How Emotivism Survives Immoralists, Irrationality, and Depression

How Emotivism Survives Immoralists, Irrationality, and Depression

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The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2002) Vol. LX

When someone thinks that it is morally wrong to cut socialwelfare while increasing military spending, that state of mindis, essentially, something akin to a desire for such changes notto take place. Or so versions of the metaethical theory known asemotivism have it, claiming that moral opinions are bestunderstood as motivational states.

Emotivism is hardly the received view of contemporaryanalytic philosophy, and much writing in metaethics seems benton showing why and how this view is wrong and on producingsomething that has at least a hope of being right, that is, atheory denying that moral opinions are well understood asdesires or motivational states. Perhaps the most popularobjection to emotivism is the following:

Immoralism: If moral opinions are desires or similar motiva-tional states, it is a mystery that there are what I will somewhatbluntly call ‘immoralists’: people having moral opinions butlacking the corresponding desires or motivation. (Some wouldprefer to label such people ‘amoralists’, but that label suggestssomeone who thinks that there are no moral obligations orrefrains from making moral judgments: in any case, ‘immoralist’should be taken in the sense given here.)

An impressive number of critics of emotivism encountered inthe literature and in conversation have thought that there areobvious cases of immoralism (Brink 1989, chapter 3; Campbell1993; Kupperman 1999, chapter 5; Mele 1996; Sinnott-Armstrong 1993; Smith 1992; Smith 1998; Simpson 1999; andStocker 1979). Consequently, prominent figures in metaethicaltexts are Satan, who wants to do what is wrong just because it

How Emotivism Survives Immoralists,Irrationality, and Depression

Gunnar BjörnssonStockholm University

Gunnar Björnsson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy atStockholm University, Sweden. His doctoral dissertation defends aversion of internalism in moral psychology, and his previous publica-tions in ethical theory include “Why Emotivists Love Inconsistency”(Philosophical Studies, 2001).

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is wrong; the practically irrational person, either in the guise ofthe morally weak, who knows what is right but is overcome bydesire and acts against his conviction, or in the guise of thedepressed individual, who knows that he ought to help, say, butlacks all motivation; and the occasional philosopher thinkingthat he ought to report his gambling income to the IRS butfeeling no inclination to do so. The simple idea is that, sincesuch characters are real or at any rate possible, and since theywould be ruled out by the emotivist identification of moralopinions and motivational states, emotivism must be false.

Emotivism is typically understood as the combination of twoideas: internalism and noncognitivism. Internalism says thatmoral opinions essentially involve some kind of motivationalstate, that their psychological function is to bring about orprevent action of the kind with which they are concerned.Noncognitivism denies that moral opinions are representationsof moral reality: although they will tend to correspond tovarious features of the actions with which they are concerned,this is not their primary function. Quite obviously, immoralismis primarily a concern for the internalist part of emotivism, andthere are many other views that involve internalism. Butexactly how immoralism is such a concern and what kinds ofdefense are available will depend on the exact form of inter-nalism. What I hope to do in this paper is to give an outline ofan internalism that is a natural development of the emotivisttheory proposed by Charles L. Stevenson and to show how itcan account for at least some typical cases of apparentimmoralism and make it plausible that other cases can behandled along similar lines. Seemingly clear cases ofimmoralism in the real world do not stand up to scrutiny, andmethodological considerations show that very little weightshould be given to imagined cases. Emotivism thus remains alive alternative in metaethics. Or so I will argue.

1. Emotivism

Emotivism, as it was formulated by Stevenson, claims that thefunction of moral terms is to express attitudes of some kind andcause similar states of mind in the hearer when put in thesuitable sentential and conversational context (Stevenson 1937,1944). (I take some liberties with Stevenson’s account, talkingabout functions rather than causal dispositions, for example.)The function of sentences such as “it would be morally wrong toprivatize public land” or “it would be wrong to ban the privateownership of handguns” is to express a negative attitude to actsof, respectively, privatizing public land and banning the privateownership of handguns and to produce a similar attitude in theaudience.

Given this account of the meaning of moral or ethical terms,and given the assumption that the function of (unembedded,


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categorical) ethical sentences is to convey moral opinions, thefollowing tentative account of one class of moral opinions seemsreasonable:

An Emotivist Suggestion: To have the opinion that it would bemorally wrong to perform an act of kind K is to have a negativeattitude toward acts of kind K.

