ABSTRACT
The most vexed and difficult question in moral philosophy is made even more vexed and difficult by the ambiguity of the word moral. This chapter begins with the question whether it makes sense to attribute truth values to moral judgments in the broad sense of the term. Both emotivism and the error theory appear to result from accepting an erroneous theory of truth. According to this theory, which was invented by Plato, a judgment is true or false according to whether the thing being discussed has the property that is being attributed to it, where a property is a distinctive way in which a group of objects resemble each other. Another argument for emotivism is that evaluations do not seem be disputable like descriptions. Since evaluation is a form of relational description, evaluations have truth values, like other indicative statements; furthermore, these truth values are absolute, although the values indicated are relative.
