Sattler
Keyword(s):  
Language Game ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Moral Engagement

ABSTRACT: In Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations the notion of a 'language game' gives human communication a regained flexibility. Contrary to the Tractatus, the ethical domain now composes one language game among others, being expressed in various types of sentences such as moral judgments, imperatives and praises, and being shared in activity by a human form of life. The aim of this paper is to show that the same moves that allow for a moral language game are the ones allowing for learning and teaching about the moral living, where persuasion takes the place of argument by means of a plural appeal. For this purpose, literature would seem to be one of the best tools at our disposal. As a way of exemplifying our moral engagement to literature I proceed at last to a brief analysis of Tolstoy's Father Sergius, to show how playing this game would help us accomplish this pedagogical enterprise.

Emendation, Divination

Martin Delrio ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Machielsen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Language ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Catholic Tradition

Humanists employed a simplified moral language of virtue and vice to describe their textual emendations. An emendation could be cast as an act of healing or, when deemed unsuccessful, as inflicting new wounds. This chapter argues that the Counter-Reformation should be seen as a textual project, which sought to codify Catholic tradition and liturgy. Within this context, it explores how Catholic scholars employed this moral language and divided emendation as grounded, positively, in the authority of the manuscript tradition or, negatively, in private reason. The latter was frequently understood as an act of divination. This chapter explores how Delrio used this language to correct not only the text of the Senecan tragedies, but his friend Lipsius as well.

Descriptive Moral Theories

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Problem ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Moral Philosophers

This chapter develops an alternative, descriptive understanding of moral theory in order to reconcile two apparently conflicting insights; the insight of the critics of moral theory into the problems of the dominant conception of moral theory and the insight into the relevance that we still attribute to the positions traditionally conceived as theories such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. Building on the work of theory-critics, but without giving up the notion of moral theory, the chapter presents a view according to which theories are descriptive rather than prescriptive and serve heuristic and elucidatory purposes. Inspired by the notion of grammar found in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is furthermore claimed that theories are descriptions which provide overviews of various normative structures of concerns—or moral grammars—and which may serve two different purposes, providing either general descriptions of the logic of our moral language or descriptions that elucidate a specific moral problem. According to this view, moral philosophers must accept the co-existence of a plurality of moral theories that describe a plurality of moral grammars, and they must give up the idea that moral theories are mutually exclusive. Moreover, the development of the second purpose reveals that theories cannot be the sole tool of moral philosophy, they need to be supplemented with grammatical investigations of the particularities involved in moral problems. Moral theories can be helpful, but they are never sufficient when addressing a problem in moral philosophy.

Disagreement, Semantics, and Meta-Semantics

2020 ◽  
pp. 14-52
Author(s):  
Billy Dunaway
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Twin Earth ◽  
Moral Twin Earth

Moral Twin Earth thought experiments appear to show that practical language is highly stable, and that many possible users of practical language are capable of having genuine disagreements with each other. This chapter clarifies a tempting generalization of this idea, which is that the members of every pair of possible users of moral language are capable of having a genuine disagreement. This is the Universal Disagreement thesis. It then shows how this thesis can be adapted to a contextualist semantics for ‘ought’ and other practical terms. It concludes by arguing that, for the realist, the central explanatory target is a claim about the stability of practical language.

Expressivism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark van Roojen
Keyword(s):  
Good Evidence ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Tight Connection ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Cognitive Attitudes ◽  
Descriptive Language

Expressivism is a kind of noncognitivism, usually about morality. And noncognitivism is a metaethical theory, that is a theory about the subject matter of morality, about the nature of moral thought and about the meaning of moral language. Noncognitivist theories of ethics and morality contrast with cognitivist theories of ethics, according to which moral language and thought is continuous with other descriptive language and thought, which represents the world to be a certain way. Insofar as the idea is to contrast moral language with ordinary descriptive language, noncognitivists must give us an account of how moral thought and language do function. That account must make sense of moral thought and talk and be consistent with how people in fact think and talk about moral matters. Expressivism is perhaps the dominant contemporary strategy for providing that story. Expressivism suggests that the function of moral language is to express desire like attitudes. The fact that moral language does so is supposed to explain the intuitively tight connection between moral opinion and action – that people’s actions provide good evidence about the morality they accept. And it is supposed also to explain why moral terms cannot be translated into nonmoral language, as G.E. Moore alleged in his influential Principia Ethica The general expressivist strategy is to explain these and other features of moral language by correlating moral sentences with the attitudes they are apt to express. The thought is that we can use these states of mind to explain what these sentences mean. Expressivism thus extends the project of the early emotivists, who along with prescriptivists developed the two main early varieties of noncognitivism. Expressivists and emotivists agree that simple indicative moral sentences are conventional devices for the expression of pro and con attitudes as opposed to cognitive attitudes such as belief. Contemporary expressivists have not repudiated emotivism; rather, they have developed it. Most are quasi-realist insofar as they have aimed to generate a systematic account of moral language that vindicates everyday moral practice. They have thus gone some way beyond their emotivist predecessors in generating accounts of more complex sentences that contain moral terms. And they have often been more specific about the attitudes expressed and about the sense in which attitude expression can be used to explain the meanings of moral terms.

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