I take it that this is part of the core of a viable emotivism. It isa central claim that figures in emotivist explanations of variousfeatures of moral thought and thinking, and emotivism is(insofar as we follow Stevenson) above all an explanatorytheory, hoping to give us a deeper understanding of the causalstructure of moral language and our moral lives. Other parts ofthat core would say something about our thoughts about whatis morally admirable and what is morally permissible andprobably extend to a fairly wide range of normative orevaluative opinions, including, perhaps, certain opinions aboutwhat is rational, as in Gibbard 1990.

The complications involved in a full-fledged emotivism arenot needed for the points I hope to make against the immoralistargument. However, unless we have a clearer notion of the kindof attitude mentioned in An Emotivist Suggestion, there is verylittle we can say about the immoralist challenge. Clarifying thisnotion, we will have to make some theoretical commitments,and my characterization of the relevant attitude will placeemotivism within a general functionalistic account of psycho-logical states. Functionalism is of course not an uncontroversialapproach in the philosophy of psychology—although perhapsthe most influential and promising one—and if functionalismdoesn’t work, neither do some of the arguments I will give lateron.

First, let me introduce a technical term for the relevant kindof attitude: ‘attitude’ is itself too vague and general to capturewhat emotivism should be concerned with, and while ‘desire’ isalmost right, it has phenomenological connotations that makeemotivism untenable—to think that some act is wrong is not tohave any particular feeling. Instead, I will define the notion of amoral optation and restate the identification using that notion.

I take an optation for acts of kind K not to be performed tobe a psychological state the function of which is to preventacts of kind K from being performed, through preventing theformation of intentions involving the realization of acts of kindK. Optations so conceived are ‘propositional attitudes’,mechanisms operating on representations of actions so as tocause or prevent the realization of the action represented.Exactly how to ascribe functions is not something I will gointo here, but I will suppose the following: the function of athing is something it does under ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’ circum-

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stances. That something fails to produce a certain effect undercertain circumstances is entirely compatible with its having asits function to produce that effect, and even with its having asits function to produce that effect under those very circum-stances. In particular, optations can fail to produce their effectbecause the opportunity never comes up, because we lack themeans, because we lack knowledge of the means, or becausethere is a conflict between optations; the list of possiblecircumstances under which an optation can fail to perform itsfunction can indeed be made very long. Similarly, a heart anda door lock can retain their functions of, respectively, pumpingblood and of keeping people without the right key from openinga door, even when they are malfunctioning or just not beingused. I will also suppose that the notion of ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’circumstances can be spelled out in non-normative terms.(Perhaps the most detailed attempt to give precise, naturalistic,non-normative definitions of function and normality is foundin Millikan 1984.)

Of course, given this definition of ‘optation’, not any optationis of the kind that emotivism should identify with opinions tothe effect that some kind of act is morally wrong. I don’t wantto eat right now, and this is presumably a matter of my havingan optation for me not to eat right now, but certainly not anoptation that could be identified as my opinion that it ismorally wrong for me to eat right now. Now, to characterizemoral optations with enough precision is a tricky affair aspointed out by Alston (1968), but I think the following con-nection to moral emotions such as guilt and indignation takesus a long way:

A moral optation for acts of a certain kind not to be performed isa psychological state the function of which is to prevent suchacts, at least partly through eliciting guilt in the agent contem-plating performing such acts and indignation toward others per-forming or contemplating performing such acts. (See Björnsson1998 as well as Gibbard 1990 on morality in the narrow sense.)

Obviously, this definition assumes that guilt and indignationcan be understood without reference to moral opinions.Admittedly, that is a controversial assumption. It might seemthat guilt essentially involves the thought that one has donesomething wrong in much the way that hope involves thethought that what is hoped for is possible but not entirelywithin one’s power. But on the other hand, it seems that we canfeel guilt even when we think that we have done nothing wrong.In any case, since my prime concern here is the immoralistargument and not the difficulty of characterizing moraloptations, and since the latter problem has been addressed inBjörnsson 1998 and Gibbard 1990, I will assume that the above


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definition is on the right track and propose the following moredefinite formulation of the tentative identification given in AnEmotivist Suggestion:

The Emotivist Identification: To have the opinion that it would bemorally wrong to perform an act of kind K is to be in a psycho-logical state the function of which is to prevent such acts, atleast partly through eliciting guilt in the agent contemplatingperforming such acts and indignation toward others performingor contemplating performing such acts.

The Emotivist Identification could be supplemented with theexplicit noncognitivist claim that moral opinions do notrepresent moral facts in any interesting sense or that therepresentational content of moral opinions is secondary to theiroptational function. But none of my arguments here will dependon any such supplementation.

