...from an extended treatment of emotion, which supplies a somewhat different moral- psychological basis.2 The view is meant to contrast with noncognitivist accounts of ethics in terms of emotion (emotivism and more recent versions of expressivism), but I shall not review in detail the arguments that the basis it assigns to ethics allows for moral realism.3 Instead I want mainly to present the view here and to recommend it for further attention, first in more or less the form in which it emerged, as a way of explaining the special motivational force of moral judgments (Section II), and then recast in somewhat artificial terms, for comparison with another (at least arguably) realist approach to metaethics known as "response-dependency" (Section III).4 My own view can be seen as a social or two-level version of response-dependency, but with a less rigid account of motivational force introduced by the move to the social level. I shall go on to acknowledge some difficulties but also to cite further advantages of my suggested approach on issues of justification (Section IV) and on the question of the relevance of emotion to moral judgment (Section V). In a nutshell: A response-dependent account explains a concept in terms of a disposition to respond in some way under standard conditions. The paradigm case outside ethics is the definition of color concepts--of red, say, as applying to things that would look red to normal observers under normal conditions of color perception. As currently...
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...of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theoryfocus on what is moral, metaethics focuses on what morality itself is. Just as two people may disagree about the ethics of, for example, physician-assisted suicide, while nonetheless agreeing at the more abstract level of a general normative theory such as Utilitarianism, so too may people who disagree at the level of a general normative theory nonetheless agree about the fundamental existence and status of morality itself, or vice versa. In this way, metaethics may be thought of as a highly abstract way of thinking philosophically about morality. For this reason, metaethics is also occasionally referred to as “second-order” moral theorizing, to distinguish it from the “first-order” level of normative theory. Metaethical positions may be divided according to how they respond to questions such as the following: * Ÿ What exactly are people doing when they use moral words such as “good” and “right”? * Ÿ What precisely is a moral value in the first place, and are such values similar to other familiar sorts of entities, such as objects and properties? * Ÿ Where do moral values come from—what is their source and foundation? * Ÿ Are some things morally right or wrong for all people at all times, or does morality instead vary from person to person, context to context, or culture to culture? Metaethical...
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