Moral fictionalism

the long version

"Moral realists maintain that morality has a distinctive subject matter. Specifically, realists maintain that moral discourse is representational, that moral sentences express moral propositions - propositions that attribute moral properties to things. Noncognitivists, in contrast, maintain that the realist imagery associated with morality is a fiction, a reification of our noncognitive attitudes. The thought that there is a distinctively moral subject matter is regarded as something to be debunked by philosophical reflection on the way moral discourse mediates and makes public our noncognitive attitudes. The realist fiction might be understood as a philosophical misconception of a discourse that is not fundamentally representational but whose intent is rather practical." "Whereas nonfactualists seek to debunk the realist fiction of a moral subject matter, the moral fictionalist claims that that fiction stands in no need of debunking but is the means by which the noncognitive attitudes involved in moral acceptance are conveyed by moral utterance. Moral fictionalism is noncognitivism without a nonrepresentational semantics."--BOOK JACKET.