Emotivism also does a remarkably good job capturing the common meanings of the words “good” and “bad”. An average person may have beliefs like “pizza is good, but seafood is bad”, “Israel is good, but Palestine is bad”, “the book was good, but the movie was bad”, “atheism is good, theism is bad”, “evolution is good, creationism is bad”, and “dogs are good, but cats are bad”. Some of these seem to be moral beliefs, others seem to be factual beliefs, and others seem to be personal preferences. But we are happy using the word “good” for all of them, and it doesn’t feel like we’re using the same word in several different ways, the way it does when we use “right” to mean both “correct” and “opposite of left”.
They do feel like different meanings to me.
Granted, I’m not a native English speaker, but my native language also uses the same word for many (though not all) of those. (For books and movies we’d use the words for ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ instead. And for weather we use ‘beautiful’ and ‘bad’.)
They do feel like different meanings to me.
Granted, I’m not a native English speaker, but my native language also uses the same word for many (though not all) of those. (For books and movies we’d use the words for ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ instead. And for weather we use ‘beautiful’ and ‘bad’.)
Seconded, and I’m not a native English speaker either, although in my case I think they feel different because of how much I talk about ethics.