2. Methodological Considerations

The Emotivist Identification is meant to be methodologicallyon a par with other theoretical identifications, like theidentification of light and photons/electromagnetic waves of acertain kind and the identification of instances of water andstuff constituted by H2O molecules. Note two features of suchidentifications: (1) Their acceptability is a matter of thetheoretical characterization being at the core of our bestgeneral explanation of the causal upshots and effects of thephenomenon in question. Our knowledge of theoretical identi-fications is thus an a posteriori matter. So, I suggest, is ourknowledge of whether emotivism is true. (2) They are neces-sarily true statements that support counterfactuals—insofaras they are true. Similarly for The Emotivist Identification,insofar as it is a correct identification, it is a necessary truth.Or more cautiously, since modal judgments and counter-factuals are sensitive to context, within scientific discourse orfrom a scientific point of view, theoretical identifications arenecessarily true statements. Presumably, they do not barfiction from meaningful talk of light with different physicalnature or water with different chemical nature. Nor shouldemotivism imply that fictional accounts of people having moralopinions without corresponding moral optations are meaning-less or mistaken.

Although both points can be questioned, I will just assumethat they are correct. Enough philosophers seem to agree thatthey are correct for the following to be an interesting claim: if(1) and (2) are correct, emotivism is not threatened by argu-ments from immoralism. That is what I will argue.

When assessing theoretical identifications, appeals to what wecan imagine, unconstrained by what our best explanatory

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theories say, show very little. I can imagine that Jesus makeswine out of water without added ingredients, that the physicalnature of light is changed by Satanic intervention or purechance, and that Mark Twain isn’t Samuel Clemens but, rather,is Samuel’s unknown twin. If this is enough to undermine theidentification from physics of light and photons/electromagneticwaves, the identification from chemistry of being a sample ofwater and being a sample consisting (almost exclusively) of H2Omolecules, or the identification from biography of SamuelClemens and Mark Twain, then identifications are much lessinteresting than they seemed to be: all emotivists should strivefor in the case of moral opinions is what we think chemistry hasgiven us in the case of water. On the other hand—and this iswhat I suggest—we might deny that our imagination is a reliableguide to theoretical identifications: intuitions about imaginedcases might explicate intuitive knowledge about moral opinionsand help armchair reflection yield fruit, but they might equallywell explicate mistaken assumptions.

The latter seems especially plausible when competentpeople have different intuitions, as is the case with imaginedimmoralists: philosophers who think that moral opinions havea necessary tie to motivation have denied that the characters weimagine when we imagine immoralists do have the moralopinions in question or insisted that they must have somemotivation: what we conceive of are not really immoralists afterall (Dancy 1993, 4–6; Gibbard 1993, 318–9). Such a response isnot by itself enough to take the sting out of the immoralist, asDavid O. Brink insists in his version of the immoralist argument(e.g., Brink 1989, 46–7), but it does call for serious reflection onthe reliability and relevance of our modal intuitions.

The test of theoretical identifications, then, shouldn’t beimagination but explanatory power. The reason we shouldaccept what chemists tell us about the nature of water is thatthe assumption that instances of water consists of H2Omolecules is central to good explanations of how water interactswith or is created in interactions between other substances.Similarly, emotivism provides a reasonable theory of thepsychological nature of moral opinions insofar as The EmotivistIdentification is central to good explanations of the causalupshots and behaviors of moral opinions.

So, in assessing emotivism, we should attend to its explana-tions of the causes and effects of real moral opinions as well asto the explanations offered by rival theories. Moreover, theoccasional case apparently involving a moral opinion but nomoral optation need not be a problem. Chemists claiming thatsugar is a substance constituted by soluble crystalline carbo-hydrates should not be shaken by the fact that aspartame canlook and taste sugary although it is of a different chemicalconstitution. Rather, the correct conclusion for the chemist is


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that aspartame is a different substance. Similarly, theoccasional apparent case of immoralism should not troubleemotivists if their theory provides good explanations of whatgoes on in most typical cases and if there is no description ofmoral opinions that has similar explanatory power butcaptures more cases. (It is also possible that no singlecharacterization will do fundamental explanatory work for thegreat majority of instances of a phenomenon: we might find, asin the case of jadeite and nephrite, that what has fallen underone label, ‘jade’ needs not one, but two alternative theoreticalcharacterizations. But I see no need for that move in the caseof the moral opinions with which The Emotivist Identificationis concerned.)

