Against Moral Intellectualism

Philosophical Investigations 37 (1):37-56 (2013)
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Abstract

This paper argues that non-cognitivism about moral judgements is compatible with moral realism. In order to reveal the possibility, and plausibility, of this hitherto under-explored position in metaethics, it surveys a series of four increasingly fine-grained formulations of the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. It argues that all but the last of these distinctions should be rejected, on the grounds that they lead advocates of non-cognitivism away from what initially motivated them to advocate non-cognitivism in the first place. One significant pay-off of this reconceived formulation of the cognitivism/non-cognitivism distinction is that it reveals what it would take to properly appreciate the place of virtue ethics in contemporary metaethical debates.

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Zed Adams
The New School

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References found in this work

Slaves of the passions.Mark Andrew Schroeder - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The moral problem.Michael Smith - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.John Rogers Searle - 1969 - Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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