Download or read book The Language of Desire written by Daniel Eggers and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expressivism has been dominating much of the metaethical debate of the past three decades. The aim of this book is to address a number of questions that have been neglected in the previous discussion.These primarily concern the psychological commitments and the methodological status of expressivism as well as important differences and similarities between the approaches of the ‘classic’ expressivists Ayer, Stevenson, Hare, Blackburn und Gibbard.
Download or read book Ethical Subjectivism and Expressivism written by Neil Sinclair and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethical subjectivists hold that moral judgements are descriptions of our attitudes. Expressivists hold that they are expressions of our attitudes. These views cook with the same ingredients – the natural world, and our reactions to it – and have similar attractions. This Element assesses each of them by considering whether they can accommodate three central features of moral practice: the practicality of moral judgements, the phenomenon of moral disagreement, and the mind-independence of some moral truths. In the process, several different versions of subjectivism are distinguished (simple, communal, idealising, and normative) and key expressivist notions such as 'moral attitudes' and 'expression' are examined. Different meanings of 'subjective' and 'relative' are examined and it is considered whether subjectivism and expressivism make ethics 'subjective' or 'relative' in each of these senses.
Download or read book Being For written by Mark Schroeder and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-05-13 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been very far developed. As argued within, expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the 'negation problem' - to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result, it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true, let alone whether it is. Being For seeks to evaluate the semantic commitments of expressivism, by showing how an expressivist semantics would work, what it can do, and what kind of assumptions would be required, in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism, it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem - but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful, constructive expressivist semantics, which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism. But it also argues that no account with these advantages can be generalized to deal with constructions like tense, modals, or binary quantifiers. Expressivism, the book argues, is coherent and interesting, but false.
Download or read book Practical Expressivism written by Neil Sinclair and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is morality? Neil Sinclair argues that it is a purely natural interpersonal co-ordination device, whereby human beings express their attitudes in order to influence others' attitudes and actions. Sinclair shows that even if moral practice is fundamentally expressive, it can still possess the features that make morality appear objective.
Download or read book Expressing Our Attitudes written by Mark Andrew Schroeder and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightforwardly applied to the subject of metaethics. The philosophical research programme of expressivism, emotivism's contemporary heir, has called this assumption into question. In this volume Mark Schroeder argues that the only plausible ways of developing expressivism or similar views require us to rethink what we may have thought that we knew about propositions, truth, and the nature of attitudes like belief and desire.
Download or read book Expressing Our Attitudes written by Mark Schroeder and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightforwardly applied to the subject of metaethics. The philosophical research program of expressivism, emotivism's contemporary heir, has called this assumption into question. In this volume Mark Schroeder argues that the only plausible ways of developing expressivism or similar views require us to re-think what we may have thought that we knew about propositions, truth, and the nature of attitudes like belief and desire. Informed by detailed scrutiny of the structural problems about understanding complex thoughts, he develops a range of alternative expressivist frameworks in detail as illustrations of general lessons, and applies them not just to metaethics, but to epistemic expressions and even to truth itself. Expressing Our Attitudes pulls together over a decade of work by one of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. Two new and seven previously published papers weave treatments of propositions, truth, and the attitudes together with detailed development of competing alternative expressivist frameworks and discussion of their relative advantages. A substantial new introduction both offers new arguments of its own, and provides a map to reading these essays as a unified argument. Along with its sister volume, Explaining the Reasons We Share, this volume advances the theme that metaethical inquiry is continuous with other areas of philosophy.
Download or read book The Continuum Companion to Ethics written by Christian Miller and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Continuum Companion to Ethics offers the definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory. Fourteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution, and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including important technical terms in ethics, a historical chronology, an extensive overview of contemporary meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary philosophical ethics.
Download or read book Practical Expressivism written by Neil Sinclair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is morality? In Practical Expressivism, Neil Sinclair argues that morality is a purely natural interpersonal co-ordination device, whereby human beings express their attitudes in order to influence the attitudes and actions of others. The ultimate goal of these expressions is to find acceptable ways of living together. This 'expressivist' model for understanding morality faces well-known challenges concerning 'saving the appearances' of morality, because morality presents itself to us as a practice of objective discovery, not pure expression. This book demonstrates how a properly developed expressivist view can overcome this objection, by showing that even if moral practice is fundamentally expressive, it can still come to possess those features that make it appear objective (features such as talk and thought of moral disagreement, truth and belief, and the applicability of logical notions to moral sentences). The key to this development is to emphasise the unique and intricate practical role that morality plays in our lives. Practical expressivism is also practical in the further sense that it provides repeatable patterns that expressivists can deploy in coming to understand the apparently objective features of morality.
Download or read book Wise Choices Apt Feelings written by Allan Gibbard and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1992 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This treatise explores what is at issue in narrowly moral questions, and in questions of rational thought and conduct in general. It helps to explain why normative thought and talk so pervade human life, and why our highly social species might have evolved to be gripped by these questions. The author asks how, if his theory is right, we can interpret our normative puzzles, and thus proceed toward finding answers to them.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics written by Christian Miller and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics offers the definitive guide to this key area of contemporary philosophy. Covering all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, thirteen specially commissioned chapters from an international team of experts explore the central ideas, terms and case studies in the field, and new directions in ethics as a whole. Now available in paperback, the Companion to Ethics covers issues such as moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including key technical terms, a historical chronology, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential resource for anyone studying, researching and writing in contemporary philosophical ethics.