Of course, this kind of assessment relies on the possibility offinding clear cases of moral opinions, and that might be moredifficult than finding good samples of water or sugar. Still, Ithink that we can agree on numerous cases where moralopinions obtain and cases where they do not, and we can learnabout what the causes of such opinions are and what differencethey make to the behavior of people having them. As a matterof fact, I think that we know quite a lot about how moralopinions interact with other psychological features undernormal circumstances. The task of the philosopher or moralpsychologist is to suggest causal structures that could explainsuch interactions and to say something interesting about thesestructures, for example explaining why they are there to befound at all and along what general principles moral opinionsinteract with other parts of the structures that are our psyche.Given the complexity of the human biological system, we can atmost hope to find principles that hold ceteris paribus or undersome especially interesting conditions. But this is a problem forany study of complex phenomena and not cause for abandoningfurther inquiry.

What I propose to do here, then, is to look at real cases ofwhat seems to be immoralism of fairly familiar and widespreadkinds, such that if these kinds of apparent immoralism turnedout to be not only apparent but real, this would suggest thatthe causes and effects of moral opinions are generally bestunderstood from a different theoretical identification. But first,let me say what assumptions I will make about the capacity ofThe Emotivist Identification to explain other phenomenaassociated with moral opinions.

3. The (Presumed) Evidence for Emotivism

Since this paper is exclusively concerned with the argumentfrom immoralism, my claim will be that if emotivism does wellin other areas, the argument from immoralism fails. I willtherefore unabashedly assume that emotivism is an explanatorysuccess elsewhere.

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For some areas, this assumption is very plausible. It is hardto think about our moral lives without noting that we have astrong tendency to feel guilt when we think that we have donesomething wrong and a tendency to feel indignation when wethink that someone else has done something wrong. And it ishard to ignore the fact that guilt and the indignation of otherskeep us from acting in ways eliciting such feelings. Moreover, itis generally agreed that motivation to act and emotions likeguilt and indignation are important signs of moral opinions andthat the lack of motivation and emotional reactions areimportant signs of lacking moral conviction (e.g., Stevenson1944, 16–17; Alston 1968, 10; Smith 1972; Dancy 1993, 4; Smith1994, 6). On emotivism, that is just what we should expect, andthis gives prima facie support to the theory.

However, I will also assume that emotivism can account forphenomena that have been seen as beyond its explanatorypowers. For example, I will assume that emotivism can explainthe role of moral opinions and moral statements in inferencesand the fact that moral statements seems to figure in logicalrelations in the same way as paradigmatically non-emotivestatements. Also, I will assume that The Emotivist Identificationprovides good ground for an explanation of our intuitions aboutmoral mistakes and disagreement and that it can explain howwe can feel guilt even though we think that we have donenothing wrong. These are controversial assumptions, to be sure,but since I have argued for their correctness at length inBjörnsson 1998 and 2001, I will just take them for granted andtry to make plausible that if they are correct, the argumentfrom immoralism has little power.

If all this would work—if the causal role of our moralopinions is well explained from the assumption that they aremoral optations—we would have a nice little argument foremotivism. On almost any view, the moral opinions of mostpeople coincide with such things as moral optations:motivational states tightly connected to emotions like guilt andindignation. And if The Emotivist Identification would turn outto be an explanatory success, there would be no reason topostulate some further entity—some non-optational moralbelief—doing the relevant causal work. (If moral optations canhave truth-conditions—if they might be ‘besires’ as Altham 1986put it—emotivism is compatible with an internalist form ofcognitivism.) But all this depends on there being good answersto the argument from immoralism.

4. Real Immoralism: A Closer Look

In line with the methodological considerations in section 2, Iwill concentrate on kinds of apparent immoralism that areordinary enough to spell trouble for The Emotivist Identificationshould they turn out to involve no optation and try to explain


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how they come about and interact with other phenomena,ultimately deciding whether they do indeed involve moral opta-tions. I will discuss four categories.

(1) Start with moral weakness. Clearly there are cases wherewe think that it would be wrong to do something but go aheadnonetheless: this is something most of us have some experienceof, if not recently. What such cases show, however, is simply thatmoral optations sometimes fail to perform their proper function:they fail to produce or prevent the relevant actions. In doingthis, moral optations are similar to a wide range of desires, asevidenced by the phenomenon of conflicting desires, where asubset of our desires takes control over our behavioral resourcesand determines action in spite of desires to the contrary. Thiscan hardly show that emotivism is wrong, as emotivists haverepeatedly argued.

(2) In cases of moral weakness and weakness of will, theoverridden motivational states typically have effects such asregret, guilt, shame, ambiguous motions or facial expressions,and so forth. That is what makes talk about weakness soapposite: there seems to be a struggle going on, where theimmoral or irrational side eventually gets the better of themoral or rational. However, cases of depression and listlessnessdo not seem to involve a motivational struggle and mighttherefore provide clearer instances of immoralism. According toarguments pointing to such cases, the depressed or exhaustedindividual can have the opinion that it would be wrong of hernot to do something, without therefore having the leastmotivation to actually do it. In giving extra weight to thisassumption, Michael Smith reports that what is really badabout depression is that one knows that one would have hadthe motivation to do the right thing, had one not beendepressed (Smith 1998, 149–74).

