Are Moral Predicates Subjective? A Corpus Study

Abstract

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the ques0on of how they relate, on the one hand, to objec0ve reality and, on the other, to subjec0ve experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analy0c philosophers for over a century, it is only rela0vely recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make a contribu0on of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical -specifically, corpus linguis0c -study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjec0vity at the linguis0c level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigma0cally subjec0ve predicates.