Download or read book The Meaning of ought written by Matthew Chrisman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book motivates a novel inferentialist account of the meaning of a core set of normative sentences. Building on a careful truth-conditionalist semantics for 'ought' considered as a modal word, Chrisman argues that ought-sentences mean what they do neither because of how they describe reality nor because of the noncognitive attitudes they express, but because of their inferential role.
Download or read book Evolution and the Foundations of Ethics written by John Mizzoni and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If human biological evolution is part of our worldview, then how do commonplace notions of ethics fit in? To ask the question, “what does evolution imply about ethics?” we must first be clear about what we mean by evolution. Evolution and the Foundations of Ethics discusses four models of evolution, represented by Darwin, Dawkins, Gould, and Haught. We must also be clear about what we mean by ethics. Do we mean metaethics? If so, which variety? With metaethical theories (such as Error Theory, Expressivism, Moral Relativism, and Moral Realism), theorists are attempting to explain the general nature, status, and origins of ethics. In the first four chapters of this book (Part I), John Mizzoni examines how metaethical theories fit with evolution. Next, in asking about the implications of evolution for ethics,do we mean normative ethics? Theorists who work with normative ethical theories—such as Virtue Ethics, Natural Law Ethics, Social Contract Ethics, Utilitarian Ethics, Deontological Ethics, and Ethics of Care)—articulate and defend a normative ethics that people can and do use in a practical way when deliberating about specific actions, rules, and policies. The next six chapters (Part II) look at how normative ethical theories fit with evolution. A full reckoning of ethics and evolution demands that we consider the range of ethical elements, both metaethical and normative. Thus, this book looks at what several different models of evolution imply about four metaethical theories and six normative ethical theories. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in the intersection of evolutionary theory and ethical theory.
Download or read book Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity written by Alasdair MacIntyre and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.
Download or read book Noncognitivism in Ethics written by Mark Schroeder and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. Noncognitivism in Ethics is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare; the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard; and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter, which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the ‘Frege–Geach’ problem. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout. It includes new sections on whether expressivism is a metasemantic thesis; the rise of relational expressivism; the idea that expressivism leads us to a novel understanding of the nature of propositions; and expressivism and epistemic modals, deontic modals, probability, and truth. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms, making Noncognitivism in Ethics essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics.
Download or read book Values and the Reflective Point of View written by Robert Dunn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Values are inescapable. They pervade and shape our psychology, our agency, and our lives as reflective and self-knowing subjects. This book explores the crucial ways in which values figure within reflection and thereby shape our theoretical and practical lives, against the backdrop of an expressivist moral psychology that is sensitive to the vicissitudes of valuing. Combining a discussion of the role that values play within reflection with a critique of a range of influential contemporary views in moral psychology and the theory of agency, Dunn shows how such views obscure or distort the nature of that role and that there is a ’natural fit’ between an expressivist account of values and the best account of the role of values in the lives of reflective agents. Writers discussed include Simon Blackburn, Michael E. Bratman, Donald Davidson, Harry Frankfurt, Christine Korsgaard, Thomas Nagel and J. David Velleman. The book is also an important addition to the literature on self-knowledge. Dunn argues that, by reasoning about truth and values, we possess a unique, non-observational way of coming to know our own minds and hearts, together with what we are going to make happen in the world. The discussion criticizes recent contributions to the theory of self-knowledge by Richard Moran and J. David Velleman.
Download or read book What is this thing called Metaethics written by Matthew Chrisman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are moral standards relative to cultures? Are there any moral facts? What is goodness? If there are moral facts how do we learn about them? These are all questions in metaethics, the branch of ethics that investigates the status of morality, the nature of ethical facts, and the meaning of ethical statements. To the uninitiated it can appear abstract and far removed from its two more concrete cousins, ethical theory and applied ethics, yet it is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting areas of ethics. What is this thing called Metaethics? demystifies this important subject and is ideal for students coming to it for the first time. Beginning with a brief historical overview of metaethics and the development of a "conceptual toolkit," Matthew Chrisman introduces and assesses the following key topics: • ethical reality: including questions about naturalism and non-naturalism, moral facts, and the distinction between realism and antirealism • ethical language: does language represent reality? What mental states are expressed by moral statements? • ethical psychology: the Humean theory of motivation and the connection between moral judgement and motivation • ethical knowledge: intuitionist and coherentist moral epistemologies, and theories of objectivity and relativism in metaethics • new directions in metaethics, including non-traditional theories and extensions to metaepistemology and metanormative theory. Additional features such as chapter summaries, questions of understanding, and a glossary make this an ideal introduction to metaethics.
Download or read book Environmental Ethics written by Andrew Kernohan and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains the basic concepts of environmental ethics and applies them to global environmental problems. The author concisely introduces basic moral theories, discusses how these theories can be extended to consider the non-human world, and examines how environmental ethics interacts with modern society’s economic approach to the environment. Online multiple-choice questions encourage the reader’s active learning.
