Relativitas Moral

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Moral Relativism First published Thu Feb 19, 2004; substantive revision Tue Dec 9, 2008

Moral relativism has the unusual distinction — both within philosophy and outside it — of being attributed to others, almost always as a criticism, far more often than it isexplicitly professed by anyone. Nonetheless, moral relativism is a standard topic inmetaethics, and there are contemporary philosophers who defend forms of it: Themost prominent are Gilbert Harman and David B. Wong. The term ‗moral relativism‘is understood in a variety of ways. Most often it is associated with an empirical thesisthat there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis thatthe truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some groupof persons. Sometimes ‗moral relativism‘ is connected with a normative positionabout how we ought to think about or act towards those with whom we morallydisagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them.

1. Historical Background 2. Forms and Arguments 3. Descriptive Moral Relativism 4. Are Moral Disagreements Rationally Resolvable? 5. Metaethical Moral Relativism 6. Mixed Positions: A Rapprochement between Relativists and Objectivists? 7. Relativism and Tolerance Bibliography Other Internet Resources

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1. Historical Background

Though moral relativism did not become a prominent topic in philosophy orelsewhere until the twentieth century, it has ancient origins. In the classical Greekworld, both the historian Herodotus and the sophist Protagoras appeared to endorsesome form of relativism (the latter attracted the attention of Plato in the Theaetetus ). Itshould also be noted that the ancient Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (formerlyspelled Chuang-Tzu) put forward a nonobjectivist view that is sometimes interpretedas a kind of relativism.

Among the ancient Greek philosophers, moral diversity was widely acknowledged, but the more common nonobjectivist reaction was moral skepticism, the view thatthere is no moral knowledge (the position of the Pyrrhonian skeptic SextusEmpiricus), rather than moral relativism, the view that moral truth or justification is

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judgment may be justified in one society, but not another. Taken in one way, this last point is uncontroversial: The people in one society may have different evidenceavailable to them than the people in the other society. But proponents of MMR usuallyhave something stronger and more provocative in mind: That the standards of

justification in the two societies may differ from one another and that there is norational basis for resolving these differences. This is why the justification of moral

judgments is relative rather than absolute.

It is important to note several distinctions that may be made in formulating differentmetaethical relativist positions. First, it is sometimes said that the truth or justificationof moral judgments may be relative to an individual person as well as a group of

persons. In this article, the latter will be assumed, as in the definition of MMR, unlessotherwise noted. Second, that to which truth or justification is relative may be the

persons making the moral judgments or the persons about whom the judgments aremade. These are sometimes called appraiser and agent relativism respectively.Appraiser relativism suggests that we do or should make moral judgments on the basisof our own standards, while agent relativism implies that the relevant standards arethose of the persons we are judging (of course, in some cases these may coincide).Appraiser relativism is the more common position, and it will usually be assumed inthe discussion that follows. Finally, MMR may be offered as the best explanation ofwhat people already believe, or it may be put forward as a position people ought toaccept regardless of what they now believe. There will be occasion to discuss bothclaims below, though the latter is probably the more common one.

Metaethical moral relativist positions are typically contrasted with moral objectivism.Let us say that moral objectivism maintains that moral judgments are ordinarily trueor false in an absolute or universal sense, that some of them are true, and that peoplesometimes are justified in accepting true moral judgments (and rejecting false ones)on the basis of evidence available to any reasonable and well-informed person. Thereare different ways of challenging moral objectivism. Moral skepticism says that weare never justified in accepting or rejecting moral judgments. Other views — variouslycalled moral non-cognitivism, expressivism, anti-realism, nihilism, etc. — contend thatmoral judgments lack truth-value, at least beyond the truth-value implied by theminimalist claim that to assert that S is true is simply to assert S (a related view, the

error theory, claims that moral judgments are always false). MMR is oftendistinguished from all of these views: Instead of denying truth-value or justification, itaffirms relative forms of these. However, metaethical moral relativist views aresometimes regarded as connected with positions that say moral judgments lack truth-value, since the relativist views contend that moral judgments lack truth-value in anabsolute or universal sense. This is sometimes simply a question of terminology, butnot always. If it is said that moral judgments lack truth-value (beyond the claim of



minimalism), then there cannot be relative truth-value in the sense that moralrelativists usually intend (though it might be contended that there is a sense in whichthere could still be justification). As will be seen below, there is a debate about therelationship between MMR and non-cognitivist or expressivist positions.

Most arguments for MMR are based on DMR and the contention that it is implausibleto suppose fundamental moral disagreements can always be resolved rationally. BothHarman (1996) and Wong (1984 and 2006) have stressed this theme, and it will beconsidered in some detail in subsequent sections. However, some argumentsfor MMR have a somewhat different approach, and two of these should be noted here.

First, MMR might be defended as a consequence of the general relativist thesis thatthe truth or justification of all judgments is not absolute or universal, but relative tosome group of persons. For example, this general position might be maintained on theground that each society has its own conceptual scheme and that conceptual schemesare incommensurable with one another. Hence, we can only speak of truth or

justification in relative terms (see entry on Relativism section 4.2 ). This positionmight be thought to have the disadvantage that it can only be put forward as true or

justified relative to some conceptual scheme (the suggestion is usually that thisscheme is our own), and many find it implausible with regard to common sense

judgments and judgments in the natural sciences. However, this is one avenueto MMR. But most proponents of MMR focus on distinctive features of morality andreject general relativism. In fact, they often contrast morality and science with respectto issues of truth and justification. For example, Harman (2000b) and Wong (1996and 2006) both associate moral relativism with naturalism, a position that presupposesthe objectivity of the natural sciences.

Second, a metaethical moral relativist position might be defended by emphasizingaspects of morality other than, or at least in addition to, disagreement. For example,Harman (2000a) has argued that a moral judgment that a person ought to do X (an―inner judgment‖) implies that the person has motivating reasons to do X , and that a

person is likely to have such reasons only if he or she has implicitly entered into anagreement with others about what to do. Hence, moral judgments of this kind are validonly for groups of persons who have made such agreements. An action may be rightrelative to one agreement and wrong relative to another (this combines agent andappraisal relativism insofar as Harman assumes that the person making the judgmentand the person to whom the judgment is addressed are both parties to the agreement).

Harman's relativism is presented as a thesis about logical form, but the relativistimplication arises only because it is supposed that the relevant motivating reasons arenot universal and so probably arose from an agreement that some but not all personshave made. In this sense, moral disagreement is an important feature of the argument.

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But the main focus is on the internalist idea that inner judgments imply motivatingreasons, reasons that are not provided simply by being rational, but require particulardesires or intentions that a person may or may not have. Internalism in this sense is acontroversial view, and many would say that a moral judgment can apply to a personwhether or not that person is motivated to follow it (see the section on psychology andmoral motivation in the entry on moral epistemology ). However, internalism is not astandard feature of most arguments for moral relativism, and in fact some relativistsare critical of internalism (for example, see Wong 2006: ch. 7)

It is worth noting that internalism is one expression of a more general viewpoint thatemphasizes the action-guiding character of moral judgments. Though Harman andothers (for example, Dreier 1990 and 2006) have argued that a form of moralrelativism provides the best explanation of internalism, a more common argument has

been that the action-guiding character of moral judgments is best explained by a non-cognitivist or expressivist account according to which moral judgments lack truth-value (at least beyond the claim of minimalism). In fact, some have claimed that theexpressivist position avoids, and is superior to, moral relativism because it accountsfor the action-guiding character of moral judgments without taking on the problemsthat moral relativism is thought to involve (for instance, see Blackburn 1998: ch. 9and 1999, and Horgan and Timmons 2006). By contrast, others have maintained that

positions such as non-cognitivism and expressivism are committed to a form of moralrelativism (for example, see Bloomfield 2003, Foot 2002b, and Shafer-Landau 2003:ch 1). For a discussion of non-cognitivism and related positions, see the entry onMoral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism.)

Finally, the term ‗moral relativism‘ is sometimes associated with a normative positionconcerning how we ought to think about, or behave towards, persons with whom wemorally disagree. Usually the position is formulated in terms of tolerance. In

particular, it is said that we should not interfere with the actions of persons that are based on moral judgments we reject, when the disagreement is not or cannot berationally resolved. This is thought to apply especially to relationships between oursociety and those societies with which we have significant moral disagreements. Sincetolerance so-understood is a normative thesis about what we morally ought to do, it is

best regarded, not as a form of moral relativism per se , but as a thesis that has often

been thought to be implied by relativist positions such as DMR and MMR. Despite the popularity of this thought, most philosophers believe it is mistaken. The question iswhat philosophical relationship, if any, obtains between moral relativism andtolerance.

The remainder of this entry will discuss DMR, the contention that it is unlikely thatfundamental moral disagreements can be rationally resolved, arguments for and

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challenges to MMR, mixed positions that combine moral relativism and moralobjectivism, and the relationship between moral relativism and tolerance.

3. Descriptive Moral Relativism

Most discussions of moral relativism begin with, and are rooted in, DMR . Though thisis not sufficient to establish MMR, the most common rationales for MMR would beundermined if DMR were incorrect. Moreover, if DMR were generally rejected, it islikely that MMR would have few proponents. Hence, it is important to considerwhether or not DMR is correct. Defenders of DMR usually take it to be well-established by cultural anthropology and other empirically-based disciplines, andmany believe it is obvious to anyone with an elementary understanding of the historyand cultures of the world. Examples of moral practices that appear sharply at oddswith moral outlooks common in the United States are not hard to come by: polygamy,arranged marriages, suicide as a requirement of honor or widowhood, severe

punishments for blasphemy or adultery, female circumcision or genital mutilation (asit is variously called), and so on. At a more general level, Wong (1984) has arguedthat at least two different approaches to morality may be found in the world: a virtue-centered morality that emphasizes the good of the community, and a rights-centeredmorality that stresses the value of individual freedom.

Though it is obvious that there are some moral disagreements, it is another matter tosay that these disagreements are deep and widespread, and that they are much moresignificant than whatever agreements there may be. Philosophers have raised twokinds of objection to this contention: a priori arguments that DMR could not be true,and a posteriori arguments that DMR is probably not true or at least has not beenestablished to be true.

A priori objections maintain that we can know DMR is false on the basis of philosophical considerations, without recourse to empirical evidence. One argument,expressed in general form by Donald Davidson (1984), states that disagreement

presupposes considerable agreement (see Davidson, Donald). According to Davidson,a methodological constraint on the translation of the language of another society isthat we must think they agree with us on most matters. For example, suppose we

believed there were numerous disagreements between us and another society abouttrees. As the disagreements piled up, we reasonably would begin to think we hadmistranslated a word in the language of the other society as ‗tree‘: It is more likelythat (what we take to be) their false beliefs about trees are really beliefs aboutsomething else. By generalization, it follows that there could not be extensivedisagreements about trees between our society and the other one. Of course, therecould be some disagreements. But these disagreements would presuppose substantialagreements in other respects. Davidson (2004a and 2004b) and others (for example,





understood within some fairly significant limits. This is a more empirical point, in linewith the objections in the last paragraph of this section.

Some versions of the a priori approach emphasize the constraints imposed by―thinner‖moral concepts such as goodness, rightness, or morality itself (for example,see Garcia 1988). Once again, a defender of DMR might say that, if these conceptshave enough content to preclude significant disagreement in their application, then itis likely that many societies do not apply them at all — a form of moral disagreementin itself. Another response would be to argue, following R.M. Hare (1981), that aformal analysis, for example in terms of a kind of prescriptivity, is plausible withrespect to some thinner moral concepts, and that this is consistent with significantmoral disagreements. However, the a priori critics question the adequacy of any suchanalysis. Much of this debate concerns the acceptability of formal versus materialdefinitions of morality (see morality, definition of).

The second approach to rejecting DMR focuses on the interpretation of the empiricalevidence that purportedly supports this thesis. Some objections point to obstacles thatface any attempt to understand human cultures empirically. For example, it may besaid that the supposed evidence is incomplete or inaccurate because the observers are

biased. In support of this, it may be claimed that anthropologists often have had preconceptions rooted in disciplinary paradigms or political ideologies that have ledthem to misrepresent or misinterpret the empirical data. Or it may be said that eventhe most objective observers would have difficulty accurately understanding asociety's actual moral values on account of phenomena such as self-deception andweakness of will. These concerns point to substantial issues in the methodology of thesocial sciences. However, even if they were valid, they would only cast doubt onwhether DMR had been established: They would not necessarily give us reason tothink it is false. Of course, this would be an important objection to someone whoclaims DMR is established or relies on DMR to argue for MMR.

