Got the girls to myself today, that means no extracurricular activities. The last couple of nights I’ve got some yard work done with the fading sun, mostly clearing out thorny vines. When I finished yesterday I couldn’t walk right away since my feet were rapped up with vines, a whole new path was cleared out and today I’ll get to walk through it. I’m excited for Spring and the warmer weather, walking outside this morning wasn’t painful. Podcast time, new episode tomorrow morning.
#15 The boo/hoorah theory
This book was written in 2007 before the first iphone was made, a more modern version would be the like/dislike theory, arguing that moral theory boils down to likes and dislikes, or boos and hoorahs, calling it emotivism. Claiming morals stem from our emotions. Notice this is binary way of thinking, it could just as easily be a 1 for good and 0 for bad attempting to cut out wasteful arguing.
Perhaps an umbrella to emotivism is subjectivism, that opinions on right and wrong are subjective based on a personality and culture. The Scottish philosopher David Hume said in his Treatise of Human Nature. 1 “feeling rather than reason provides the motive for our moral actions.”
As William Shakespeare said, does he sound familiar? “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” That thinking word is man’s doing, think something then make it so, not intrinsic to the object. This should serve as a warning for thinking God is wrong, thinking is an earthly deed and not to be trusted, thinking cannot produce fact.
“The most common criticism to emotivism is that it fails to capture the logic of ethical discourse – the characteristic patterns of reasoning and rational argument that underlie it.” To rectify this a school of thought branching from subjectivism is prescriptivism. That moral items prescribe how to feel, they tell us what to do or how to behave. In this way moral commands become universal and must be followed by everyone including the rule creator. There are no special circumstances or loop holes, that is to say not realistic. Nowadays it’s popular to think of things as a spectrum, spectrum implies no hard lines, no rules.
A simplistic description of emotivism is morals are not descriptions of the actions, but our feelings of the actions. When saying something is wrong it’s really saying is it feels wrong to the individual spouting the morals. Those arguing against say there isn’t enough ethic knowledge where the emotivist believes there is nothing ethical to know, we’re not making claims on ethical fact, rather expressing our feelings and feelings cannot be true or false. Since there is nothing to debate on actions, people are simply advertising their morals, or a more common phrase today, virtue signaling.
Into 2025 virtue signaling is back on the menu, possibly more than ever people are saying, “look at this thing, isn’t it bad” forcing you to agree with them or you are also bad. In reality they have gotten hooked on a storyline that brings with it a set of rules, don’t follow the rules and you can’t be apart of the story because people living happy moral lives outside of the rules means their story is a fiction. The reason I’ve been aggressive on a lot of topics is because I understand these people are trying to get their foot in the door then lead us to the next crazy idea. I am happy and I am good, no amount of earthly thinking and words will convince me to betray myself. Be gone satan!
Chris' Morning Pages 