Emotivism has its problems. Notably, you can’t use ‘yay’ and ‘boo’ exclamations in arguments, and they can’t be reasons.
Right. I think that most people hold the belief that their system of valuations is internally consistent (i.e. that you can’t have two different descriptions of the same thing that are both complete, accurate, and assign different valences), which requires them (in theory) to confront moral arguments.
I think of basic moral valuations as being one other facet of human perception: the complicated process by which we interpret sensory data to get a mental representation of objects, persons, actions, etc. It seems that one of the things our mental representation often includes is a little XML tag indicating moral valuation.
The general problem is that these don’t generally form a coherent system, which is why intelligent people throughout the ages have been trying to convince themselves to bite certain bullets. Your conscious idea of what consistent moral landscape lies behind these bits of ‘data’ inevitably conflicts with your immediate reactions at some point.
Right. I think that most people hold the belief that their system of valuations is internally consistent (i.e. that you can’t have two different descriptions of the same thing that are both complete, accurate, and assign different valences), which requires them (in theory) to confront moral arguments.
I think of basic moral valuations as being one other facet of human perception: the complicated process by which we interpret sensory data to get a mental representation of objects, persons, actions, etc. It seems that one of the things our mental representation often includes is a little XML tag indicating moral valuation.
The general problem is that these don’t generally form a coherent system, which is why intelligent people throughout the ages have been trying to convince themselves to bite certain bullets. Your conscious idea of what consistent moral landscape lies behind these bits of ‘data’ inevitably conflicts with your immediate reactions at some point.