Another objection, more directly pertinent to DMR , is that anthropologists have tacitlyand mistakenly assumed that cultures are rather discrete, homogenous, and staticentities — rather like the shapes in a Piet Mondrian painting or a checkerboard. In fact,according to this contention, cultures typically are rather heterogeneous and complexinternally, with many dissenting voices. Moreover, they often interact and sometimesinfluence one another, and they may change over time. From this perspective, theworld of cultures is closer to an animated Jackson Pollock painting than to theunambiguous configuration suggested by the first image. If these contentions werecorrect, then it would be more difficult to know the moral values of different culturesand hence to know whether or not DMR is true. As before, this would not show that itis false (in fact, the point about heterogeneity might point the other way). However,we will see later that these contentions also pose challenges to MMR.



Other critics try to establish that the empirical evidence cited in support of DMR doesnot really show that there are significant moral disagreements, and is consistent withconsiderable moral agreement. A prominent contention is that purported moraldisagreements may result from applying a general moral value (about which there isno disagreement) in different circumstances or in the same circumstances where thereis a factual disagreement about what these circumstances are. Either way, there is noreal moral disagreement in these cases. For example, everyone might agree on theimportance of promoting human welfare (and even on the nature of human welfare).But this may be promoted differently in different, or differently understood,circumstances. Another contention is that moral disagreements may be explained byreligious disagreements: It is only because specific religious assumptions are made(for instance, about the soul) that there are moral disagreements. Once again, theapparent moral disagreement is really a disagreement of a different kind — here, aboutthe nature of the soul. There is no genuine moral disagreement. Of course, these

possibilities would have to be established as the best explanation of the disagreementsin question to constitute an objection to DMR.

Finally, some objections maintain that proponents of DMR fail to recognize that thereis significant empirical evidence for considerable moral agreement across differentsocieties. Several kinds of agreement have been proposed. For example, the role-reversal test implied by the Golden Rule (―Do unto others as you would have them dounto you‖) has been promi nent beyond Western traditions: A version of it is alsoendorsed in The Analects of Confucius, The Way of the Bodhisattva of the IndianBuddhist philosopher Shāntideva, and elsewhere. Another form of this claimmaintains that basic moral prohibitions against lying, stealing, adultery, killing human

beings, etc. are found across many different and otherwise diverse societies. Yetanother contention is that the international human rights movement indicatessubstantial moral agreement. On the basis of evidence of this kind, some such asSissela Bok (1995) and Michael Walzer (1994) have proposed that there is a universalminimal morality, whatever other moral differences there may be. In a similar vein,Hans Küng (1996) and others have maintained that there is a common ―global ethic‖across the world's major religious traditions regarding respect for human life,distributive justice, truthfulness, and the moral equality of men and women. Thesecontentions, which have received increased support in recent years, must be subjected

to the same critical scrutiny as those put forward in support of DMR. However, if theywere correct, they would cast doubt on DMR. In the final analysis, there may besignificant agreements as well as disagreements in people's moral values. If this werethe case, it would complicate the empirical background of the metaethical debate, andit might suggest the need for more nuanced alternatives than the standard positions.

4. Are Moral Disagreements Rationally Resolvable?



Philosophers generally agree that, even if DMR were true without qualification, itwould not directly follow that MMR is true. In particular, if moral disagreementscould be resolved rationally for the most part, then disagreement-based argumentsfor MMR would be undermined, and there would be little incentive to endorse the

position. Such resolvability, at least in principle, is what moral objectivism would leadus to expect. One of the main points of contention between proponents of MMR andtheir objectivist critics concerns the possibility of rationally resolving moraldisagreements. It might be thought that the defender of MMR needs to showconclusively that the moral disagreements identified in DMR cannot be rationallyresolved, or again that the moral objectivist must show conclusively that they can be.

Neither is a reasonable expectation. Indeed, it is unclear what would count asconclusively arguing for either conclusion. The center of the debate concerns what

plausibly may be expected. Adherents of MMR attempt to show why rationalresolution is an unlikely prospect, while their objectivist critics try to show why to alarge extent this is likely, or at least not unlikely.

Moral objectivists can allow that there are special cases in which moral disagreementscannot be rationally resolved, for example on account of vagueness or indeterminacyin the concepts involved. Their main claim is that ordinarily there is a rational basisfor overcoming disagreements (not that people would actually come to agree).Objectivists maintain that, typically, at least one party in a moral disagreement acceptsthe moral judgment on account of some factual or logical mistake, and that revealingsuch mistakes would be sufficient to rationally resolve the disagreement. They suggestthat whatever genuine moral disagreements there are usually can be resolved in thisfashion. In addition, objectivists sometimes offer an analysis of why people makesuch mistakes. For example, people may be influenced by passion, prejudice,ideology, self-interest, and the like. In general, objectivists think, insofar as people setthese influences aside, and are reasonable and well-informed, there is generally a basisfor resolving their moral differences. (They might also say that at least someagreements about moral truths reflect the fact that, with respect to matters pertainingto these truths, people generally have been reasonable and well-informed.)

Proponents of MMR may allow that moral disagreements sometimes are rationallyresolved. In particular, they may grant that this often happens when the parties to a

moral dispute share a moral framework. The characteristic relativist contention is thata common moral framework is often lacking, especially in moral disagreements between one society and another, and that differences in moral frameworks usuallycannot be explained simply by supposing that one society or the other is makingfactual or logical mistakes. These moral disagreements are ultimately rooted infundamentally different moral orientations, and there is usually no reason to thinkthese differences result from the fact that, in relevant respects, one side is less





To this familiar kind of objection, there are two equally familiar responses. One is toconcede the objection and maintain that MMR is true and justified in some metaethicalframeworks, but not others: It is not an objective truth that any reasonable and well-informed person has reason to accept. This may seem to concede a great deal, but forsomeone who is a relativist through and through, or at least is a relativist aboutmetaethical claims, this would be the only option. The other response is to contest theclaim that there is parity of reasoning in the two cases. This would require showingthat the dispute about the irresolvability of moral disagreements (a metaethical debate)can be rationally resolved in a way that fundamental moral disagreements (substantivenormative debates) themselves cannot. For example, the metaethical debate might berationally resolved in favor of the relativist, while the substantive normative debatescannot be resolved.

5. Metaethical Moral Relativism

Even if it were established that there are deep and widespread moral disagreementsthat cannot be rationally resolved, and that these disagreements are more significantthan whatever agreements there may be, it would not immediately follow that MMR iscorrect. Other nonobjectivist conclusions might be drawn. In particular, opponents ofobjectivism might argue for moral skepticism, that we cannot know moral truths, orfor a view that moral judgments lack truth-value (understood to imply a rejection ofrelative truth-value). Hence, proponents of MMR face two very different groups ofcritics: assorted kinds of moral objectivists and various sorts of moral nonobjectivists.The defender of MMR needs to establish that MMR is superior to all these positions,and this would require a comparative assessment of their respective advantages anddisadvantages. It is beyond the scope of this article to consider the alternative

positions (see cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral anti-realism, moralepistemology, moral realism, and skepticism, moral). What can be considered are thechallenges the proponent of MMR faces and what may be said in response to them.

It might be thought that MMR, with respect to truth-value, would have the result that amoral judgment such as ―suicide is morally right‖ (S) could be both true and false— true when valid for one group and false when invalid for another. But this appears to

be an untenable position: Nothing can be both true and false. Of course, some personscould be justified in affirming S and other persons justified in denying it, since thetwo groups could have different evidence. But it is another matter to say S is both trueand false.

The standard relativist response is to say that moral truth is relative in some sense. Onthis view, S is not true or false absolutely speaking, but it may be true-relative-to-

X and false-relative-to- Y (where X and Y refer to different societies or moralframeworks, and their respective standards). This means that suicide is right for



persons in X , but it is not right for persons in Y ; and, the relativist may contend, thereis no inconsistency in this conjunction properly understood.

Once this position is taken, another objection arises. Relativism usually presents itselfas an interpretation of moral disagreements: It is said to be the best explanation ofrationally irresolvable moral disagreements. However, once moral truth is regarded asrelative, the disagreements seem to disappear. For example, someone in X whoaffirms S is saying suicide is right for persons in X , while someone in Y whodenies S is saying suicide is not right for persons in Y . It might well be that they are

both correct and hence that they are not disagreeing with one another (rather as two people in different places might both be correct when one says the sun is shining andthe other says it is not, or as two people in different countries may both be correctwhen one says something is illegal and the other says it is not). The relativistexplanation dissolves the disagreement. But, then, why did it appear as a disagreementin the first place? An objectivist might say this is because people assume that moraltruth is absolute rather than relative. If this were correct, the relativist could notmaintain that MMRcaptures what people already believe. The contention would haveto be that they should believe it, and the argument for relativism would have to beformulated in those terms. For example, the relativist might contend that MMR is themost plausible position to adopt insofar as moral judgments often give practicallyconflicting directives and neither judgment can be shown to be rationally superior tothe other.

A common objection, though probably more so outside philosophy than within it, isthat MMR cannot account for the fact that some practices such as the holocaust inGermany or slavery in the United States are obviously objectively wrong. This pointis usually expressed in a tone of outrage, often with the suggestion that relativists posea threat to civilized society (or something of this sort). Proponents of MMR mightrespond that this simply begs the question, and in one sense they are right. However,this objection might reflect a more sophisticated epistemology, for example, that wehave more reason to accept these objectivist intuitions than we have to accept anyargument put forward in favor of MMR. This would bring us back to the arguments ofthe last section. Another relativist response would be to say that the practices inquestion, though widely accepted, were wrong according to the fundamental standards

of the societies. This would not show that the practices are objectively wrong, but itmight mitigate the force of the critique. However, though this response may be plausible in some cases, it is not obvious that it always would be convincing.

This last response brings out the fact that the proponent of MMR needs an account ofrelative truth. To say that S is true-relative-to- X presumably means more than that the

people in X accept S . For example, we ordinarily suppose that truths can beundiscovered or that people can make mistakes about them. As just noted, a moral



relativist could make sense of this by supposing that a set of fundamental standardsare authoritative for people in X : What is morally true-relative-to- X is whatever thesestandards would actually warrant. By this criterion, there could be moral truths thatare unknown to people in X , or they could be mistaken in thinking something is amoral truth. On this approach, however, an explanation is needed of why somestandards are authoritative for people in a society.

A similar point arises from the fact that it is sometimes thought to be an advantageof MMR that it maintains a substantial notion of intersubjective truth or justification:It avoids the defects of moral objectivism, on the one hand, and of moral skepticismand theories that disregard moral truth-value altogether, on the other hand, because itmaintains that moral judgments do not have truth in an absolute sense, but they dohave truth relative to a society (and similarly for justification). This is thought to be anadvantage because, notwithstanding the supposed difficulties with moral objectivism,morality is widely regarded as ―not merely subjective,‖ and MMR can capture this.However, this purported advantage raises an important question for relativism: Whysuppose moral judgments have truth-value relative to a society as opposed to no truth-value at all? If the relativist claims that a set of fundamental standards is authoritativefor persons in a society, it may be asked why they have this authority. This questionmay arise in quite practical ways. For example, suppose a dissident challenges someof the fundamental standards of his or her society. Is this person necessarily wrong?

Various answers may be given to these questions. For example, it may be said that thestandards that are authoritative in a society are those that reasonable and well-informed members of the society would generally accept. This might seem to providea basis for normative authority. However, if this approach were taken, it may be askedwhy that authority rests only on reasonable and well-informed members of thesociety. Why not a wider group? Why not all reasonable and well-informed persons?

A different response would be to say that the standards that are authoritative for asociety are the ones persons have agreed to follow as a result of some negotiation or

bargaining process (as seen above, Harman has argued that we should understandsome moral judgments in these terms). Once again, this might seem to lend thosestandards some authority. Still, it may be asked whether they really have authority or

perhaps whether they have the right kind. For example, suppose the agreement had been reached in circumstances in which a few members of society held great powerover the others (in the real world, the most likely scenario). Those with less powermight have been prudent to make the agreement, but it is not obvious that such anagreement would create genuine normative authority — a point the dissidentchallenging the standards might well make. Moreover, if all moral values areunderstood in this way, how do we explain the authority of the contention that people





take to be authoritative for both societies. In addition, conflicts between societies aresometimes resolved because one society changes its moral outlook and comes to shareat least some of the moral values of the other society. More generally, sometimes

people in one society think they learn from the moral values of another society: Theycome to believe that the moral values of another society are better in some respectsthan their own (previously accepted) values. The Mondrian image of a world dividedinto distinct societies, each with it own distinctive moral values, makes it difficult toaccount for these considerations. If this image is abandoned as unrealistic, and isreplaced by one that acknowledges greater moral overlap and interaction amongsocieties (recall the Pollock image), then the proponent of MMR needs to give a

plausible account of these dynamics. This is related to the problem of authority raisedearlier: These considerations suggest that people sometimes acknowledge moralauthority that extends beyond their own society, and a relativist needs to show whythis makes sense or why people are mistaken in this acknowledgement.

