This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Wouldn't that depend on whether you are seeking a logic based objective prescriptive ethics or a pragmatic de facto psychological or social explanation?

Can you rephrase that? I'm not sure what you mean.

I don't see why. If there's no moral thing-in-itself than the number of positions you have on it are merely descriptions of a non-thing anyway.

I'll put it this way, if you're claiming there is a "thing" there, then your position toward it ought to be accurate. But non-cognitivism claims there is no "thing" to morality, so what matters it?

Non-Cognitivism is a group of meta-ethical positions that claim moral language is not truth-apt (meaning it cannot be true and cannot be false) and that when people make moral claims, they are not actually asserting propositions.
An ethical cognitivist would understand "killing is wrong" to mean "killing has the property of wrongness". But a non-cognitivist would claim killing has no moral properties and that moral language like "killing is wrong" does not actually describe or refer to anything in the world.

Emotivism and Prescriptivism both fall under the Non-Cognitivist category.

Emotivism is the view that what people are doing when they moralize is expressing their emotions or attitude. So from the Emotivist perspective, a moral claim like "killing is wrong" is interpreted as "boo killing!".

The Prescriptivist would say that when people moralize, they are are making commands. So "killing is wrong" actually means "don't kill!".

You're right, non-cognitivists say there is no moral thing, meaning there are no moral facts or properties. But what the non-cognitivist is trying to do is explain what people are doing when they use moral language. If, when people moralize, they are not actually referring to some moral fact, then what are they actually doing? So the non-cog is not trying to account for the "non-thing" of morality but trying to account for moral language.

Interesting. Well, I know emotivism because I once held that view. I don't know prescriptivism. If I did, that might shed some light on the answer. But I don't, so I don't know.

Sorry.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

I believe you can. I have interacted with some people who held an error theory about descriptive properties, but accepted non-cognitivsm about normative statements (what we ought to do)

I'm not sure what you're getting at actually. Could you rephrase it?

I understand truth-apt to mean "capable of being true or false".
Descriptive sentences/statements are truth-apt because the statement either describes something accurately or it describes something inaccurately.

Questions, commands, and expressive sentences are not truth-apt because these types of sentences are not propositions, not making claims about reality.
Emotivists think moral utterances are expressive.
Prescriptivists think moral utterances are commands.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.