What is a moral statement

Question

Consider the following statements

1. I feel lying is wrong.
2. I prohibit lying.
3. I dislike lying.
4. I think lying is bad.

Are these statements moral statements ? I think they only express a certain attitude or a state of mind towards lying. They can only be assigned a truth value if we take them to be descriptive statements, not moral statements. The content upon which the truth or falsity of the numbered statements depends on is a description. If l am not wrong, moral non cognitivist philosophers claim that people mean to express one of the four or more similar statements when they say " lying is wrong " . So there should be an equivalence between descriptive statements and non descriptive statements, this sounds paradoxical and wrong. Is it even possible to write a non descriptive statement in a language. If one writes, "sad" on a piece of paper. It would be meaningless. It's impossible to write about an attitude/command in a language without having a subject. However, this causes another problem, we do not use "lying is wrong" to ONLY express an attitude/command but to state a fact. Do we try to get the meaning of a statement by its use or by analysis of composite statements.

Answer 1

Moral statements are prescriptive statements uttered within an interpersonal context. If they are descriptive of anything, they are descriptive of socially defined norms or ideals.

I mean, consider a man trapped alone on a desert island. For that man, 'lying' is neither moral nor immoral; it serves no end and has no purpose. He might lie to himself, I suppose, but that's more in the nature of comfortable wishful thinking than malicious prevarication.

A cognitivist statement of the form "I think lying is bad" is a reference to a social fact. It's best translated as a truth assignment: e.g., "I hold the assertion 'lying is bad' to be true". Durkheim established that there are 'social facts' — statements that describe the internal structures of a social unity — but they are harder to conceptualize than simple material facts.

I'm not sure if this answers your question, because I'm not certain exactly what your question is. But it's a start...

Answer 2

As self-reports, all except 2 are simply true, assuming accurately reported (and you aren't lying.) But not "moral statements" at all. And 2 is a moral statement only in the unlikely case that you are God or some other presiding moral authority.

In a deontic sense, at least, moral statements should be univeralizable or at least general, so cannot be qualified as attitudes. Only the categorical statement "lying is wrong" is a moral statement, and it is "true" if you accept Kant's CI demonstration that it is imperative to any coherent idea of moral statements to begin with.

But it could be that I'm missing your point here, which seems to be that value judgments and moral propositions are not facts or that all statements must be permanently affixed to bodies.