Form of expressivism

This is a view in what is often called metaethics, the study of the meaning of the language that is used to express moral claims.

Expressivists hold that moral and other normative judgments are not in the business of representing a set of independent facts or relations.

Their function is instead to give expression to practical attitudes of approval or disapproval,

such as desires or intentions[8].

Moral language, on this approach, might be compared to the verbalizing that goes on at a football game or a rock concert, which does not even attempt to make claims about the way things are in the world, but rather gives expression to the spectators’ attitudes toward the events they are observing.

To say that it is wrong to exploit and mock the vulnerable, for instance, is to give voice to your disapproval of acting in this way; it expresses a desire that people should not perform actions of this kind, much as the lusty booing that takes place at the football stadium expresses the audience’s disapproval of the botched play that just took place on the field.

This expressivist position does a good job of accommodating the considerations

marshaled in the arguments from metaphysics and motivation.

According to expressivism, moral and other normative assertions don’t really say anything at all

about the world, so we can make sense of such discourse without postulating any funny

properties or states of affairs.

The expressivist account also offers a nice explanation of the practical dimension of moral thought. If moral discourse is in the business of expressing the agent’s desires, then we can immediately understand how it is that moral judgments can directly engage the will.

The practical attitudes that moral discourse expresses guarantee that such motivations will be present whenever a moral judgment is endorsed.

The problem, however, is that the simple expressivist view seems to go too far in the direction of assimilating moral thought to the formation of such practical attitudes.

If people can be motivated to act directly by their normative judgments, this connection

can also break down.

You might for instance think that it would be wrong to keep a wallet that you have found in the university library (rather than turning it in at the lost-and-found office), but give in to the temptation to keep the wallet when you realize how much money it contains.

In cases of this kind, people act against their own moral judgments[9], and the possibility

of doing this suggests that moral judgments don’t simply involve the expression of effective motivating attitudes.

Normative thought has an important critical dimension. It can brought to bear on our own