Thinking in Moral Terms

Book excerpt: This work examines the nature of moral judgements. In the course of developing an account of moral judgements, the author discusses issues such as: moral motivation, the nature of desire, the justification of commitments, the relation between morality and rationality, the difference between moral and scientific inquiry, and the nature of properties, of concepts, and of normativity. The author argues-non-cognitivists who construe moral judgements as mere expressions of sentiments-that moral thought employs concepts which figure into the content of both cognitive and conative states of mind. She argues that this view is not a cause for any metaphysical worries about moral properties, and rejects the idea that the difference in the distinctive action-guiding role of moral judgements is to be understood in terms of the metaphysical nature of the facts which render them true. She also rejects the widespread idea that the distinctive action-guiding role of moral judgements amounts to their being intrinsically motivating, and argues that moral judgements motivate in collaboration with a desire which employs moral concepts in representing the desired state of affairs. Against some moral naturalists, the author argues that it is not a condition on the acceptance of a moral theory that its concepts have some explanatory function, and that this marks the crucial difference between the concepts unique to moral thought and those characteristic of scientific (or proto-scientific) thought). She suggests that this reflects a difference in the aims of moral and scientific inquiry. Appreciation of the distinctive aim of moral practice is required for the mastery of moral concepts and this is why moraljudgements are invariably understood as action-guiding, even if they are not in all cases motivating.