Asleep-Television-24 t1_jdvshxg wrote on March 27, 2023 at 3:46 PM

I was reading After Virtue by MacIntyre and came across "emotivism". MacIntyre's thesis in this book is that moral language that exists today has suffered a loss due to the Enlightenment project; 16th century philosophy from Hume to Diderot, Kant to Kierkegaard. This period led to what is known as emotivism, which originated in the early 20th century. An emotivist would say that all moral judgments are expressions of feelings, preferences, and attitudes. To put it colloquially: something is right "because I said so".

According to MacIntyre, emotivism has crept into our current political discourse, bureaucracies, etc. I am fascinated by his arguments on the social context and implications of emotivism, and thought that it would be interesting to share here.

GyantSpyder t1_jegco5x wrote on March 31, 2023 at 8:30 PM

MacIntyre is super important IMO and not nearly enough people know the ideas he was getting at. Think about all the time people spend arguing on the internet - what are they actually doing? Concepts like "blue lies," "concern trolls," and other social behaviors around rhetoric that undermine discourse as debate - if you have some MacIntyre handy it makes a lot more sense than if you don't.