I agree with Smith’s observation, at least as it concerns themild kind of depression or listlessness of which I myself havesome experience. But what do observations of depression show?Rather than looking at chronic depression, consider somethingthat most of us will have an easier time thinking about, namelytemporary states of listlessness, due to temporary exhaustion,sleep deprivation, sickness, or personal loss. Suppose I findmyself in such a state, remembering that I had promised tomeet a friend downtown to help with a few things. I think tomyself that it would be wrong not to go, but that thought doesnot engage, somehow, and I find myself lying down on the sofainstead of putting on shoes. Four complementing considerationssuggest that emotivism survives examples like this.

(i) While it is plausible to say that the listless has moral opinionsbut lacks moral motivation, it often seems equally plausibleto say that she wants to go help her friend, say, but lacks the

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energy or willpower. But it is plausible that the psychologicalfunction of wanting to do something is exactly to make onedo it. If so, the listless is in a motivational state of the relevantkind—a state the function of which is to make her go help herfriend—and we have no clear counterexample to emotivism.

(ii) Emotivism claims that moral opinions are states the functionof which is to affect action in a certain way. But introspectionis obviously not an infallible guide to the functions or thepresence of states that govern our behavior and thinking,especially not under abnormal psychological conditions.Hence, even if the listless doesn’t think she is in a certainmotivational state, she might well be.

(iii) Why does the listless seem to have a moral opinion? There isperhaps a certain readiness to utter certain sentences and atendency to give reasons for her opinion, and perhaps thethought that “It would be wrong not to go” passes throughthe conscious mind without any feeling of insincerity (apartfrom that having to do with the lack of drive). But thediscussion in this paper assumes that emotivism can explainwhy moral optations tend to produce utterances, consciousthoughts, and moral reasoning. If this is right, thesephenomena are equally signs of moral optations. Hence, thereis evidence that the listless does have moral optations.Moreover, there is nothing strange about moral optationsmanifesting these dispositions under conditions of listlessnesswhile losing their power to influence action or some of theirmotivational phenomenology: different dispositions are ingeneral manifested under different circumstances.

(iv) This brings up the final point. A moral optation is a statethat affects action in specific ways under ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’conditions for affecting action, and listlessness is hardly sucha condition. Listlessness and depression are generalmotivational disorders that lower energy levels and one’smotivation to do anything, including mischief. This generalitysuggests that it is not particular optations that are lackingin the listless or depressed, but general means for theirenactment. (Medical science suggests that low levels ofdopamine and serotonin in the brain play a crucial role.)Moreover, this would explain the following commonsensicalobservation: when cured from our listlessness, we usually findourselves with much the same motivation and range of desiresas we had before the affliction. So, even assuming emotivism,it is no wonder that the moral opinions of the listless comewithout the specifically motivational phenomenology. (Assuggested by Aristotle 1980, Book 7, those “asleep, drunk ormad” can also be said to be under a general motivational


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deficiency rather than lacking particular motivational states.Gibbard (1993, 318) might be advocating a similar response.

It seems, then, that emotivists should not worry about thesekinds of practical irrationality or deficiency. And various patho-logical cases can be handled along similar lines. Take, forexample, the cases of brain damage described in Damasio 1994.One of Damasio’s patients is able to reason well about whatwould be the morally correct action in various difficult cases, aswell as about what would be reasonable decisions in his ownlife. However, his actions always seemed to be related to moreprimitive impulses, leading to disastrous results. The interpre-tation that I suggest for a case like that is that this person hasthe moral optations that a normal person has, but that they failto affect action due to missing parts of the brain.

(3) There are, of course, common forms of apparent im-moralism that do not seem to involve practical irrationality.Suppose that someone thinks that it would be wrong not toreport his betting income to the IRS but, nevertheless, feels noinclination to report it. He assumes that he lacks motivationalstates the function of which is to make him report that incomeand concludes that emotivism must be false (Sinnott-Armstrong1993, 302). But why should he conclude from not feelinginclination that there is no moral optation? We have alreadyseen ways in which optations can fail to be expressed, and thiscase gives us reason to look at more such ways. Since I haveheard similar arguments from people with whom I am per-sonally somewhat acquainted, I will draw from this knowledge,though I will stick to the example above for purposes ofillustration. Typically, the following seem to be true about thiskind of apparent immoralist:

(i) The person’s moral optations are in many other cases clearlyaligned with his moral opinions. In particular, they are soaligned when concerned with acts similar to not reportingthe betting income, such as a wealthy person’s act of notreporting large parts of a high salary.

