Philosophy 361 Ethics Darwall Fall 1997 METAETHICS VI: NONCOGNITIVISM I All responses we have considered to the fundamental dilemma of metaethics have taken the "objective purport" of ethical judgments at face value, assuming that ethical judgments purport to assert propositions--aim to say that something is true. There is a way of maintaining that, speaking metaphysically, there are no ethical facts to make ethical judgments literally true, but that, nonetheless, neither is it the case that ethical judgments are false. That is to hold that, strictly speaking, ethical judgments do not assert propositions, and hence are neither true nor false. This position is known as noncognitivism. Noncognitivists grasp the second horn of our dilemma. Unlike the nihilist who thinks we should give up making ethical judgments once we realize that, metaphysically speaking, there are no values, the noncognitivist does not think we should stop thinking and talking about ethics. Rather, he seeks an understanding of what is really going on within ethical thought and speech, that will explain why we can continue as we normally do even if the nihilist is right in his metaphysical assessment of the situation. II The particular version of noncognitivism we will examine is known as emotivism. There are hints of this position in earlier periods, but it is very much a twentieth- century position, formulated independently by a number of writers in the late twenties and thirties. The most influential formulations were due to A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson [Stevenson taught for over thirty years at the University of Michigan! Today, the most prominent form of noncognitivism, known as norm-expressivism, is defended by Michigan's Allan Gibbard.] The central tenet of emotivism is that ethical judgments do not assert propositions, but express the feelings and attitudes of the person making the judgment. Consider the judgment: "It is wrong to read another's computer files without permission." This seems to express a proposition which could be true or false; and someone uttering this sentence might be taken to express a belief that it is wrong . . . The emotivist says this appearance is mistaken. Rather, the judgment expresses the person's disapproval, negative moral attitude, or feeling. It is as if the person making the judgment said something like "People reading other people's computer files--tsk tsk." The "tsk tsk" does not add any propositional content; it doesn't express any proposition which could be true or false. III We need to observe an important distinction. The emotivist does not say that an ethical judgment asserts that the person making it has a given attitude or feeling. That, of course, can be true or false. Rather, the judgment expresses the feeling or attitude itself. Unlike a belief, a feeling or attitude cannot be true or false, it simply is. Notice, by the way, how much more plausible emotivism is than a simple sort of subjectivism would be which held that to judge that X is good is to say of oneself that one likes X. On the latter view, we could not explain at all why when two people judge, respectively, that X is good and that X is not good, they are in disagreement. IV Still, the disagreement may not seem to be of the sort that we normally think is involved in genuine ethical disagreement. It's as though when two people have fixed on a common topic, say, abortion, one person puts thumbs up and the other person puts thumbs down. For all we know so far, this disagreement need by no different than one of taste. So how can the emotivist explain the objective purport of ethical judgment? The emotivist must deny that anything really objective is at issue, but explain the appearance that it is. Stevenson did this by arguing that ethical judgments have a dynamic in addition to an expressive function: they attempt to evoke similar attitudes in others. When two people respectively judge that abortion is wrong and that it is not, each is attempting to evoke a similar attitude in the other--this is different from a simple expression of taste. It's as if they said "I like this, do so as well!" V Emotivists are also obliged to explain how ethical discourse seems to be a rational activity. We frequently try to support our judgments with reasons, and often feel that if we cannot our judgment is unjustified. How can this be if the emotivist is right? A. Stevenson attempted to answer this objection, first, by pointing out that our attitude on some question often, perhaps always, depends on our beliefs. We cite facts on which our attitudes causally depend in the hope that they will cause a similar attitude in our interlocutor. This is all that giving reasons for ethical judgments is. B. This invites a further objection. If all that is going on is causing changes in the attitudes of others, there are many ways of doing this--brainwashing, manipulation, coercion--in addition to the dispassionate citing of facts and considerations. Isn't there something essentially more reasonable about the latter methods, which renders them more appropriate for ethical discourse? And how can emotivism explain that? To this objection, Stevenson replied that the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable methods of ethical discourse is itself an ethical distinction. When we say that manipulation is an unreasonable way of changing attitudes we are making an ethical judgment. Thus we are expressing our disapproval for this way of operating-- no more or less. This disapproval is an attitude Stevenson shares, but he insists that we shouldn't think there is some truth that corresponds to it. VI Even if emotivism can explain how genuine ethical disagreement is possible, we may wonder how it can explain what is going on in ethical inquiry. What is inquiry but a search for what is true? Stevenson's response to this objection was ingenious: we only ask ourselves questions like this when we feel some conflict in our own attitudes. We don't like this conflict, and we try to remove it. We do so by an internalized version of interpersonal ethical discourse--we attempt to achieve some "internal agreement" by listening to the conflicting "voices" of the different attitudes, and looking to considerations that will resolve the disagreement. VII How plausible is emotivism? Note that it depends on there being a sharp distinction between beliefs and attitudes or feelings. The former admit of truth value; the latter are supposed not to. But is there a sharp distinction, or any distinction at all, between beliefs and the sort of attitudes expressed by ethical and moral judgments? This is a crucial question. Take moral judgments, say, the judgment that abortion is wrong. This judgment is supposed by the emotivist to express a distinctive kind of moral attitude. But what distinguishes this attitude? It may be that nothing does other than it is the attitude that something is wrong. But, if this is so, then the very distinction between beliefs and attitudes on which emotivism relies threatens to evaporate.