Transcript File - Tallis English & Philosophy

The denial of moral truth:
Emotivism
Or, the "hurrah/boo!" theory
Where it fits in
• A non-cognitivist theory: morality is non-propositional,
and so can’t be known to be true or false.
• If moral judgments aren’t true or false, we can’t reason
about basic moral principles.
• “X is good” simply means “Hurrah for X!”
• so goodness and immorality are limited to our (societal?)
preferences.
– For example, the death penalty makes me feel nasty.
– So it’s wrong
Origins
• popular in C18.
• Hume defends (subjectivist?) emotivism: “Tis not contrary to reason
to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my
finger”
• Later in his life he defends a kind of Impartial Observer theory: what
would we feel when faced with a moral choice?
• Hence, Hume’s “Is/Ought Gap”, or “Fact/Value Distinction”
– you can't go from a factual statement (an "is") to a moral one (an
"ought"), as facts don’t motivate actions (he thinks)
• C20 view – facts (primary qualities) give rise to reasons (secondary
qualities) for us to act
• Remember the primary/secondary quality distinction we worked on last
summer?
• Is/ought gap means that ‘sentiment’ or emotion is the only ground
for our moral judgements
– as it makes us act
– Because it is the source of our feeling of right and wrong..
Modern emotivists
• Emotivism defended C20 by A.J. Ayer on logical
positivist grounds: Verification Principle…
• Classic formulation of view in ch. 6 of ‘Language, Truth
and Logic’ (1936)
– ‘Stealing money is wrong‘…expresses no proposition which can
be either true or false.’ It is as if I had written 'Stealing money!!' where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks
show…a special sort of moral disapproval.’
Ayer’s arguments for
Emotivism:
• To be meaningful, a proposition must be empirically
verifiable or analytically true.
– ‘My favourite trousers are Lycra’ (verifiable)
– “Married people are partnered” (analytic)
• A C20 restatement of ‘Hume’s Fork’ – if not ‘matter of
fact’ or ‘relation of idea’, then meaningless.
• Moral opinions
– neither factually verifiable
– Or reducible to tautologies
– So are meaningless (as are religious, aesthetic, metaphysical
claims)
• E.g “There is a God”, “Tyler’s haircut is bitchin’”, “Terrorism is
wrong”, ‘There are objects that exist without being perceived’.
Ayer’s conclusions
• Moral arguments are just expressions of feeling.
• Ethical statements and moral judgements are emotive
responses: they seek to arouse feelings or express pain.
• So moral judgements are persuasive, but they are not
factual.
• They might look like they assert truth-claims (moral
statements resemble declarative, testable
statements)…but…
• They assert an emotion, that’s all.
Emotivism isn’t subjectivism
• Mind! Emotivism isn’t subjectivism:
• Emotivism: “X is good” means “Hurrah for X!”
• Subjectivism: “X is good”
– This means “I like X”
– A verifiable proposition
– hence T/F
– hence meaningful as a psychological not
ethical claim (according to Ayer)
• We could test if you liked X…
Why be an emotivist? Part 1
• Does away with worrying feeling that morality
needs a more complex justification (i.e. complex
Kantian/Utilitarian theories etc.
• Simple yet explains a good deal (strength of our
ethical feelings, their shared nature etc)
• Offers clear criterion for sense vs. nonsense.
• Sociological analyses do seem to show that
goodness and immorality are limited to our
preferences.
• doesn’t appeal to mysterious entities (God, the
transcendental…) that make morality mysterious
• explains why we can’t define “good”, why we
can’t prove moral beliefs…
Why be an emotivist? Part 2
• explains how people disagree about morality, and why
they agree
• chimes with view that we can’t reason about basic moral
principles and makes space for emotion to play a
prominent role (as clearly it does)
• we can reason about morality if we assume a shared
system of values.
• but we can’t establish the correctness of any system of
values
• Stresses importance of persuasive language and
emotion in the expression of moral sentiment.
Issues with emotivism Part 1
• The logical positivist argument for emotivism is flawed: in
particular, the claim that any meaningful proposition is
either verifiable or tautologous is self-contradictory,
hence inconsistent (key example: ‘the claim that…’ is
not itself verifiable or tautologous…)
• Emotivism can’t explain unemotional moral judgments,
which surely we do have? Indeed, cool and levelheaded moral assessment is something that we value.
• We do reason about moral judgments. The claim that
they are merely expressions of emotion seems odd
(Ayer: here we are reasoning about the meaning of our
moral terminology rather than its application)
• Are our responses to atrocities like genocide, rape and
murder just matters of feeling?
Issues with emotivism Part 2
• Our moral feelings aren’t subjective or personal,
necessarily. They are natural, and shared…common
reactions to horrific crimes (e.g. the holocaust) suggests
the possibility of a reasonable basis for moral behaviour.
• reduces moral discussions to a shouting match if we
can’t reason about basic moral principles.
• Many uses of “good” and “bad” are difficult to translate
into exclamations.
– “Hurrah for good people!”
– “If lying is bad, then getting your brother to lie is bad.”
– “This is neutral (neither good nor bad).”
• Is this a truth claim or an exclamation: “A view is better if
it’s simpler and explains more”? We do use ethical
claims evaluatively with a clear sense of their meaning!