Show description

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Develops a form of revolutionary moral fictionalism, a form of fictionalism that recommends a reform of our actual moral practice. ‣Kalderon, Mark Eli. Moral Fictionalism. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005a. An outline of a form of hermeneutic moral fictionalism, a form of fictionalism that purports to be descriptive of our ordinary moral practice. ‣Kalderon, Mark Eli. Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005b. An excellent collection of articles on fictionalism, including an exchange between Simon Blackburn and David Lewis on whether quasi-realism should be viewed as a form of fictionalism.

For ease of presentation it can be broken down into three (interrelated) areas. An accessible account of how issues in moral psychology potentially impact on debates between moral realists and their opponents can be found in Chapter1 of Smith 1994. Internalism and Externalism Internalists (sometimes called “motivational internalists”) typically hold that there is a necessary, conceptual, and a priori relationship between moral judgment and motivation to act. For example, in the works mentioned here, Smith argues that it is a conceptual a priori truth that a practically rational agent who makes a moral judgment will be motivated to act accordingly.

Warnock, G. J. Contemporary Moral Philosophy. London: Macmillan, 1967. Contains a standard critique of non-naturalism. EXPRESSIVISM One way of avoiding both the challenge posed to naturalism by the open-question argument as well as the metaphysical and epistemological extravagances of non-naturalism involves denying that moral sentences are in the business of purporting to represent facts. There are various forms, including emotivism, prescriptivism, quasi-realism, and norm-expressivism. Emotivism Emotivism is the view that moral judgments express emotions, feelings, or sentiments, and are thus not assessable in terms of truth and falsity.