Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms

© 2013 David Plunkett & Tim Sundell This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Introduction.1 In The Language of Morals, R.M. Hare introduces what is now a famous case in metaethics. Hare asks us to imagine a missionary who arrives on a distant island inhabited by cannibals. Much like the missionary, these cannibals use the term ‘good’ as a general term of praise for people and their actions. However, the cannibals apply the term ‘good’ to different sorts of people and actions than the missionary does. 2 The cannibals are thus surprised by how the missionary applies the term. As Hare writes: