Book question

[eggs_maledict]

Has anyone read Mark Schroeder's Noncognitivism in Ethics or Aaron Zimmerman's Moral Epistemology? Both look interesting but are newish and lacking reviews.

Comments

[anosognosia]

Nope! Won't you burst into flames if you read noncognitivism stuff though?

[eggs_maledict]

Yeah, probably, but I feel like I should try to get a solid understanding of it, because it occupies such a large space in contemporary metaethics.

[anosognosia]

It would seem to me to require a negative proof, insofar as I don't see the bare relation between our moral feelings and moral judgments as being contentious, anymore than I'd content against a proposed relation between our sense experience and our knowledge. But the projects of ethics and epistemology seem to be constituted a move beyond these subjective phenomenon toward objective validity, a move which the noncognitivist in the strict sense anyway presumably must refute in the case of ethics.

Perhaps this is my virtue ethics leanings talking though, I can at least imagine a Kantian objection to this formulation of ethics (whether a Kantian ultimately OUGHT to so object).

[eggs_maledict]

I'm in two minds about it, because on the one hand I think the noncognitivist empirical claim that moral statements are expressions of preference (or whatever) is true in many cases, but on the other I don't think that this means all moral claims are necessarily just expressions of preference.

As to a connection between moral feelings, moral judgements and moral facts...I'm dubious that moral feelings are really all that relevant to the question of whether there are moral facts and if there are, what their content is; partly because they are frequently just preference expressions and partly because I'm not convinced one could construct a good argument for moral feelings having a relation to objective moral facts.