2009/01/01 by Mark Schroeder · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
paper · doi:10.1086/597019
A. A Tale of Two FlowchartsIf you open any textbook on metaethics, one of the first things that you are likely to see is a flowchart. 1 The advertised purpose of this flowchart is to ascertain, by means of your answers to three or four binary questions, where you lie in the space of possible metaethical theories.And its first question usually goes as follows: "Do you think that moral sentences express beliefs or that they express desire-like attitudes?"If you say "beliefs," then you count as a cognitivist, and you will be expected to answer such questions as what those beliefs are about, whether and how we find out about such a thing, how we manage to refer to it in thought and language, and why finding out about it should bear any special connection to motivating us.If you say "desire-like attitudes," then you fall into the expressivist camp, or so it is said, and you are duly forewarned that famous problems accounting for the logical and inferential features of moral sentences await you.The flowchart tells us that the differences between these two camps are deep and fundamental and that we can think of other differences between views as downstream from them.This first question of such flowcharts, however, contains multiple