Metaethical Theory Of Emotivism

Metaethics. “A branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words” (DeLapp). Metaethics focuses on what morality is rather than what is moral. Four popular metaethical theories are Emotivism, Realism, Relativism, and Skepticism. This paper seeks to answer the question as to which metaethical theory is most plausible, which I argue is Skepticism.

Emotivism: Emotivism stems from logical positivism. A thesis that the meaning of a statement is the set of possible evidence you could have for that statement. If a statement or claim cannot be proven by evidence, it is meaningless. This applies to ethical judgements and moral claims as these statements cannot be backed by a set of …show more content…
I think this is the strongest argument to prove emotivism implausible. As emotivism argues all ethical statements do not claim truth, but rather express attitudes making the statements meaningless. Yet, ethical issues have been debated and written on by scholars for centuries. It is very difficult to accept that if emotivism is true, philosophers have wasted and continue to waste their time on literally meaningless work and that there cannot actually be moral arguments. Emotivism also oversimplifies ethical arguments. Since moral claims cannot be supported by any kind of fact, when arguing to influence others attitudes, one is not doing so rationally (as there is no appeal to fact), and trying to influence without fact boils ethics down to mere …show more content…
Focusing on the importance of tolerance to a cultural relativist, I believe, is the best way to reject it. If cultural relativism were true, it would not allow for social change. In a society what is morally good is what the majority approves of, as per cultural relativism, making it the case that minority views would always be wrong. This is because minority disagreement with accepted values contradicts cultural relativism, as well as showing how cultural relativism is intolerant to minorities. Yet, time and time again the values of a society have changed, for example, the abolishment of slavery, and how it curved in favor of the minority. This could not happen if cultural relativism were true because one would not be able to contradict the morals they were raised to have, thereby making cultural relativism