6. Mixed Positions: A Rapprochement between Relativists and Objectivists?

Discussions of moral relativism often assume (as generally has been assumed here sofar) that moral relativism is the correct account of all moral judgments or of none. Butit is possible that it is the correct account of some moral judgments but not others or,more vaguely, that the best account of morality vis-a-vis these issues wouldacknowledge both relativist and objectivist elements. Such a mixed position might bemotivated by some of the questions already raised. On the empirical level, it might bethought that there are many substantial moral disagreements but also some strikingmoral agreements across different societies. On the metaethical plane, it might besupposed that, though many disagreements are not likely to be rationally resolved,other disagreements may be (and perhaps that the cross-cultural agreements we findhave a rational basis). The first point would lead to a weaker form of DMR (see thesuggestions in the last paragraph of section 3 ). The second point, the more importantone, would imply a modified form of MMR. This approach has attracted somesupport, interestingly, from both sides of the debate: relativists who have embraced anobjective constraint, and (more commonly) objectivists who have allowed somerelativist dimensions. Here are some prominent examples of these mixed metaethicaloutlooks.

David Copp (1995) maintains that it is true that something is morally wrong only if itis wrong in relation to the justified moral code of some society, and a code is justifiedin a society only if the society would be rationally required to select it. Since whichcode it would be rationally required to select depends in part on the non-moral valuesof the society, and since these values differ from one society to another, somethingmay be morally wrong for one society but not for another. Copp calls this position aform of moral relativism. However, he believes this relativism is significantly







mitigated by the fact that which code a society is rationally required to select alsodepends on the basic needs of the society. Copp thinks all societies have the same

basic needs. For example, every society has a need to maintain its population andsystem of cooperation from one generation to the next. Moreover, since meeting these

basic needs is the most fundamental factor in determining the rationality of selecting acode, Copp thinks the content of all justified moral codes will tend to be quite similar.For instance, any such code will require that persons's basic needs for such things as

physical survival, self-respect and friendship be promoted (these are said to benecessary for minimal rational agency). The theory is mixed insofar as the rationalityof selecting a code depends partly on common features of human nature (basic needs)and partly on diverse features of different societies (values). Whether or not justifiedmoral codes (and hence moral truths) would tend to be substantially similar, despitedifferences, as Copp argues, would depend on both the claim that all societies havethe same basic needs and the claim that these needs are much more important thanother values in determining which moral code it is rational for a society to select.

Wong (1996) defended a partly similar position, though one intended to allow forgreater diversity in correct moral codes. He argued that more than one morality may

be true, but there are limits on which moralities are true. The first point is a form ofmetaethical relativism: It says one morality may be true for one society and aconflicting morality may be true for another society. Hence, there is no oneobjectively correct morality for all societies. The second point, however, is aconcession to moral objectivism. It acknowledges that objective factors concerninghuman nature and the human situation should determine whether or not, or to whatextent, a given morality could be one of the true ones. The mere fact that a morality isaccepted by a society does not guarantee that it has normative authority in thatsociety. For example, given our biological and psychological make-up, not justanything could count as a good way of life. Again, given that most persons aresomewhat self-interested and that society requires some measure of cooperation, any

plausible morality will include a value of reciprocity (good in return for good on some proportional basis). Since these objective limitations are quite broad, they areinsufficient in themselves to establish a specific and detailed morality: Many

particular moralities are consistent with them, and the choice among these moralitiesmust be determined by the cultures of different societies.

Wong has developed this approach at length in more recent work (2006). His―pluralistic relativism‖ continues to emphasize that there are universal constraints onwhat could be a true morality. The constraints are based on a naturalisticunderstanding of human nature and the circumstances of human life. For Wong, givena variety of human needs and the depth of self-interest, morality's function is to

promote both social co-operation and individual flourishing. In addition, morality



requires that persons have both effective agency and effective identity, and these canonly be fostered in personal contexts such as the family. Hence, the impersonal

perspective must be limited by the personal perspective. Any true morality wouldhave to respect requirements such as these.

Nonetheless, according to Wong, the universal constraints are sufficiently open-endedthat there is more than one way to respect them. Hence, there can be more than onetrue morality. This is pluralistic relativism. For Wong, the different true moralitiesneed not be, and typically are not, completely different from one another. In fact, theyoften share some values (such as individual rights and social utility), but assign themdifferent priorities.

Wong presents pluralistic relativism as the best explanation of what he calls ―moralambivalence,‖ the phenomenon of morally disagreeing with someone whilerecognizing that the person is still reasonable in making the conflicting judgment — tothe point that one's confidence in being uniquely right is shaken. It might be wonderedif moral ambivalence is sufficiently widespread to play a central role in determiningwhether or not moral relativism is correct. However, this should not detract attentionfrom Wong's sustained and detailed argument that an empirically-based understandingof the nature and conditions of human life both limits and underdetermines what a truemorality could be.

In many respects, Wong's pluralistic relativism is the most sophisticated form ofrelativism developed to date, and it has the resources to confront a number of theissues raised in the last section. But at least one issue remains. On this view, for eachtrue morality, a portion of that morality will be consistent with the universalconstraints, but not required by them. What authority does this portion have? ForWong, since one function of morality is to advance social co-operation, groups ratherthan individuals must determine the particular ways in which a morality will meet theuniversal constraints. But the fact that a group has determined these particulars in oneway rather than another does not seem sufficient to establish that everyone in thegroup has reason to accept its decision. Something needs to be said about theconditions under which the decision was reached. Suppose that some persons withinthe group disagree with the group's decision about these particulars — for example,

persons with a communitarian Confucian heritage who live in an individualisticsociety such as the United States. What reason do these persons have to conform tothe individualistic values of the larger society?

This example raises another question for pluralistic relativism. As Wong recognizes,sometimes people belong to more than one group and the values of these groups mayconflict. More needs to be said about the truth conditions of moral statements of



persons in this situation. The moral authority Wong assigns to groups, in contrast toindividuals, makes this a pressing concern.

A somewhat similar mixed position has been advanced, though more tentatively, byFoot (2002a and 2002b; see also Scanlon 1995 and 1998: ch. 8). She argued that thereare conceptual limitations on what could count as a moral code (as seen in section3 above), and that there are common features of human nature that set limits on what agood life could be. For these reasons, there are some objective moral truths — forexample, that the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews was morally wrong. However,Foot maintained, these considerations do not ensure that all moral disagreements can

be rationally resolved. Hence, in some cases, a moral judgment may be true byreference to the standards of one society and false by reference to the standards ofanother society — but neither true nor false in any absolute sense (just as we might saywith respect to standards of beauty).

Foot came to this mixed view from the direction of objectivism (in the form of avirtue theory), and it might be contended by some objectivists that she has concededtoo much. Since there are objective criteria, what appear as rationally irresolvabledisagreements might be resolvable through greater understanding of human nature. Orthe objective criteria might establish that in some limited cases it is an objective moraltruth that conflicting moral practices are both morally permissible. In view of suchconsiderations, objectivists might argue, it is not necessary to have recourse to theotherwise problematic notion of relative moral truth.

A position related to Foot's has been advanced by Martha Nussbaum (1993). Withexplicit reference to Aristotle, she argued that there is one objectively correctunderstanding of the human good, and that this understanding provides a basis forcriticizing the moral traditions of different societies. The specifics of this account areexplained by a set of experiences or concerns, said to be common to all human beingsand societies, such as fear, bodily appetite, distribution of resources, management of

personal property, etc. Corresponding to each of these is a conception of living well, avirtue, namely the familiar Aristotelian virtues such as courage, moderation, justice,and generosity. Nussbaum acknowledged that there are disagreements about thesevirtues, and she raised an obvious relativist objection herself: Even if the experiencesare universal, does human nature establish that there is one objectively correct way ofliving well with respect to each of these areas? In response, Nussbaum conceded thatsometimes there may be more than one objectively correct conception of these virtuesand that the specification of the conception may depend on the practices of a

particular community.

As with Foot, Nussbaum came to this mixed position from the objectivist side of thedebate. Some moral objectivists may think she has given up too much, and for a









related reason many moral relativists may believe she has established rather little. Forexample, bodily appetites are indeed universal experiences, but there has been a widerange of responses to these — for example, across a spectrum from asceticism tohedonism. This appears to be one of the central areas of moral disagreement. In orderto maintain her objectivist credentials, Nussbaum needs to show that human naturesubstantially constrains which of these responses could be morally appropriate. Someobjectivists may say she has not shown this, but could, while relativists may doubt shecould show it.

Another approach might be construed as a mixed position, though it was not putforward in these terms. Isaiah Berlin (1998) argued that, though some moral valuesare universal, there are also many objective values that conflict and are notcommensurable with one another. He called his position pluralism and rejected thelabel ‗relativism‘. But if incommensurability implies that these conflicts cannot berationally resolved, then it might suggest a concession to relativism.

Against such a position, an objectivist may ask why we should think objective goodsare incommensurable: If X and Y are both objectively good, then why not say that thestatement ‗ X is better than Y ‘ (or a more restrictive comparative statement specifyingrespects or circumstances) is objectively true or false, even if this is difficult to know?Berlin's view was that there are many examples of conflicting goods — for example,

justice and mercy, or liberty and equality — where it is implausible to suppose they arecommensurable.

Finally, it should also be noted that a rather different kind of mixed position was proposed by Bernard Williams (1981 and 1985: ch. 9). He rejected what he called―strict relational relativism,‖ that ethical conceptions have validity only relative to asociety. But he endorsed another form of relativism. This was explained by referenceto a distinction between a ―notional confrontation,‖ where a divergent outlook isknown but not a real option for us, and a ―real confrontation,‖ where a divergentoutlook is a real option for us — something we might embrace without losing our gripon reality. Williams's ―relativism of distance‖ says ethical appraisals are appropriatein real confrontations, but not in notional ones. For example, we could never embracethe outlook of a medieval samurai: Since this is a notional confrontation, it would beinappropriate to describe this outlook as just or unjust. This is the sense in whichrelativism is correct. But in real confrontations, relativism unhelpfully discourages theevaluation of another outlook that is a genuine option for us.

Williams was a strong critic of most forms of moral objectivism, yet he also criticizedmany of the nonobjectivist alternatives to objectivism. His outlook is not easilyclassified in terms of standard metaethical positions. With respect to his relativism ofdistance, it may be wondered why appraisals are inappropriate in notional



confrontations: Why should the fact that an outlook is not a real option preclude usfrom thinking it is just or unjust? On the other hand, in real confrontations Williamsthought the language of appraisal was appropriate, but he also thought theseconfrontations could involve rationally irresolvable disagreements. Though Williamsrejects strict relational relativism, objectivists may argue that his position suffers fromdefects as serious as those that attend MMR. If the confrontations are real because thetwo outlooks have something in common, objectivists might ask, could this not

provide a basis for resolving these disagreements?

The central theme in mixed positions is that neither relativism nor objectivism iswholly correct: At least in the terms in which they are often expressed, thesealternatives are subject to serious objections, and yet they are motivated by genuineconcerns. It might seem that a mixed position could be developed that would give usthe best of both worlds (there are a number of other proposals along these lines; forexample see Hampshire 1983 and 1989). However, an implication of most mixed

positions (this does not apply to Williams) seems to be that, in some respect, somemoral judgments are objectively true (or justified), while others have only relativetruth (or justification). This should not be confused with the claim that an action may

be right in some circumstances but not others. For example, a consequentialist viewthat polygamy is right in one society and wrong in another because it has goodconsequences in the first society and bad consequences in the second would not be amixed p osition because the judgments ―Polygamy is right in circumstances A‖ and―Polygamy is wrong in circumstances B‖ could both be true in an absolute sense. Bycontrast, a mixed position might say that ―Polygamy is right‖ is true relative to onesociety and false relative to another (where the two societies differ, not necessarily incircumstances, but in fundamental values), while other moral judgments have absolutetruth-value. This is a rather disunified conception of morality, and it invites manyquestions. A proponent of a mixed view would have to show that it is an accurate

portrayal of our moral practices, or that it is a plausible proposal for reforming them.

