18th
I’m well aware of expressivism in metaethics and aesthetics. I’d like to point out that expressivism doesn’t imply that there must be anything sensible about “my truth” and “your truth”. As any moderately well brought up person will tell you, it’s not ok to excuse your murdering, lying and stealing with “in my morality, these things are good”. Morality is absolute, not relative, even if it’s subjective, not objective; the subjective-objective dimension is orthogonal to the relative-absolute dimension. The linguistic norms regarding proper use of moral language dictate that we don’t accept “my wrong” and “your wrong”; moral statements may be expressions of attitude, but if so they are expressions that are tied to the norms of truth, and just because someone says “murder is not evil”, that doesn’t make it true. Moral statements may be more or less justified in moral discourse. Just like someone saying “the moon is made of cheese” doesn’t make it true, so someone saying “it’s not wrong to murder” doesn’t make it true.
Sorry, sorry - final response.
Still disagree here. The whole point about being expressivist about morality is that one thereby holds that there just is no fact of the matter as to whether or not moral claims are true - they have no propositional content, and are therefore precisely not “tied to the norms of truth.” Tied to norms, yes, but not those of truth - and certainly not the sort of truth that you seem to be so keen on preserving in your original post (which I quite liked, by the by).
You write: “just because someone says “murder is not evil”, that doesn’t make it true.” Certainly not - but precisely because here, truth just isn’t an applicable notion. My point (which I could’ve made clearer, for sure) is that, once you draw attention to the special way “truth” is used in morality, aesthetics, etc, it becomes clear that we’ve taken a significant departure from “truth” in physics or math. It’s a pity, I think, that the same word is used. But if the concept thereby addressed is sufficiently different, then, by all means, go ahead and accept “my truth” and “your truth.”
What, anyway, do you find so objectionable in “in my morality, these things are good”? One can argue that this is indicative of a more subtle understanding of how the domain actually functions, a fact belied by existing linguistic tradition that suggests - wrongly, I maintain - the existence of absolute moral truths.
