01/13/2019
Expressing Praise and Condemnation
The thesis that I am interested in is an expressivist hypothesis: People use moral statements to express praise and condemnation. They do this to trigger the reward system in order to create rules of behavior in other people that will make "good" actions more common and "bad" actions less common.
There is a family of theories called expressivism that holds that moral statements are expressions of the speaker's attitudes. Expressivist theories are typically classified as non-cognitivist