Now, our optations are not randomly distributed over variousactions, but sensitive to features of those actions, features thatcan be exemplified by other actions and eliciting similaroptations in similar cases. Given (i), there is a reason to expecta moral optation concerning the IRS report, an optationelicited by the same features of failing to report the bettingincome that trigger the optation concerning the wealthyperson’s not reporting parts of his salary. But if this is indeedthe case, why is there no felt inclination to act accordingly inthis case? Unlike the case of depression, there is no generalmotivational deficit, so the explanation would have to lie

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elsewhere. What I suggest is doing important work here isthat:

(ii) Reporting the betting income involves a cost on the part ofthis person (filling in a complicated form, not being able to goon that vacation, or just losing a little money): the person hasan optation not to report the betting income.

If there is a moral optation, there is also a conflict of optations,just as in cases of weakness of will. But why, then, is there nosense of struggle in this case?

The answer, I think, is that the moral optation is silenced bythe optation not to suffer the personal cost. Such silencing isnot a strange phenomenon invoked ad hoc here: rather it is abasic and very useful feature of practical reasoning. When weare considering alternative routes of action and choose a routethat we think best overall, that route nevertheless fails to realizesome goal that another route would have realized. In difficultdecisions—decisions where we are likely to talk about moralweakness or moral strength—we are painfully aware of this,but it takes place even when decisions are easy. Once such adecision is made, there is typically little point in spendingcognitive resources on what isn’t but could have been achieved:that, I suggest, is the general reason why optations elicited byconsiderations not adhered to are silenced.

Why, then, are not all optations contrary to decisionssilenced? Why do we experience weakness, regret, or discomfortwith our decisions? The answer, I suggest, comes in two parts.The first is that silencing might be a bad thing when thedisregarded optation is an important one, where it might beimportant to be on the lookout for options that involve itssatisfaction. The other is that silencing might be a bad thingwhen disregarding an optation is likely to lead to adversereactions such as disappointment, anger or indignation on partof others. But in cases like the IRS example, the followingwould typically be true:

(iii) Doing what one thinks is wrong is unlikely to lead to adversereactions, and it is not something that one regards as verywrong.

This seems to be the case with the IRS example. Tax evasion isnot generally considered a grave moral sin—in fact, the IRS isseen by many as an enemy—and a common thought is exactlythat no one (identifiable) will be hurt. Hence, silencing couldvery much be expected in such cases. Of course, (i) does not givea conclusive reason that there is a moral optation that can beexpected to have been silenced given (ii) and (iii): it only makesthe existence of such an optation quite likely. But if we assume—


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as I do in this paper—that emotivism is well supported prior tothe analysis of immoralists, and if we hold in mind thatknowledge of our own motivational states is limited, a goodlikelihood is all emotivism needs to retain credibility.

An interesting case somewhat similar to the IRS example isprovided by brands of cynicism where someone is doing whatshe thinks is wrong because others are doing the same thingand because only one person doing what is right would fail tosignificantly help the situation. Disillusioned, she lives a lifethat she thinks is immoral. Again, she might not feel muchregret, but that does not mean that she is missing the relevantoptations: silencing can be quite effective. So, emotivism canexplain how cases like the IRS example is possible, and whythere is a difference between moral opinions as to how obviousmotivational signs are involved. Rather than being a problemfor emotivism, the phenomenon gives it further support.

(4) Before turning from real cases of apparent immoralism tofacts about what people are willing to say and think aboutfictional characters such as Satan, we can have a look at a real‘satanic’ act, reported by St. Augustine in his Confessions. St.Augustine confesses that, in his youth, he and some friendsonce stole pears from a neighbor, just because it was wrong:they had no interest whatsoever in the pears and could getmuch tastier fruit along morally acceptable and less strenuousroutes. Is this a problem for emotivism? I don’t think so. Kids—and adults—do all kinds of things just because they are(perceived as) dangerous or disgusting. Admittedly, such casesneed not involve any clear feeling of practical conflict, but thefeeling of danger involved is very plausibly seen as theexpression of a state the function of which is to make one avoidthe activity: the excitement and heightened sense of being aliveresults from mastering the dangerous situation and overcomingone’s own reluctance. To take an obvious example, peoplebungee-jump just because it is scary, because there is areluctance to master. The same, I suggest, holds when people—like the young St. Augustine—do what they think is wrong “justbecause it is wrong”: it is because parts of them “scream out”against doing it that what they perceive as wrongdoing isexciting and tempting. So emotivism does not rule out thisbrand of satanic motivation, quite the opposite.