7. Relativism and Tolerance

Relativism is sometimes associated with a normative position, usually pertaining tohow people ought to regard or behave towards those with whom they morallydisagree. The most prominent normative position in this connection concernstolerance. In recent years, the idea that we should be tolerant has been increasinglyaccepted in some circles. At the same time, others have challenged this idea, and the

philosophical understanding and justification of tolerance has become less obvious.The question here is whether moral relativism has something to contribute to thesediscussions, in particular, whether DMR or MMR provide support for tolerance. In thiscontext, tolerance does not ordinarily mean indifference or absence of disapproval: Itmeans having a policy of not interfering with the actions of persons that are based on



moral judgments we reject, when the disagreement is not or cannot be rationallyresolved. The context of discussion is often, but not always, moral disagreements

between two societies. Does moral relativism give us a reason to be tolerant in thissense?

Though many people seem to think it does, philosophers generally think they aremistaken. DMR may provide the occasion for tolerance, but it could not imply thattolerance is morally obligatory or even permissible. DMR simply tells us there aremoral disagreements. Recognition of this fact, by itself, entails nothing about how weshould act towards those with whom we disagree. MMR fares no better. For onething, MMR cannot very well imply that it is an objective moral truth that we should

be tolerant: MMR denies that there are such truths. (A mixed position could contendthat tolerance is the only objective moral truth, all others being relative; but it wouldhave to be shown that this is more than an ad hoc maneuver.) It might be saidthat MMR implies that tolerance is a relative truth. However, even this is problematic.According to MMR, understood to concern truth, the truth-value of statements mayvary from society to society. Hence, the statement, ―people ought to be tolerant‖ ( T ),may be true in some societies and false in others. MMR by itself does not entailthat T is true in any society, and may in fact have the result that T is false in somesocieties (a similar point may be made with respect to justification).

Some objectivists may add that in some cases we should be tolerant of those withwhom we morally disagree, but that only objectivists can establish this as an objectivemoral truth (for example, by drawing on arguments in the liberal tradition from Lockeor Mill). To the objection that moral objectivism implies intolerance (or imperialism),objectivists typically contend that the fact that we regard a society as morally wrongin some respect does not entail that we should interfere with it.

Nonetheless, the thought persists among some relativists that there is a philosophicallysignificant connection between relativism and tolerance. Perhaps the conjunctionof MMR and an ethical principle could give us a reason for tolerance we would nothave on the basis of the ethical principle alone. Such an approach has been proposed

by Wong (1984: ch. 12). The principle is, roughly speaking, that we should notinterfere with people unless we could justify this interference to them (if they wererational and well-informed in relevant respects). Wong called t his ―the justification

principle.‖ Of course, it is already a tolerance principle of sorts. The idea is that itgains broader scope if MMR is correct. Let us suppose the statement that there is anindividual right to freedom of speech is true and justified for our society, but is falseand unjustified in another society in which the press is restricted for the good of thecommunity. In this case, given MMR, our society might not be able to justifyinterference to the restrictive society concerning freedom of the press. Any

justification we could give would appeal to values that are authoritative for us, not





Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-CognitivismFirst published Fri Jan 23, 2004; substantive revision Sun Jun 7, 2009

Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential

variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral propertiesor moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false,noncognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating

properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense.Roughly put, noncognitivists think that moral statements have no truth conditions.Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people utter moral sentences theyare not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive inthe way that beliefs are. Rather they are expressing non-cognitive attitudes moresimilar to desires, approval or disapproval.

Cognitivism is the denial of non-cognitivism. Thus it holds that moral statements doexpress beliefs and that they are apt for truth and falsity. But cognitivism need not bea species of realism since a cognitivist can be an error theorist and think all moralstatements false. Still, moral realists are cognitivists insofar as they think moralstatements are apt for truth and falsity and that many of them are in fact true.

1. A More Detailed General Description o 1.1 Two Negative Constitutive Non-cognitivist Claims o 1.2 Cognitivism o 1.3 Contrast with Cognitivist Subjectivism

2. Principal Varieties in More Detail o 2.1 Emotivism o 2.2 Prescriptivism o 2.3 Quasi-realism o 2.4 Norm-expressivism o 2.5 Borderline cases

3. Motivations for Non-cognitivism o 3.1 The Open Question Argument o 3.2 Naturalism o 3.3 Motivational internalism and the action-guiding character of moral

judgments o 3.4 Supervenience

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#DetGenDes


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#TwoNegConNonCla


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Cog


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#ConCogSub


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#PriVarDet


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Emo


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Pre


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Qua


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Nor


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#BorCas


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#MotNon


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#OpeQueArg


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Nat


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#MotIntActChaMorJud





http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Sup




















4. Problems, Objections and Response Strategies o 4.1 The Embedding Problem o 4.2 The Wishful Thinking Objection o 4.3 Non-cognitivism and Relativism o 4.4 Capturing The Varieties of Normative Ethical Theories Within A Non-

cognitivist Metaethic 5. Can The Cognitivist/Non-cognitivist Distinction Be Sustained?

o 5.1 Sophisticated Non-cognitivism vs. Sophisticated CognitivistRelativism

o 5.2 Minimalism as Undermining Non-cognitivism o 5.3 Non-cognitivist Overreaching and Possible Collapse

6. Conclusion Bibliography Other Internet Resources Related Entries

1. A More Detailed General Description

1.1 Two Negative Constitutive Non-cognitivist Claims

Two negative theses comprise the central common non-cognitivist claims, althoughoften current theories only endorse them in qualified form. One thesis might becalled semantic nonfactualism . Simply put this thesis denies that predicative moralsentences express propositions or have truth conditions. Thus semantic nonfactualismsuggests that their contents are not apt for truth or falsity. Moral predicates do notdenote or express properties and predicative moral sentences do not therefore

predicate properties of their subjects. The second negative thesis can becalled psychological non-cognitivism . This thesis denies that the states of mindconventionally expressed by moral utterances are beliefs or mental states which fallon the cognitive side of the cognitive/non-cognitive divide. Typically non-cognitivistsaccept both negative theses, though there are views which accept one and not theother.

Some non-cognitivists have accepted these theses in their strongest form — moralsentences in no way predicate properties, are apt for truth or falsity, or express beliefs.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#ProObjResStr


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#EmbPro


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#WisThiObj


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#NonRel


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#CapVarNorEthTheWitNonMet





http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#CogDisSus


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#SopNonVsSopCogRel





http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#MinUndNon


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#NonOvePosCol


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Con


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Bib


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Oth


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Rel



















But most current non-cognitivists accept these negative claims only in a somewhatweakened form. For example many non-cognitivists hold that moral

judgments' primary function is not to express beliefs, though they may express themin a secondary way. Others deny that their contents are true or false in

any robust sense but not that they can be true or false in a deflationary sense accordingto which there is no substantial property separating true and false sentences.

Non-cognitivists deny neither that moral sentences are meaningful nor that they aregenerally used by speakers in meaningful ways. Thus different sorts of non-cognitivistcouple their negative theses with various positive claims about the meanings of moralsentences and about the states of mind that they express. It is the diversity of positive

proposals that generates the different varieties of non-cognitivism. Emotivists suggestthat moral sentences express or evoke non-cognitive attitudes towards various objectswithout asserting that the speaker has those attitudes. Norm-expressivists suggest(roughly) that the states of mind expressed by moral sentences are attitudes ofacceptance of various norms or rules governing conduct and emotion, perhaps coupledwith a judgment that the objects or action under discussion comports with thosenorms. Prescriptivists suggest that these sentences are a species of prescription orcommand, and may or may not offer an account of the state of mind such judgmentsexpress.

While non-cognitivism was first developed as a theory about moral judgments (Ogden& Richards 1923, 125. Barnes 1933.) many of the arguments for the position applyequally well to other sorts of evaluative language. Thus most non-cognitivists todayextend the treatment to normative or evaluative judgments generally, and thediscussion below will often speak of normative or evaluative judgments and terms — a category which includes as paradigms moral judgments, judgments of rationality,and judgments of value.

1.2 Cognitivism

Cognitivism is perhaps best defined as the denial of non-cognitivism. Cognitiviststhink that moral sentences are apt for truth or falsity, and that the state of mind ofaccepting a moral judgment is typically one of belief or at least that the terms are aptfor expressing beliefs in the same sense that other ordinary descriptive terms are soapt. (There is some reason to be careful here since cognitivists may not need to



employ the sense of ‗express‘ that expressivists need to get their theory off theground. See Schroeder 2008a.) Different species of cognitivist disagree about thecontents of moral sentences and beliefs, about their truth conditions, and about theirtruth. To discuss all the varieties would require a complete taxonomy of possible

metaethical positions. What they have in common, however, is that they all deny thatan adequate account of moral judgments can be given consistent with the two negativenon-cognitivist theses.

1.3 Contrast with Cognitivist Subjectivism

It is useful to contrast non-cognitivism with one particular variety of cognitivism inorder to more clearly present what the non-cognitivist is claiming. Various versions ofcognitivist subjectivism equate moral properties such as rightness with the property of

being approved of by some person or group. To be right is to be approved of by thespeaker, or the speaker and her friends, or the members of the speaker's society, oreverybody. On many such views, when a speaker says something is right she is in factsaying that she approves, or that she and those like her approve. In one very goodsense she would then have expressed her approval — she said that she approved orthat she and her friends did. And, if approval is a conative rather than a cognitiveattitude, we might say that she expressed a non-cognitive attitude. But this by itself isnot sufficient to make the position non-cognitivist. This variety of subjectivism agrees

with one of the positive non-cognitivist theses (that moral utterances conventionallyexpress non-cognitive attitudes), but it does not agree with either of the essentialnegative non-cognitivist claims (that the judgments don't express beliefs and/or thatthey are not truth-apt). According to this subjectivist theory, the moral utteranceexpressed the speaker's belief that she approves of the action and this has truthconditions which are also the truth conditions of the sentence uttered. When a non-cognitivist says that a sentence conventionally expresses an attitude, she means tocontrast the mode of expression with saying that one has the attitude. A simpleexample gets the idea across. One can express dislike of something by saying that onedislikes it. This is the way that a cognitivist subjectivist thinks we express moralattitudes. But one can also express dislike of something by booing or hissing. This ismuch like the way some non-cognitivists think we express moral attitudes. The latterway of expressing an attitude is different from the way cognitivist subjectivists thinkwe express moral attitudes because it expresses the attitude without saying that wehave the attitude (Barnes 1933; Carnap 1937, 28 – 29.)



2. Principal Varieties in More Detail

The principal varieties of non-cognitivism can be distinguished by focusing on the positive claims they make in explicating the semantic function of moral expressions

and the nature of the mental states typically expressed by those who utter them insimple predicative statements.

2.1 Emotivism

Emotivists think moral terms in grammatically assertive utterances function primarilyto express emotion and perhaps also to elicit similar emotions in others (Barnes 1933;Ayer 1952, Chapter 6.; Stevenson 1946). They can be read as suggesting that the rightway to explain the meanings of such terms is to point out that they are conventional

devices for performing a certain sort of speech act, one which if sincere requires thatthe speaker have a certain attitude. Sentences employing general predicates of positivemoral evaluation such as ‗right‘, ‗good‘, ‗virtuous‘, and so on s ignal a non-cognitive

pro-attitude such as approval or preference. Sentences employing general predicatesof negative evaluation such as ‗wrong‘, ‗bad‘, and ‗vicious‘ signal negative non -cognitive attitudes. Thus to call a person virtuous is to express an attitude of approvaland the speech act of doing so is analogous to the speech act performed when wecheer for that person. The account can be extended beyond general moral terms.Simple predicative utterances employing the so-called thick moral terms such as‗brave‘ and ‗honest‘ can then be thought of as performing this same speech act whileat the same time predicating the natural property (say fearlessness in the case of

bravery) which common usage of the term seems to track. Thus thick moral terms canthe thought of as having both descriptive and emotive meaning.

Some theorists who view themselves as emotivists suggest that even the most generalterms of moral evaluation have a descriptive meaning rather than just an emotive ornon-cognitive meaning. (Stevenson 1944, 22; Hare 1952, suggests the same sort of

idea within a prescriptivist theory at 118.) One such approach analyzes judgmentsapplying a moral predicate to a particular object or action as expressing approval ordisapproval of some property while at the same time predicating that property of theobject or item in question (Barker 2000, Ridge 2006). According to these theorists, asentence such as ―Lying is wrong‖ both predicates a property of the act type lying andexpresses the speaker's disapproval of that property.



