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Excerpt from Moral Judgement: Readings in Contemporary Metaethics
The first set of meta-ethical questions deals with the meaning of the words and sentences which occur in moral discourse. They are such questions as: What do the basic evaluative terms right, praiseworthy, and so forth) and the basic prescriptive terms must, obligatory, and so forth) mean in the various contexts of everyday moral practice in which evaluations and prescriptions are uttered? What different kinds of meaning do they have? What linguistic jobs do they perform? For what pur poses are they used? Under what conditions and in what ways are they vague or ambiguous? Are moral judgments genuine assertions or are they mere exclamations? In what respects are such judgments similar to, and in what respects are they unlike, ordinary factual assertions? In what sense do they express the attitudes and emo tions of the person who utters them? What effects do they normally have, or are they intended to have, upon those to whom they are addressed?
The principal questions in meta-ethics concerning truth are the following: Is it legitimate or appropriate to apply the words true and false to moral judgments? If not, why not? If so, what do such words mean? What are the criteria for their application? How do these criteria differ from those for factual or empirical assertions? Do prescriptive and evaluative sentences express moral propositions?
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