Meta-Ethics Delves Into The Nature Of What Make A Moral Judgment

Meta-ethics delves into the nature of what makes a moral judgement. Moral judgements are believed to be calculations or opinions formed as to whether some action, inaction etc. or a person and their behaviour is seen as good or bad, which is measured against some standard of Good (Gensler, 1998, Chapter 5). It is argued that moral judgements contain two features, practicality and correctness. From this, many philosophers have discovered that these two features have underlying tension in making a moral judgement. However, it can be argued that the non-descriptivism position can account for correctness in moral judgements.
One feature of a moral judgement is practicality. Practicality of moral judgements suggests that our moral judgements motivate

However, some moral judgments, such as the judgement that murder is wrong, are not judgements about how to get something that we already want. Therefore, either they are not beliefs at all, and consequently not objective, or they cannot motivate us, and therefore not impractical (Singer, 1991, pp455-458).
However, according to the Humean Theory of Motivation, Hume (1739) argued that beliefs (attitudes about how things are) alone cannot motivate us and that motivation requires something like a desire (attitudes about how we want things to be), or, in Hume’s words, “a passion”. For example, the belief that it is raining will only motivate someone to wear a raincoat if they have the desire to stay dry. The belief that it is ringing does not motivate us to act unless it is relevant to one of our desires. But moral judgements motivate without further desires, so they cannot be beliefs. Desires give us the destination of what we want to achieve, whilst the belief gives us the

In other words, something doesn’t have to be a belief to be true or false. They also try to give an adequate account of correctness by claiming that apparent moral argument is just argument about matters of fact and that we can’t argue about basic moral claims. Hare’s Rational Non-Descriptivism position states that “there are rules of reasoning which govern non-descriptive as well as descriptive speech acts.” (Hare, Singer, 1991, p.455-458). In addition, the Universal Prescriptivism position suggests that moral judgements must meet the Universalisability requirement, “Treat relevantly similar cases the same!” An example to show this is “X is wrong” equates to “You (and anyone relevantly like you) do not do X and do not do anything relevantly like X” (Hare, Singer, 1991, p.455-458). Hare also suggests that moral judgements are types of imperatives and/or commands. Imperatives are the types of things that can be correct or incorrect, and there are also inconsistent imperatives, “If, as is certainly the case, there can be logical inconsistency between contradictory imperatives, someone who wants the totality of the imperatives, or in general prescriptions, that he (or she) accepts to be self-consistent will have to observe the rules which govern consistency” (Hare, 1991, p. 455). Hare suggests that we can use the general feature of lack of inconsistency and special