Consider the following statements
- I feel lying is wrong.
- I prohibit lying.
- I dislike lying.
- 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.