Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation

Abstract

Cognitivists are on solid ground, it seems to us, when they maintain that practical evaluations‘this is right’, ‘this is fair’ are expressions of judgement and belief (even if these may be massively mistaken). Their non-cognitivist opponents deny the appearances when they say that such evaluations are expressive only of feeling or desire or some such non-cognitive attitude that differs from belief and its cognates in not being subject, in its own right, to the same disciplines of evidence and logic and reasoning.