While this two component approach may have advantages when dealing with the roleof moral terms in inferences and arguments (see discussion of the embedding problem

below), it may be open to the objection that the view is no longer a version of non-cognitivism. Accounts of this sort do not deny that moral judgments predicate

properties — in fact they are committed to the claim that they do. And speakers willmake these predications only when they believe that they are true, so that it seems thatmoral judgments will express beliefs.

Non-cognitivist proponents of the two component theories insist that the theoriescount as non-cognitivist because emotive meaning is in some sense primary or prior tothe descriptive component. One way they can do this is by suggesting that the

predicated property is determined by the moral attitudes of the speaker (Hare 1952,118). To go back to our example, the property predicated by ―Lying is wrong,‖ could

be the most general property toward which the speaker has an attitude of moraldisapproval. Different speakers would thus be predicating different properties oflying, and which property this would be in a particular case would be a function of theemotive attitudes of the speaker. Whether this is sufficient to count such theories asemotivist or non-cognitivist is open to dispute, but many proponents of such views docall themselves non-cognitivists and emotivists. And these more complicated viewsare often adopted by theorists who begin from simpler theories which are paradigmcases of non-cognitivism.

2.2 Prescriptivism

Prescriptivists suggest that moral judgments are a species of prescriptive utterance andthat prescriptions are distinct from assertions, even when they have the grammaticalform of assertions. Early prescriptivists thought that this had radical implications formoral reasoning and argument. Carnap suggested that moral judgments are equivalentto relatively simple imperatives. The statement ‗Killing is evil‘ means the same thingas ‗Do not kill.‘ On that basis he claimed that there could be no moral knowledge or

error. (Carnap 1937; 23 – 24 & 29)

By contrast current versions of prescriptivism, most developed in the works of R. M.Hare, have attempted to vindicate moral thinking as a rational enterprise. The mainidea here is that while moral sentences do in fact express a species of imperative or

prescription, they express prescriptions of a special universal sort. And it is largely



because they are prescriptions of this sort that they are subject to various consistencyconstraints, so that accepting one moral judgment carries with it a requirement thatone accept other judgments in some respects like it. While Hare denies that moral

judgments are exactly equivalent to imperatives expressible in any other form of

words, he does tell us a lot about what they mean. Moral imperatives are universal in anumber of ways. They are to apply not just to the agent about whom they are made (ifthey are made with respect to a particular agent) but also to any agent who is similarlysituated. And they apply to any action or object which is relevantly similar to theactions or objects about which the judgment is made. They apply to all relevantlysimilar cases at any time and any place. Thus, very roughly, when one calls an actionright one is not only prescribing the action in question, but also any relevantly similaraction wherever and whenever it occurs. And the prescription is addressed not only to

the agent whose action is up for assessment but also to every other person, includingthe speaker and listeners. In this way, Hare believes, calling an action wrong commitsthe speaker to judging wrong any relevantly similar action done at any time and any

place by any person.

With ordinary prescriptions, it isn't obvious that there is a state of mind that someonemust be in if they utter or obey a command and which we ought to characterize asaccepting an imperative. Hare, himself at one point argues that there is no substantiveway of characterizing the attitude a person must have if she expresses or accepts a

prescription or moral judgment (Hare 1952, 9 – 11). Even so, prescriptivists have somereason for wanting to offer an account of accepting a moral judgment if they want toexplain moral practice. Ordinarily we attribute moral judgments to people, even

people who are silent. So the prescriptivist will want to say something about our basisfor these attributions. An account of the attitude that constitutes accepting a moral

judgment will allow them to ground such attributions. One suggestion is that theattitude of accepting a moral judgment involves an intention to do what the judgmentsrecommend. Sincerely accepting a command directed at oneself involves doing it ifone is in circumstances where it applies and one is able and otherwise intending to doit should one find oneself in those circumstances (Hare 1952, 20). Since moralcommands are universal according to the theory, they will be directed at everyone.Thus anyone who sincerely accepts a moral judgment will be disposed to do what they

believe right in circumstances where they can. Less sincere judgments may lack thisconnection (Hare 1952, 169). The matter is relevant to some of the arguments overinternalism that we will consider below.



2.3 Quasi-realism

Since non-cognitivism is a species of irrealism about ethics, it should be unsurprisingthat many of its main motivations overlap with those for other versions of ethical

irrealism, especially with those for error theories. Early non-cognitivists seem mostconcerned to defend metaphysical and epistemic commitments incompatible with arealist interpretation of moral claims. For example, moral judgments seem to beempirically under-determined (Ayer 1952, 106; Mackie 1977, 39). Hence they failtests for meaningful discourse proposed by logical positivists. If moral language ismeaningful, it would be a counter-example to the view. Thus early versions of non-cognitivism were proposed by these theorists, not so much because they wereinterested in moral philosophy but rather to render innocuous a seeming counter-example to their own theories (Carnap 1937, 24-27; Ayer 1952, 107 – 109).

More contemporary non-cognitivists have also been motivated by similar underlyingmetaphysical and epistemic commitments. But they have been as concerned withvindicating the legitimacy of moral practice and argument as with anything else. As aresult, they have put more time and energy into explaining, and in a certain sense

justifying, the realist-seeming features of moral discourse in the absence of acommitment to realism (Hare 1952; Blackburn 1984, 1998; Gibbard 1990).

‗Quasi-Realism‘ is Simon Blackburn's name for this sort of non -cognitivism, andespecially his own version of expressivism. Yet other sophisticated non-cognitivists,notably Allan Gibbard, have been happy to work under the quasi-realist banner(Gibbard 2003, 18 – 19). What especially distinguishes the quasi-realist project is anemphasis on explaining why we are entitled to act as if moral judgments are genuinelytruth-apt even while strictly speaking they remain neither true nor false. Thus it is acommitment of a quasi-realist that normative judgments are in an important waydifferent from most (other) paradigm descriptive judgments — enough so to render

problematic their status as either true or false — and yet that a justification is

nonetheless available for our practices of treating them as if they were in fact true orfalse. What exactly this comes to is hard to say without discussing some of the special

problems for non-cognitivism in general, since it is precisely in offering solutions tothose problems that the quasi-realist carries out his program. Thus we will revisit the

position later on in the context of these problems.



2.4 Norm-expressivism

Allan Gibbard (1990) has proposed an analysis of judgments regarding rationalityaccording to which they express non-cognitive attitudes towards rules or norms. From

there he proceeds to reduce other normative judgments into various more particularkinds of judgments of rationality, so that all moral judgments are covered by the

proposed analysis. Gibbard suggests that normative judgments express the acceptanceof systems of norms — rules dividing actions under naturalistic descriptions into thosewhich are forbidden, permitted and required. To call an action rational is, to a firstapproximation, to express one's acceptance of a system of norms which allows it. Tocall an action irrational is to express one's acceptance of a system of norms whichforbids it. And so on (Gibbard 1990, 46). This is only Gibbard's idea to a firstapproximation, since a speaker may not have a determinate system of norms in mindwhen he or she makes such a judgment. So Gibbard suggests we would do better tothink of judgments to the effect that an action would be irrational as expressingrejection of any set of norms which does not forbid it. More precisely, a normative

judgment predicating a normative term of a particular action rules out combinations ofdescriptive judgments concerning the action with norms that either permit, forbid, orrequire (as appropriate) actions falling under those descriptions. More complex

judgments are captured using sets of norm- world pairs which the judgments ―rule out‖representing those states of mind inconsistent with the judgments in question. The

basic idea is that a judgment that action A is permissible is incompatible with a pairthe first member of which represents A as a lie, and the second member of which is anorm that rules out lying. And it is inconsistent with many more such combinations

besides. Given this, we can capture the content of the judgment that action A is permissible by specifying the set of world-norm pairs with which it is incompatible.(A more detailed exposition of Gibbard's technical apparatus can be found within thediscussion of the Embedding Problem below.)

Gibbard develops his analysis to cover moral judgments by analyzing such judgmentsin terms of judgments of rationality. An action is wrong if and only if it fails to meetstandards of action the intentional or negligent violation of which in a normal state ofmind would be sufficient for finding the agent prima facie blameworthy. And anaction is blameworthy if it would be rational for the agent to feel guilty and for othersto resent the agent for doing the action (Gibbard 1990, 45). Since the rationality of



guilt or resentment receives a non-cognitive analysis, the approach generates a non-cognitive analysis of moral judgments themselves.

Gibbard's more recent work (Gibbard 2003) retains many of the main features of his

norm-expressivist theory but it revises to some extent the account of the non-cognitiveattitudes involved in accepting a normative judgment. On the current view, such

judgments express the acceptance of plans, or perhaps better they express a state ofmind that we might think of as planning to act in this way or that depending on thenaturalistic circumstances one finds oneself in. More complex judgments embeddingnormative terms express combinations of such attitudes with further attitudes,including ordinary beliefs. Whereas in the earlier work Gibbard used sets of world-norm pairs to formally capture the contents of judgments, in the later work he relieson what he calls ―fact - prac worlds‖. Formally they mostly fu nction in the same waysas the world-norm pairs did in the earlier theory. But in the fact-prac worlds apparatuscontingency plans take the place of norms as members of the pairs. Once again, a

judgment that action A is permissible will be inconsistent with some combinations offactual beliefs with plans. Each of these combinations can be captured by a factualcomponent representing how the world is factually together with a componentrepresenting a plan. For example the judgment that action A is permissible will beincompatible with any pair the fact-representing member of which representsaction A as a lie, paired with a plan that rules out lying. And just as a similar idea

allowed Gibbard to use sets of norm-world pairs to capture the content of normative judgments, he now can capture the content of a normative judgment by specifying theset of fact-prac worlds with which it is incompatible. When the apparatus is fullydeveloped, the fact representing members of the pairs can once again be thought of as

possible worlds insofar as they specify every detail of the world, and the plans arehyper-plans insofar as they have an answer for what to do in every circumstance.Gibbard often calls these fully determinate fact- prac worlds ―fact - plan worlds‖. Theresulti ng theory might now be called ‗plan -expressivism‘ rather than ‗norm -expressivism‘ though most of its important structural features are very similar to thoseof his earlier view.

Further developments come in the form of Gibbard's arguments for the theory:Gibbard suggests that people need to plan and need ways to think about and represent

plans, and he argues that a language which might naturally develop in order to do thisand which therefore expressed acceptance of such plans would wind up looking very



much like our actual moral discourse. And he uses the fact-prac world apparatus toargue that supervenience of the moral on the non-moral falls naturally out of theresulting story. (Gibbard 2003).

2.5 Borderline cases

Often philosophical positions are introduced in rather pure and stark versions, only to be modified in light of arguments and objections so as to become more like competingtheories over time. It should not be too surprising that this is the case in metaethicsand that present day non-cognitivist theories are less distinguishable from cognitivistalternatives than earlier versions. It can even be a controversial matter whethertheories developed within the non-cognitivist tradition but modified to handleobjections still deserve the label. The varieties of emotivism which postulate both

descriptive meaning and emotive meaning have sometimes aroused such suspicions.Furthermore, while non-cognitivists accept each of the two negative theses outlinedabove, there are views which accept only one of the two without the other. These

positions constitute two metaethical theories which we might think of as borderlinecases lying just outside the non-cognitivist region of logical space.

Fictionalists are not semantic non-factualists. Moral sentences are regarded asgenuinely truth-apt. Such sentences do have truth conditions and an assertive sentenceusing a moral predicate does predicate a property. Yet, in normal use, these sentencesare not strictly speaking true. Thus far the fictionalist agrees with error theorists. Butwhile error theorists think that the falsity of moral sentences implies that ordinarymoral talk is massively in error, fictionalists disagree. According to the fictionalist aspeaker uttering a false moral sentence is typically not expressing a belief in thecontent expressed by the sentence. Rather such speakers are using it fictively, and thisuse involves no error. Thus, fictionalists are psychological non-cognitivists. Acceptinga moral judgment is not believing the judgment true and the state of mindconventionally expressed by an assertive sentence using moral terms is also not belief

in the content of that judgment. Just like standard versions of non-cognitivism,fictionalists will generally offer a story about what non-cognitive states of mind theydo conventionally express. For example, they may suggest that the state of mind is anintention to act as if the moral judgment expressing the intention is true. The rejectionof semantic nonfactualism leads most taxonomists to omit fictionalism from the non-



cognitivist genus, but some fictionalists have presented their views as descendants ofnon-cognitivism (MacIntyre 1981, 15 – 18; Kalderon 2005).

