adjectivism

Adjectivism is a position in metaethics that treats evaluative terms such as good, bad, right, and wrong as primarily adjectives that express attitudes rather than report facts. On adjectivist views, moral judgments like “stealing is wrong” function to express disapproval or to prescribe a stance, rather than to state that actions possess moral properties. The emphasis is on the grammatical role of evaluative words: the predicate position of an adjective is used to convey the speaker’s evaluative stance.

Adjectivism sits within non-cognitivist or expressivist traditions. It contrasts with cognitivist theories, which hold that moral sentences express beliefs with truth-conditions, and with some forms of expressivism or emotivism that analyze moral talk as expressions of emotion or commands. Adjectivists try to preserve a robust evaluative vocabulary while denying that moral claims commit us to moral facts; some formulations hold that moral language primarily serves to guide behavior or express attitudes rather than to report states of affairs.

Key arguments for adjectivism include its alignment with the motivational force of moral language and its compatibility with ordinary language usage of adjectives in evaluative contexts. Critics contend that adjectivism has difficulty accounting for apparent objectivity, moral progress, and disagreements that seem to be about facts rather than attitudes. They question whether all moral terms function purely as adjectives or whether some can play propositional roles.

In contemporary debate, adjectivism remains a minority yet influential option within non-cognitivist and expressivist theories, contributing to discussions on moral semantics, the psychology of evaluation, and how language ties moral judgments to action and reason. It is one of several attempts to explain the nature of moral discourse without committing to moral facts.