I can hardly claim to have shown that the above kinds ofapparent immoralism involve moral optations. Partly, this isbecause the evidence is anecdotal; partly it is because I havebeen relying on intuitive but yet to be systematicallydocumented principles of psychology; and partly because therelevant notion of function remains to be given a precisedefinition. Regarding all this, I claim bad company: theimmoralist arguments against emotivism have equally—or to agreater extent—relied on anecdote and folk psychology, and my

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goal here has been to undermine those arguments, not to showthat emotivism is correct. Moreover, science rarely starts outwith precise definitions, but adds refinement as evidencedemands it. Enough refinement has been supplied to underminethe arguments from immoralism discussed so far, and that hasbeen my primary ambition.

5. The Emotivist Identification andthe Commonsense Notion of Immoralism

Consider an argument taken from what is probably the mostnuanced treatment of immoralism in the metaethical literature.I quote from Ronald D. Milo’s Immorality:

we think that the most evil or reprehensible kind of wrongdoingconsists in willingly and intentionally doing something onebelieves to be morally wrong … because one simply does not carethat it is morally wrong…. Any analysis of the nature of moralbeliefs that does not allow for even the possibility of these formsof immoral behavior is, it seems to me, defective. (Milo 1984, 253)

Similar arguments are found in Brink 1989 (27) and Copp 1995(16). I have already argued that our intuitions about thepossibility of immoralism should be given little weight whenassessing emotivism, but isn’t the world plentiful of reprehen-sible wrongdoing of just the kind Milo is pointing to? In anycase, this is certainly what people seem to think, and soemotivism seems to imply that people are in massive error. Isthat really plausible?

Here, one could perhaps argue, as Nietzsche famously did,that everyday psychological belief—especially when concernedwith evil—is replete with misunderstanding boosted byChristian mythology. (See for example Nietzsche 1994.) How-ever, we can find less intricate ways to explain the common-sense conception of reprehensible wrongdoing without ad hocassumptions, and what can be explained on a given theory canhardly tell against it, quite the contrary. But let me start withsome considerations that should free us, first of the idea thatthe common sense understanding of immorality must beveridical, and then of the idea that it is necessarily in conflictwith emotivism.

To begin with, although depictions of the kind of wrongdoingwith which Milo is concerned satiates a plethora of soap operas,the real thing is not something we encountered daily. Now,thoughts about cases of which we have very little experiencetend to lack reliability: remember how contrary to generalexpectations the data from Stanley Milgram’s experiments onobedience were, and consider how it surprises many people thatfor some of the most atrocious evils such as genocide, theperpetrators have thought that what they did wasn’t wrong, but


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rather morally compulsory. (See for example Staub 1989.)Hence, the thoughts Milo alludes to might tell us little aboutreality.

Moreover, it is not clear that what common sense has inmind when thinking of the most reprehensible wrongdoinginvolves a person lacking moral optation to abstain from whathe knows is wrong, where moral optations are understood in thesense defined above. I have already argued that the presence ofsuch optations is compatible with little or no overt behavior andlittle or no feeling of motivation. These have not been obviouspoints even in a philosophical context, and so common senseshould not be expected to have grasped them adequately. Andeven if this is so, it is not clear that it is a complete lack of moraloptation rather than a lack of motivationally effective moraloptation that is central to the commonsense conception ofreprehensible wrongdoing.

So, it is neither clear that common sense has a veridicalgrasp of reprehensible wrongdoing nor that whatever vaguegrasp it has is in conflict with emotivism. But furthermore,emotivism can explain why we would extend our everydaygrasp of moral opinions to cases where few of the standardmotivational signs obtain.

The first assumption in this explanation is that having amoral optation has a fairly wide but reasonably systematicrange of psychological and behavioral effects, including atendency to adduce supporting reasons and instigate inferentialmoves: this I have taken for granted. It would be plausible toexpect our thinking about moral opinions to be adapted to thissystematic range of effects, so that we expect these effects whenencountering moral opinions and identify moral opinions bythese effects.

Given this, what would happen if we came across a person—real or fictional—that displayed all but a relatively well-definedsubset of these psychological and behavioral patterns? Howwould we describe such a person? That would depend on whetherwe had a specific expression signifying the specific state ofmind giving rise to that limited set of effects—in which case wewould use that expression—but suppose we had no suchexpression. Then, I suggest, we would use our ordinary expres-sion for moral opinions and note in what ways the usualassumptions fail to hold: the deviant case would be described onthe pattern of “P thinks that K is morally wrong, but X is thecase,” where X signifies what is different from standard cases.