In contrast, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have propounded a view which they

call Nondescriptivist Cognitivism. As the label suggests, they do not regard their viewas a species of non-cognitivism, but like fictionalism the view does accept one of non-cognitivism's two constitutive negative theses while rejecting the other. However,with respect to each thesis Horgan and Timmons's choices contrast with those made

by fictionalism. Nondescriptivist cognitivism spurns psychological non-cognitivism, but embraces semantic nonfactualism, at least insofar as it rejects the claim that moralsentences describe the world or predicate genuine properties. (Horgan & Timmons2000; Timmons 1999.) The precise content of the view is difficult to pin down. (Itholds that moral judgments express beliefs that do not represent the world as beingone way rather than another, yet it is arguably constitutive of beliefs that theyrepresent.) It is nevertheless worth noting the view since, together with fictionalism itillustrates that there are positions which accept only one of the two negative thesesconstitutive of non-cognitivism. If the views are coherent this would suggest the twonegative theses are logically independent.

3. Motivations for Non-cognitivism

Non-cognitivism is motivated by a number of considerations, most rooted inmetaphysics, the philosophy of mind or epistemology.

3.1 The Open Question Argument

At the beginning of the 20th Century, G. E. Moore's open question argumentconvinced many philosophers that moral statements were not equivalent to statementsmade using non-moral or descriptive terms. For any non-moral description of anaction or object it seemed that competent speakers could without confusion doubt thatthe action or object was appropriately characterized using a moral term such as ‗good‘or ‗right‘. The question of whether the action or object so described was good or rightwas always open, even to competent speakers. Furthermore, in the absence of anysystematic theory to explain the possibility of synthetic as opposed to analytic identityclaims, many were convinced that this showed that moral properties could not beidentified with any natural (or supernatural) properties. Thus Moore and others





‗ought‘ from an ‗is‘ (Hume 1888, 469). According to Hume's Law, no set of premisesconsisting entirely of non-moral descriptive statements is sufficient to entail a moralor normative conclusion. The non-cognitivist is in a position to explain this, insofar asher positive proposal for the functioning of moral terms will suggest they do more

than merely describe the world. She will say that moral terms essentially express a positive attitude, or function to commend. Purely descriptive terms do not. Nothingcan be the conclusion of a valid argument which is not already implicit in the

premises. Thus descriptive claims cannot entail the extra expressive or imperativalcomponent that according to the non-cognitivist is part of the meaning of moral terms(Hare 1952, 32 – 49).

There are of course many ways to resist these arguments. Perhaps moral expressionsare analytically equivalent to naturalistic expressions, but these analyticities arethemselves not obvious even to competent speakers (Lewis 1989, 129). This may be

because no analyticities are obvious, or it may be because moral analyses in particularare especially complex. One moral that could be drawn from the history of TwentiethCentury analytic philosophy is that if there are any analyticities, competent speakerscan question them. This is the paradox of analysis. If any definition can be questioned

by a competent speaker, and we think there are at least some definitions sufficient tounderwrite analytic truths, then the mere fact that a speaker can doubt a candidateanalysis may not tell against that analysis. An equivalence could be analytic because

competent speakers tacitly respect them, for the most part acting as if they are true(Lewis 1989, 130). It has been suggested that moral concepts are role conceptsanalogous to the concepts of various mental states as conceived by functionalists(Jackson and Pettit 1995). If so we should expect them to be quite complex. And theircomplexity might make it hard to recognize the adequacy of an analysis, even forspeakers who tacitly respect the equivalence so defined.

Relatedly, some theorists have wanted to resist Hume's Law, arguing that one can infact validly draw normative or moral conclusions from purely descriptive premises(Foot 1958 – 9; Searle 1964). It is actually quite difficult to find an adequateformulation that is immune to counter-example, although many theorists suspect thereis nonetheless something right about Hume's claim (Humberstone 1996).

There may be a problem for those more sophisticated forms of non-cognitivismaccording to which moral terms have both descriptive and prescriptive or expressive





sense non-cognitivists are naturalists. They offer a reduction of the attitude ofaccepting a moral judgment to a perfectly naturalistic sort of attitude such as theattitude of approval or disapproval. And they do not postulate any properties whichcannot be reduced to natural properties. Thus another motivation for accepting non-

cognitivism has been naturalism. If someone doubts the prospects for reducing moral properties to natural properties (perhaps under the influence of the open questionargument), they need not concede that there are any extra-natural or supernatural

properties. One can simply reinterpret even the moral judgments one accepts as predicating no properties at all. Or, as with the more sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism, one can allow them to predicate natural properties and argue that theappearance that they do something other than this is due to the additional expressivecomponent in their meaning. One's naturalism will then not commit one to giving up

moral judgments or reducing moral properties to natural properties (Ayer 1952, 106 – 7).

3.3 Motivational internalism and the action-guiding character of moral judgments

Many non-cognitivists have argued for their theories based on motivational internalist premises. Motivational internalists believe that there is some sort of conceptual ornecessary connection between moral judgments on the one hand and motivations toact on the other. (Hare 1952, 20; Brink 1989, 37ff.; Smith 1994, 60ff.) The nature of

the connection is a matter of some dispute and theorists have suggested and refuted avariety of candidates (Darwall 1997). Non-cognitivists have often supported theirtheory by arguing from versions of judgment internalism, which postulate a necessaryconnection between accepting a moral judgment on the one hand and being motivatedto act on it on the other. This sort of internalism is controversial, so that leading non-cognitivists have had both to defend judgment internalism and to argue that theirfavored theory should be accepted as the best explanation of the sort of internalismthey attempt to vindicate.

You can find defenses of various versions of judgment internalism which supportsomewhat different but still necessary connections between accepting or uttering amoral judgment on the one hand and being motivated on the other. One version makesthe connection very tight — if one accepts a judgment one is motivated to do what itsays we ought to do. Others are looser, requiring motivation only in rational persons(Korsgaard 1986; Smith 1994, 61) or perhaps in normal members of a community



(Dreier 1990; Horgan & Timmons 1992; 164 – 5). Depending on which version atheorist defends, different versions of non-cognitivism can explain the necessity of theconnection, although not all versions can be easily explained using non-cognitivistresources. The tightest connection which requires motivation in anyone who accepts

the judgment that some action is right is rather well explained by a very simpleversion of emotivism on which a judgment that some action is right conventionallyexpresses one's approval of that action. One can only sincerely use that expressionwhen one has the attitude just as one can only sincerely cheer for some team or personif one has a positive attitude towards them. Sincere utterance requires motivation,that's part and parcel of this sort of emotivist theory.

On the other hand, this easy explanation of the strong internalist thesis has liabilities.Such strong internalism may be too strong to be credible insofar as it rules outamoralists — those who accept moral judgments without being at all motivated to dowhat they recommend. Such people may be possible and even actual (Brink 1989, 46).If so, simple emotivism of the sort described is refuted because the sincerityconditions for making the judgment require the motivation not present in theamoralist. Examples such as the amoralist have led internalists to posit moremoderate, defeasible, but still necessary connections between moral judgments andmotivation (Korsgaard 1986; Dreier 1990; Smith 1994). More complex versions ofnon-cognitivism can make the connection with actual motivation looser and thereby

withstand the amoralist challenge. But not every more moderate internalist principlewill be easily explained by a corresponding non-cognitivist theory. Some versions ofmoderate internalism require that rational people will be motivated in accordance withtheir own moral judgments (Smith 1994, 61). But it isn't clear what version of non-cognitivism can take advantage of this sort of defeasible connection. On any theorywhere the acceptance of a moral judgment is constituted by the acceptance of a non-cognitive attitude, it should be the case that those who genuinely hold the judgmenthave the attitude. This should apply to the irrational as well as the rational.

Other responses to the amoralist are available consistent with non-cognitivism. Onesuch response is not to accept a defeasible version of internalism, but rather to claimthat amoralists do not have genuine moral beliefs. What an amoralist expresses whenshe makes a moral claim that she is disinclined to honor involves using the moral

predicate in an ―inverted commas sense‖ — a sense which alludes to the value judgments of others without itself expressing such a judgment (Hare 1952, 145 – 6).



Many cognitivists have not found this a persuasive characterization of all amoralists(Brink 1989, 46 – 7). Alternatively, non-cognitivists can point out that a sentence canconventionally express an attitude even when uttered by people who don't have therequisite attitude. For example, one can apologize without feeling sorry or actually

caring about what is at issue (Joyce 2002). But it is not so easy to see how to carry thisover to the treatment of accepting a moral judgment in the absence of uttering a moralsentence. We would like there to be grounds to attribute the belief or acceptance of amoral judgment to those who are silent on some grounds, and it isn't clear exactlywhat resources are available to a non-cognitivist if it doesn't involve being in someattitudinal state. Even if one can sincerely apologize without having any specialfeeling or attitude as one does so, it seems we would not say of a person that theywere sorry unless they had such an attitude. Thus the analogy with apology only takesus so far.

Hare's most famous argument for the action-guiding character of moral judgments isthe Missionaries and the Cannibals Argument. He suggests an example in which ourtranslation practices seem to indicate that when we use moral words from our homelanguage to translate words and concepts from another language, what is mostimportant to us is that native users of the language or concepts generally use them toguide choice and action (Hare 1952, 148 – 9). If this is right, it establishes a connectionof the following form: Necessarily the acceptance of a moral judgment will normally

incline society members to do what is recommended by that judgment. This versionwill require an intention to act or something similar in most people much of the time,

but it will not require such an intention from everybody all of the time. The argumentthus supports a version of moderate internalism. And, according to Hare, people whoutter general commands that are directed at themselves will normally but notinvariably act in accordance with those commands (Hare 1952, 169). So this much of

prescriptivism fits with the sort of internalism that Hare's arguments support. But,insofar as Hare also suggests that accepting a command directed at oneself requires anintention to act accordingly (Hare 1952, 20), he seems committed to a closerconnection between moral judgment and motivating states than the Missionaries andCannibals Argument vindicates.

Thus far we have been considering internalism as a reason to accept non-cognitivism based on a sort of inference to the best explanation. Insofar as non-cognitivism canexplain the connection between normative or moral judgments and motivation we



have some reason to accept it. But the explanations so far have relied on the positive part of non-cognitivism — the part that connects the meanings of moral terms tocommendation or the expression of attitudes. The denial of cognitivism so far has

played no role. Since the expressivist or prescriptivist component of non-cognitivist

theories does not by itself entail the denial of cognitivism, a cognitivist could takethem on board and explain a species of internalism just as non-cognitivists do (Copp2001).

There is, however, a popular non-cognitivist strategy for arguing that they areuniquely placed to explain judgment internalism. This strategy proceeds from theHumean idea that belief alone is incapable of motivating action. The Humean Theoryof Motivation, as it has come to be known, postulates that motives must always becomposed of desires for some end, possibly along with some relevant means-ends

belief (Hume 1888, 413; Smith 1987). The theory is supposed to rule out any state ofmind which both qualifies as a cognitive state and which would be sufficient tomotivate action by itself without supplementation from some independent desire. Ifmoral judgments necessarily motivate, even in the absence of further desires, thetheory seems to entail that they cannot be genuine beliefs. They must be conativerather than cognitive states, or at the very least be composites to which the non-cognitive component is essential. Even if beliefs are also constituents of the judgment,those beliefs will not be identical to it, since they can persist in the absence of

motivation while the moral judgments necessitate motives (Blackburn 1998, 97 – 100).

This argument too can be resisted by cognitivists. It presupposes a particularly strongversion of internalism. If the nature of the necessary connection between moral

judgments and motives is of a defeasible kind, it will be possible for someone toaccept the judgment while remaining unmotivated (Korsgaard 1986; Dreier 1990;Smith 1994). And even a stronger version of judgment internalism might be consistentwith various subjectivist cognitivist theories, especially those which relativize thetruth of moral judgments to individual agents. Such theories can make the truthconditions for the judgments include the presence of certain attitudes in the speakerand claim that speakers are highly accurate in tracking that part of their truthconditions (Harman 1978; Dreier 1990.). Furthermore, despite its lofty pedigree, theHumean Theory of Motivation is itself subject to dispute (Dancy 1996; Darwall 1983;

Nagel 1970; McDowell 1981).



3.4 Supervenience

It is common ground among moral theorists that moral properties supervene on non-moral properties. Two items cannot differ in their moral properties without differing

in some non-moral property as well. Or to put the point in terms more suited to thenon-cognitivist, all agree that it is inappropriate to treat two items as morallydistinguishable without believing that they are also distinguishable in some other way.If two actions are otherwise identical, labeling one as good thereby commits one tolabeling the other as good.

