PHILOS 2YY3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Gilbert Harman, Divine Command Theory, Conventionalism
27 Sep 2016
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Ie: treat others as you wish to be treated, harassing people based on skin colour is wrong, murderers are evil, don"t waste food while others are starving, etc. Moral judgements/statements can be descriptive (describing the world), prescriptive (suggesting certain actions), expressive (expressing emotions/feelings), nonsensical or manipulative. Moral cognitivism: moral facts/statements express beliefs about the world that are truth-evaluable (can be true or false) Non-cognitivism: moral facts/statements do not express beliefs about the world, and are thus not truth-evaluable (cannot be true or false) Error theory: all moral views are equally wrong, morality is fiction. It"s just a set of traditional rules inherited from ancestors [] based on ignorance/superstition/fear. Perhaps it is only a convenient fiction, with no underlying authority at all. (shafer-landau, 2015) Fact-value distinction: facts are real; but values cannot be called facts. The world does not contain any moral features therefore, a moral judgment that makes a claim about the world is automatically false.
