Truthiness deconstructed

CBS News has published an article deconstructing the meaning of Truthiness:

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Truthiness is the definitive cultural and comedic acknowledgement of moral relativism. How’s that?

Truthiness actually has a serious philosophic pedigree. It is called “emotivism,” a phrase invented by a Scottish philosopher who lives and works in America, Alasdair MacIntyre. In 1981 he published one of the most influential works of moral philosophy in the later part of the 20th century, “After Virtue.” MacIntyre defines it this way: “Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and, more specifically, all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling. …” In this view there is no difference between saying “the death penalty is wrong” and “I don’t like the death penalty.”

Where emotivism prevails, MacIntyre argues, moral arguments become “interminable.” There are no agreed-on, common criteria for evaluating moral truth or judgment. “I like the death penalty, you don’t.” The abortion debate is a classic example. MacIntyre’s entire intellectual mission is to rescue this descent into social and moral incoherence not by arguing that there is such a thing as immutable, absolute and discoverable truth, but that within a community, within a cultural and ethical heritage, there are clear and absolute virtues.

But in the real world, we live in a wild pluralism. People don’t — and probably can’t — acknowledge their own emotivism; they think their judgments are fact-based and reasoned, not emotional. Or they don’t care. You have been the victim of emotivism is you have been shut up with the omnipresent locution, “You just don’t get it!”

So the concept of truthiness also has a sociological side. We’re so jaded by the continuous supply of intentional lies and deceptions by politicians, celebrities, “the media” and marketers that we need a word to replace truth, which is obsolete and naive. Emotivism won’t do the trick in daily life.

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