Portal:Philosophy/Selected article/2006-20

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical statements (such as 'Killing is wrong') do not assert propositions; that is to say, they do not express factual claims or beliefs and therefore are neither true nor false (they are not truth-apt). This distinguishes it from moral realism, which holds that ethical statements are objectively and consistently true or false; ethical subjectivism, which proposes that ethical statements assert propositions about the speaker's own attitudes; moral skepticism, which proposes that all ethical statements are false; and cognitivist irrealism, which asserts that ethical statements are true or false (this is ethical cognitivism), although there are no worldly facts to make them true or false.