Some non-cognitivists have argued that this uncontroversial datum supports theirtheories against rival alternatives. Hare seems to have introduced the term‗supervenience‘ to t he philosophical literature (Hare 1952, 145) and he suggested that

his own theory, universal prescriptivism, was uniquely placed to explain it. Insofar asmoral prescriptions were by their nature universal they would prescribe or proscribeany action which was sufficiently similar to the action up for evaluation. Thus Hareincluded supervenience as one of the phenomena that any adequate metaethical theoryshould explain and he counted it as a point in favor of his theory that it did so. But thefeature of his theory that did the explanatory work was not its non-cognitivism — rather it was that it required the judgments to be universal in the ways he specified. Infact, Hare himself suggested that the supervenience of moral judgments on descriptive

features was part and parcel of these judgments having a secondary descriptivemeaning (Hare 1963, 7 – 22).

Other contemporary expressivist theories can use a similar approach to explainingsupervenience. Take a version of expressivism which says that a moral judgment thatsuch and such an action is wrong predicates a nonmoral property of that action and atthe same time expresses disapproval of that property. This too will explainsupervenience, insofar as the speaker will be committed by that moral judgment todisapproving of anything else with that property. Gibbard's apparatus in which the

judgments express attitudes towards norms that pick out actions by their naturalfeatures will generate the same sort of result. Thus each of these theorists will be ableto explain supervenience. But of course naturalist reductionist theories will also beable to do the necessary explanatory work. If moral properties just are natural

properties, there should be no surprise if two items cannot differ in their moral



properties without also differing in their natural properties. We might thus concludethat supervenience does not favor either cognitivism or non-cognitivism.

Simon Blackburn, however, argues that the phenomenon of supervenience especially

favors non-cognitivism. According to Blackburn, it is not just the simple fact thatmoral properties supervene on nonmoral properties that needs to be explained. Nor isit just that appropriate moral predication must supervene on nonmoral predication, to

put the point in a way that does not beg the question against non-cognitivism. It israther to explain how honoring the supervenience constraint can be a requirement oflinguistic competence, even while there is no analytic entailment from nonmoralclaims to moral claims. In other words, what needs explaining is how superveniencecan be a conceptual requirement even while there is no analytic equivalence betweenmoral properties and any non-moral property. Blackburn thinks that we require suchan explanation even if there are metaphysically or nomically necessary connections

between moral and nonmoral terms or properties. For, he thinks, it is hard to see howsuch nomic or metaphysical connections could justify the analytic status of thesupervenience thesis. People can be ignorant of nomic necessities for it is an empiricalmatter what natural laws govern our world. And they might be ignorant of certainmetaphysical necessities while knowing all the truths about the meanings of theirterms. So these necessities cannot justify the apriori and analytic status that thesupervenience requirement has. Or to put the same point differently, a requirement to

recognize some constraint that one should recognize merely in virtue of havingcompetence with the appropriate terms cannot be explained by citing a fact whichmere linguistic competence does not put one in a position to recognize.

Blackburn's favored explanation of the difference in status between the two claims isroughly as follows: Moral judgments must supervene on judgments regarding natural

properties because it is the point of moral judgments ―to guide desires and choicesamong the natural features of the world‖ (Blackburn 1993, 137). Since this sort ofexplanation makes reference to our purposes in using moral terms rather than to anindependent realm of moral fact, Blackburn thinks it supports a quasi-realist accountrather than a straightforward realist theory. He goes on to suggest that because theexplanation relies on facts about what beliefs can coexist with linguistic competence,the re is ―no further inference to a metaphysical conclusion‖ (Blackburn 1993, 143).



It should be obvious that Blackburn's argument is not entirely independent of thearguments for non-cognitivism that we have already surveyed. The claim that there isno analytic entailment from any natural property to any moral property is simplyHume's Law — a datum often supported through use of the open question argument.

Thus any reductive naturalist about moral properties will deny that premise of theargument along with the validity of the open question argument. (Dreier 1993) Thethought that an explanation which involves the practical purposes to which moral

judgments are put must favor non-cognitivism over cognitivism might well depend onaccepting a Humean division between inert beliefs and motivating desires. An anti-Humean might well deny that action-guiding purposes will not best be served by

beliefs concerning genuine properties (McDowell 1981). And it should be no surprisethat explaining the analyticity of the supervenience constraint should require claims

about what the competent can believe. For the phenomena to be explained aresupposed to be analytically necessary. In other words they are claims the linguisticallycompetent must accept (Dreier 1993).

Allan Gibbard (2003) has recently proposed a new argument for expressivismgrounded in his fact-prac world apparatus as a representational device for capturingnormative judgments. Given that account of the content of normative judgments itwill turn out to be necessary that those with moral attitudes are committed tonormative judgments which treat descriptively identical items the same for purposes

of planning. This is because the plans themselves must be formulated so as toindividuate circumstances of action usi ng ―recognitional‖ concepts. Thus any tworecognitionally identical circumstances will yield the same plan of action. If Gibbard'sreasons for thinking that plans must be formulated in recognitional terms are cogent,this result would allow the theory to explain the relevant phenomenon ofsupervenience. It does not, however, show that a cogntivist theory might not do just aswell on its own terms.

4. Problems, Objections and Response Strategies

One strategy of objection to non-cognitivism is to find fault with the main motivatingideas. We have already surveyed many of these in the course of discussing thearguments for non-cognitivism. We now turn to objections resting on the content ofthe theory rather than its motivations.



4.1 The Embedding Problem

Non-cognitivism as presented to this point is incomplete. It gives us an account of themeanings of moral expressions in free standing predicative uses, and of the states of

mind expressed when they are so used. But the identical expressions can be used inmore complex sentences, sentences which embed such predications. Thus far we havenot considered what the expressions might mean when so used. We say things such asthe following:

It is true that lying is wrong.Lying is not wrong.I wonder whether lying is wrong.I believe that lying is wrong.

Fred believes that lying is wrong.Is lying wrong?If lying is wrong he will be sure to do it.If lying is wrong then so is misleading truth-telling.

So, in addition to their analyses of unembedded predication, non-cognitivists owe usan account of the meanings of more complex sentences or judgments such as these.Leading contemporary non-cognitivists have all tried to provide accounts. As it turnsout, the task is difficult and generates much controversy.

The task is difficult in virtue of two interrelated considerations (1). In many caseswhat the non-cognitivist says about the meanings of moral sentences used in simple

predication cannot plausibly apply to the same sentences when embedded. Forexample, if a non-c ognitivist says the meaning of ‗Lying is wrong‘ is explained by thesuggestion that it serves to express disfavor towards lying in the way that ‗Boo lying!‘might, that does not seem to be a good explanation of what the very same words aredoing when they are used in many embedded contexts. For example if those words

occur in the antecedent of a conditional, or when a person says, ‗I wonder if lying iswrong‘ they may well not express such disapproval. Nor is there a convention which

justifies competent listeners in an expectation that the speaker has such an attitude ofdisapproval towards lying. So more must be said to explain such embedded uses. And(2) whatever we say about the meanings of moral predications when embedded invarious contexts, we would like it to make sense of the way these more complex



expressions interact in inference and argument with more straightforward predicativeuses of those expressions. The first consideration makes this harder to do. Normallywe believe that the status of an argument as valid depends, at least in part, on thewords not shifting in meaning as we move from premise to premise. But given that the

noncognitivist account of the meaning of the expressions when unembedded does notstraightforwardly extend to their embedded use, it is not obvious how this constraintwill be met (Geach 1960, 223).

Consider the following example from Geach (1965, 463):

(P1) If tormenting the cat is bad, getting your little brother to do it is bad(P2) Tormenting the cat is bad.Ergo , getting your little brother to torment the cat is bad.

The argument is valid. But if the entire meaning of ‗tormenting the cat is bad‘ in thesecond premise is well explained by saying that it is suited for use in expressingdisapproval of tormenting the cat, then that meaning cannot be the same as themeaning it has in the first premise (which one might accept even if one approves oftormenting cats). This doesn't show that the expression is not being used emotively inthe second premise; a descriptivist can agree to that. But it does indicate that morewill need to be said to explain what is going on. For straightforwardly descriptivearguments of the same form, the explanation of why the argument is valid relies onthe idea that the phrase in the antecedent has a constant meaning that it represents

both unembedded and embedded. This is what Geach has called The Frege Point: ―Athought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a

proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet berecognizably the same proposition‖ (Geach 1965, 449). As Geach saw it, we need tothink of predication as constant across embedded and unembedded occurrences of

predicative moral sentences so as not to commit a fallacy of equivocation in makingarguments.

But the negative component of the non-cognitivist position, that moral judgments donot express propositions or predicate properties, seems to rule out this way ofexplaining matters. If there is no proposition expressed in normal predicative uses ofmoral expressions we eliminate one candidate for a constant element that generatesrelations of implication with other expressions embedding the same form of words. If



there is no common thing predicated by such sentences, whether embedded or not, itis hard to see what their meanings have in common across these contexts. This is the

problem known variously as the Embedding Problem, Geach's Problem, theFrege/Geach Problem and the Frege/Geach/Searle problem in honor of it's two earliest

discussants (Geach 1957 – 58, 1960 & 1965; Searle 1962) and of Frege to whom Geachcredited the basic insight.

There seem to be two main ways to try and offer a non-cognitivist solution to thischallenge. One approach is to accept Geach's diagnosis and try to find a commonelement of meaning among the different uses of the same predicative expressions.This common element could then be used to underwrite relations of logicalimplication in roughly the way that ordinary propositions are used. The alternativeapproach is to give a different sort of explanation for the seeming relations ofimplication between such judgments or sentences. We'll examine this second methodfirst as it has been most popular.

4.1.1 A logic of attitudes

One way to start from scratch without accepting the Frege Point is to postulate a logicof attitudes which licenses inferences between the appropriate judgments. The generalidea is that if there are norms of correct inference that hold between various

judgments which require us to accept one when we accept another, we can use thosenorms to underwrite the relations of logical implication that we intuitively acceptamong moral judgments. Thus this strategy attempts to reverse the usual order ofexplanation for why we infer as we do. We standardly begin by pointing out relationsof implications between the contents of the judgments that form the premises andconclusion of an argument and from there we derive a justification for accepting theconclusion based on the premises. For example, one justification would be to

postulate norms of belief revision that require us to try (other things equal) to eschewinconsistency in the contents of our thoughts. By contrast the approach under

consideration starts with norms governing the consistency of attitudes that do notdepend on prior relations of implication or consistency among their contents. It thentries to generate relations of implication and consistency between judgments byinvoking these independent norms.



Most such accounts begin by giving plausible accounts of the entire judgments inwhich simpler moral explanations are embedded. These accounts might analyze themeither as complex beliefs (Blackburn 1971) or as further non-cognitive expressive

judgments (Blackburn 1984). These judgments should be such as to have rational

connections to the other judgments that are likely to play a role in valid arguments. Ifall goes well, a kind of pragmatic incoherence or irrationality will be involved whensomeone accepts the judgments of a valid argument so analyzed while at the sametime rejecting the conclusion. Such a speaker would be in a state similar to thoseuttering sentences of the sort that feature in Moore's paradox, such as ‗It is raining butI don't believe that it is.‘

A simple example of this sort of approach comes from Blackburn. Conditionalsexpress higher order attitudes towards accepting certain conjunctions of attitudes. ―Iflying is wrong, telling your little brother to lie is wrong,‖ (when sincerely uttered)expresses approval of m aking disapproval of getting one's brother to lie ―follow upon‖disapproval of lying.

…Anyone holding this pair [the above attitude, plus the attitude expressed by ‘lying iswrong’] must hold the consequential disapproval: he is committed to disapproving o fgetting little brother to lie, for if he does not his attitudes clash. He has a fracturedsensibility which cannot itself be an object of approval. (Blackburn 1984, 195)

Logical entailments involving moral judgments are explained as follows: Aconstellation of attitudes which includes the attitudes expressed by the conditional and

by the seemingly assertive premises but not those expressed by the conclusion isirrational, because it goes against the purposes of moral discourse. Somewhat moresophisticated ways of working out this strategy can be found in several places,including further work by Blackburn himself (1988b), but the basic idea is wellexemplified in this proposal.

The proposal also well exemplifies the program of quasi-realism. By displaying our practices of inference as making sense despite their non-cognitivist roots, Blackburnhopes to vindicate those practices. If the program goes through for enough of ourstandard ways of speaking and reasoning, including the other embedded contexts notcurrently under discussion, he hopes to show how we can ―earn the right‖ to talk as ifthese judgments are true.



The logic of attitudes strategy has met with much resistance on the part ofcognitivists. It seems to many that the answer conflates genuine inconsistency withmere pragmatic incoherence (Hale 1986; Schueler 1988; Brighouse 1990; Zangwill1992; van Roojen 1996). In fact it might seem that this is obvious; if we define

validity or entailment in terms of truth preservation, arguments with purely non-cognitive premises will not even be candidates for validity and relations among themwill not be entailments.

