Thinking in Moral Terms (Studies in Ethics)

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 committments, 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 interpret moral judgements as mere expressions of sentiments and that moral thought employs concepts 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. Against some moral naturalists, the book argues that it is not a condition on the acceptance of a moral theory that its concepts have some explanatory function, and this marks the crucial difference between the concepts unique to moral thought and those characteristic of scientific thought. She suggests that this reflects a difference in the aims of moral and scientific inquiry.