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. >> The final view about the status of
morality I want to discuss is emotivism. Unlike all of the other philosophical
views I've been discussing in this lecture, emotivism says that our moral
opinions aren't the sort of thing that can be true or false.
According to emotivism, moral claims are neither statements of objective fact nor
statements whose truth is subjective or culturally relative.
They're expressions of our emotional reactions.
To get an idea of what emotivism comes to, recall the subjectivist view that I've
discussed before. The subjectivist says that my assertion,
polygamy is wrong, is true just in case I morally disapprove of polygamy.
The emotivist denies this, but she says instead that my assertion directly
expresses my moral disapproval. In somewhat colorful language, the
emotivist is suggesting that when I say, polygamy is wrong, it's as if I said, boo
for polygamy. Emotivists don't deny that we call some
moral opinions true and others false, in a loose sense.
It's just that they think that, strictly speaking, our moral statements are not the
expressions of beliefs in matters of fact, neither objective fact nor relative fact,
but rather the expression of our moral attitudes.
To explain the possibility of genuine moral disagreement, emotivist suggests
that, like it's possible to disagree in belief, it's also possible to disagree in
attitude. Indeed, when I say okra is yummy, and
someone else says okra is gross, it's plausible to construe what's going on
here, as are both expressing attitudes towards okra, just attitudes that
disagree. That is, we might think that I'm
expressing my like of okra, and you are expressing your dislike.
For the emotivist, moral disagreement is similar.
It's disagreement in our moral attitudes, rather than in our beliefs about some
matter of fact.