Apply this to some purported or fictional immoralist: “Heknows that torturing political prisoners is wrong but lacks themotivation to abstain from such torture.” Here, the audiencecould use their everyday conception of moral opinions; deductthe motivational part but keep the rest of the ordinaryassumptions more or less intact; conclude that this disagreeable

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character knows that the torture is extremely painful for thevictim, that it often is psychologically devastating, and thatpeople in general think that it is wrong and are emotionallyagitated by it; and further conclude that, partly because of suchknowledge, he has the capacity to verbally and otherwisebehave somewhat like normal people thinking that torturingpolitical prisoners is morally wrong. The usual descriptions ofimmoralists are thus to be expected, given emotivism, and giventhat we lack a special expression for the state in which apparentimmoralists find themselves. The same phenomenon of using anexpression denoting a substance, S, to convey thoughts aboutobjects that share many but not all of the typical properties of Salso explains the—at least apparent—intelligibility of talkabout Jesus’ changing the chemical composition of water andabout Mark Twain’s being Samuel Clemens’s unknown twin.Moreover, given the questionable veridicality of our everydayunderstanding of reprehensible wrongdoing and the generaldifficulty of understanding moral opinions that is displayed byongoing philosophical controversy, it is quite likely that weshould be unaware that our description of the wrongdoer, taken‘literally’ or ‘scientifically’, describes the impossible.

“But isn’t it just very plausible that some real, non-depressed, psychopaths know that what they do is wrong,without therefore being the least motivated to refrain?” If thisthought goes through the reader’s mind at this point, I canonly ask her to look through this section once more, con-sidering (a) whether the thought really is in conflict with thepresent form of emotivism and (b) how likely it is to carryinformation about how to characterize our moral opinions so asto provide information central to our best explanations of theircauses and effects.

6. Concluding Remarks

But maybe the argument of this paper shows too much. Con-sider Joe, claiming that all birds fly, and dismissing penguinsas not really being birds just because of their lack of aviation:can’t he use the same arguments to dismiss objections to hisclaim? Not so. This case is different from the emotivisttreatment of putative immoralists in that Joe goes againstfundamental organizing principles of biological taxonomy thatfocus on internal structure and evolutionary background. (Thisfocus is not arbitrary but chosen for structuring information inways conducive to biological inquiry and explanation.)Unfortunately for Joe, penguins are birds on both counts. Bycontrast, it is unclear how emotivists flout any such principles.Quite the contrary, one popular and well-advocated taxonomicprinciple in philosophical psychology (and, of course, inphysiology) is to categorize in terms of function, and this isexactly what our version of emotivism does, basing the ascrip-


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tion of function on observation of interesting ways in whichmoral opinions normally interact with other states of mindand with other people through emotional and linguisticexpression. A more telling example is this: if Joe found ordreamt up an animal very much looking and behaving like apenguin but nourishing its young with milk and stemmingfrom other mammals, biologists would neither say that it is abird nor that it is a penguin. The temptation to talk about thecreature as ‘Joe’s Penguin’ would be neither here nor there.

The literature on emotivism contains too many varieties ofapparent immoralism to examine in one paper, showing for eachtype how it can be accommodated within an emotivist frame-work. What I hope to have established, however, is the generaldifficulty of undermining emotivism or internalism withreference to immoralism and an awareness that if we areinterested in the nature of moral opinions (rather than in ourconceptions or beliefs thereof), fantasy and intuitions have littleforce. If anything, the cases we have looked at have shown theresources of emotivism and hinted at ways in which other formsof internalism might be defended.

Does this mean that there is no straightforward way torefute emotivism? Certainly not, if it is false: the argument herehas relied on the assumption that The Emotivist Identificationis central to explanations of the causes and effects of moralopinions in ‘non-immoralist’ cases, and this assumption is ofcourse far from trivial. There are the prima facie difficulties ofexplaining moral reasoning and the structure of moraldisagreement and of accounting for cases where we seem tohave moral optations but nevertheless lack corresponding moralopinions, to mention a few. And if the presence of moral opta-tions fails to do the relevant explanatory work, we might havereason to reject emotivism even if all clear real cases of moralopinions come with the right kind of motivation. But these arelarge issues for other occasions.

Note

This paper has benefited from being discussed at the Higher Seminarin Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University and at a Brown Bagmeeting at the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecti-cut. Detailed and helpful comments have also been given by PaulBloomfield, Joel Kupperman, William G. Lycan, and Folke Tersman.Joe’s Penguin was conceived as an obstacle for the emotivism defendedhere by an anonymous referee for Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch. The paper was written while on a grant from STINT, TheSwedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research andHigher Education.

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