This quick way of arguing that the strategy involves conflation is probably too quickas these critics largely recognize. Even before Geach raised his version of thechallenge to non-cognitivism, Hare pointed out that there can be relations betweencommands that are very much like the logical relations between descriptiveutterances, so much like them that we would expect them to receive a commonexplanation. ‗If it is raining, take an umbrella,‘ and ‗If it is raining, you will take anumbrella,‘ interact logically with ‗It is raining‘ in very similar ways and seemingly forsimilar reasons. This inspired Hare to invent a model of linguistic meaning with twocomponents. One, the phrastic , to represent states of affairs, and the other, the neustic ,to function as something like a mood indicator. The neustic indicates what speech-actis being performed with the phrastic. It might be asserted or denied, prescribed or

proscribed, and so on (Hare 1952, 17 – 22). Hare hoped that the logical connectivescould be included as parts of the phrastic (Hare 1952, 21), so that a common set of

logical rules could be used to explain most of the standard inferences in any moodusing some standard logical principle relating judgments involving those connectives.

Nevertheless he did include some extra rules, such as a rule forbidding imperativalconclusions based on premises that include no imperatives.

The payoff was supposed to be a unification of logic for sentences in various moods,including moral sentences which Hare thought were a species of universal imperative.A full assessment of the adequacy of the system would be beyond the scope of thisentry. It is not obvious how the proposal is supposed to work in full generality, and itis hard to see how treating logical connectives solely as components of the phrasticscan do all the needed work. But the phenomenon that Hare was pointing to — that therelations between certain imperatives are very much like those between similardescriptions — gives non-cognitivists a response to the objection that only genuinelytruth-apt judgments can stand in logical relations to one another.



Critics of explaining logic in terms of rational or pragmatic relations between attitudescan grant Hare's basic point. That prescriptions can stand in logical relations to oneanother does not entail that pragmatic or similar coherence or incoherence forms the

basis of these relations. Many skeptics about the strategy have done their best to work

out the details of the suggested logic of attitudes. By considering various intuitivelyavailable judgments and applying the non-cognitivist accounts to them they haveaimed to uncover logical relations that are not easily captured using this approach(Hale 1993, 354). Many of the specific criticisms turn on the details of the particular

proposals up for assessment, but there are some more general complaints that seem torecur.

Perhaps the simplest criticism has to do with ―the negation problem‖ for expressivisttheories. One datum to be explained is the logical inconsistency of the sentences―Murdering is wrong,‖ and its negation, ―Murdering is not wrong.‖ The logic ofattitudes approach does this by mapping each onto an attitude which it expresses andthen showing that the attitudes in question are inconsistent or disagree with oneanother. Intuitively the first sentence expresses disapproval of murdering. The

problem now is to find an attitude incompatible with it and which plausibly isexpressed by the second sentence. And it turns out to be difficult to find an attitude todo the job.

There are three ways to negate the claim that Fred believes that murder is wrong:

(1) Fred does not believe that murdering is wrong.(2) Fred believes that not murdering is wrong.(3) Fred believes that murdering is not wrong.

Intuitively these ascribe different states of mind to Fred, and the third ascribes theattitude expressed by our target sentence. But when we negate the attitude ascriptionconstitutive of the simple expressivist analysis (Fred disapproves of murdering) we

don't have enough candidate attitudes to capture all three. We have only:

(1*) Fred does not disapprove of murdering. And,(2*) Fred disapproves of not murdering.

And these plausibly correspond to the first two attitudes towards murder expressed in(1) and (2). But it is the third which ascribes belief in the negation of the claim that



murder is wrong, so we have not yet got our explanation.(Unwin 1999, 2001; Hale2002; Schroeder 2008a).

A more general (but not necessarily more fundamental) criticism emphasizes that the

strategy of reducing logical inconsistency to attitudinal incoherence requires us to findthe former whenever we find the latter. An advocate of one version of the logic ofattitudes approach is committed to finding inconsistency in what seem to be merelyMoore- paradoxical sentences involving morality, such as ‗Laughing is wrong, but Idon't believe that it is.‘ If inconsistency is to be explained via the relations betweenattitudes, any way of expressing those same attitudes will be inconsistent. Since othersentences may also express the very same attitudes as moral judgments express, thesetoo will have to stand in the same logical relations to other sentences that moral

judgments expressive of those attitudes will. That can force the theory to be highlyrevisionary of our ordinary judgments about logical consistency and implication. Anysentence or set of sentences, moral or otherwise, which expresses commitments thatthe approach rules incoherent and hence inconsistent will also have to count asinconsistent. Yet this can conflict with our ordinary judgments about such cases.

Normally, for example, we regard Moore-paradoxical sentences as consistent but selfdefeating. But if the Moore-paradoxicality of a set of moral attitudes is supposed to

justify counting moral judgemets that express them as inconsistent, we should regardthese sentences as inconsistent. And if that is true for Moore-paradoxical moral

sentences, it should also go for Moore-paradoxical nonmoral sentences. Yet that is nothow we are pretheoretically inclined to view them (van Roojen 1996).

This is not to say that there are not ways forward for the non-cognitivists. (Dreier2006, Horgan and Timmons 2006b, Schroeder 2008b, 2008c). One strategy is to backaway from pragmatic incoherence as the explanation of the inconsistency in questionwhile sticking with the idea that the basic explanatory resource is the incompatibilityof some attitudes with others. Horgan and Timmons (2006b) postulate an infinitehierarchy of primitive inconsistency relations between the attitudes which areexpressed using the sentences which we pre-theoretically regard as inconsistent. Forexample, th ey postulate that the attitude expressed by ‗Lying is wrong,‘ is inconsistentwith the attitude expressed by ‗Lying is not wrong‘. But they say no more to explainwhy this is so. It is just a primitive fact about these attitudes (and many others) thatthey have this sort of incompatibility. The large number of primitive incompatibilities

postulated by the theory makes critics worry that no real explanatory work is being



done. (Schroeder 2008a, 2008b) It seems at least that all should agree we would atleast have a more unified account if we could construct the story with fewer primativeinconsistencies.

It may yet be possible to do something of this sort. Dreier (2006) suggests that non-cognitivists might be able to give a plausible explanation of inconsistency if they canfind a way to distinguish between indifference and indecision. And he makes somesuggestions for how that may be done. Schroeder (2008b, 2008c) suggests that thenon-cognitivist may yet be able to make considerable headway with the logic ofattitudes, but only if she is willing to accept some revisions to our pre-theoretic viewof various matters. He suggests that the essential problem is that there is not enoughstructure to the judgments postulated by the standard non-cognitivist accounts todistinguish all of the attitudes necessary to stand in the appropriate logical relations.And, he suggests, an expressivist can generate enough structure by complicating thestory about what the attitudes in question are attitudes towards. The specific proposalis to that 'lying is wrong' (for example) expresses a noncognitive attitude not directlytowards lying but towards blaming for lying. If that attitude is itself incompatible withholding the very same attitude towards not blaming for lying, the resulting accountcan be used to give a unified story about consistency and inconsistency among non-cognitive attitudes. Adding this extra structure into the attitudes creates more places toinsert negations to generate the full range of attitudes it seems a person can have. An

extension to sentences embedding both moral and non-moral judgments adds morecomplication and has the upshot that all judgments would need to express a basic non-cognitive attitude towards actions. (Schroeder, 2008c)

Many non-cognitivists have by and large remained unimpressed with cognitivistcomplaints about embedding (Blackburn 1998, 72). In fact, it appears that there is notreally even agreement on what the problem is. Those urging Geach's objection thinkthat it needs to be explained why moral arguments are genuinely valid, where validityis a logical relation between contents of judgments. Thus they are unhappy with theentire logic of attitudes approach precisely because it tries to find the primary groundof implication in rational relations between the judgments considered as attitudesrather than the contents. Many non-cognitivists, on the other hand, think that the taskis to explain why we reason as we do (Björnsson 2001), or perhaps why it is rationalto reason as we do. And they may suggest that this last verdict is itself just one morenon-cognitive judgment.



4.1.2 A logic of contents

Non-cognitivists can meet the challenge on their critics' terms if they can get analternative approach to work. The alternative uses the alleged descriptive meanings of

moral judgments to generate the required logical relations. No party to the debatedenies that descriptions can stand in logical relations to one another. Thus some non-cognitivists hope to explain logical relations by using the secondary descriptivecomponent in the meanings of moral terms postulated by some versions of non-cognitivism.

According to the main variants of this approach, this secondary component picks out adescriptive property determined by the moral attitudes of the speaker. If the speakermorally approves of all and only sweet things, then this property is sweetness. An

ordinary judgment that such and such is right might then in a secondary way predicatesweetness. If the speaker morally disapproves of all and only the sour things then her

judgments of wrongness predicate sourness as the secondary descriptive meaning.And so on. In embedded contexts, this secondary component becomes the semanticvalue of the embedded moral expression. ‗If lying is wrong, then he will lie,‘ has anantecedent whose embedded content is the same as a statement predicating the

property on which the speaker's moral disapproval supervenes. Thus, continuing withour example, the sentence says the same thing as, ‗If lying is sour, then he will lie.‘

And the content of this conditional will interact with the secondary descriptivemeaning of the unembedded moral judgments to determine its logical functioning sothat we get the implications we would expect. Differing proposals of this general sortsay somewhat different things about exactly how the descriptive content is expressed(Barker 2000; Ridge 2006) or quasi-expressed (Jackson 1999), but the basic idea isworked out in similar ways.

Cognitivists can raise doubts about the adequacy of these proposals due to the way thedescriptive meaning is determined. If it is the actual attitudes of the speaker that

determine the property, a speaker may not use the same term to pick out the same property in each premise of the argument. For she may have had one attitude whenshe considers earlier premises, only to change her attitude during the course of theoverall argument. Thus Geach's original charge of equivocation might still beappropriate in some circumstances (van Roojen 2005). Worries of this sort makeexpressivist theories which are at the same time cognitivist (Copp 2001, Boisvert



2008) more attractive because they can claim many of the attractions of expressivismwithout the cost of seeming equivocation.

Many people suspect that the technical apparatus introduced by Allan Gibbard (1990)

leaves his theory well positioned to solve the embedding problem. Gibbard suggestswe can use an extension of possible worlds semantics to capture normative contentsconsistent with his norm expressivist analysis. The extension generates a set of world-norm pairs by pairing each possible world with each possible set of consistent andcomplete norms. Consistent complete sets of norms divide naturalistically describedact-types into those which are permitted, required, or forbidden in such a way that noaction can be both required or permitted and also forbidden. Sets of these pairs arethen used to represent the contents of moral judgments. On Gibbard's preferred way ofdoing this, particular judgments rule out sets of these pairs. For example, judging anaction forbidden will rule out any pair in which the world member of the pairrepresents the action as satisfying a complete naturalistic description which is notsufficient to classify an action as forbidden according to the set of norms forming thesecond member. The set of the remaining pairs which the judgments do not rule outrepresent the contents of the judgments.

From here the approach is further extended to handle the contents of conjunctions,disjunctions, and conditionals and to explain how these interact logically. Contents of

conjunctions are the intersections of the sets representing their conjuncts. Contents ofdisjunctions are the unions of the sets representing the contents of the disjuncts.Contents of conditionals will be the union of the set representing the negation of theantecedent and the set representing the consequent. Judgments are inconsistent if theintersection of their contents is empty. Arguments are valid if the premises areinconsistent with the denial of the conclusion (Gibbard 1990, chapter 5).

One way to view the moral of Geach and Searle's objections is that the problem fornon-cognitivism is due to the theory not making a distinction between the contents of

a sentence on the one hand, and the speech act for which the sentence is being used.This is why Searle accuses non- cognitivists of committing the ―speech act fallacy.‖ Itis plausible that sentences bear their logical relations to one another in virtue of theircontents, and not in virtue of the speech act that they are used to accomplish. Whatseems to be needed is a way for non-cognitivists to distinguish the contents of asentence from the force with which it is used. If one thinks of Gibbard's sets of world-



norm pairs as capturing the contents of the moral sentences, it looks as if thatapparatus allows non-cognitivists to make the relevant distinctions (Dreier 1998). Thesuggestion is especially attractive in light of the fact that Gibbard's apparatus can beadapted to work with any model theory for propositional attitudes that a theorist might

use to replace possible worlds (Dreier 1999).

On the other hand, it is not easy to say whether the apparatus is best interpreted ascapturing the contents of distinctively non-cognitive mental states. This won't be a

problem for noncognitivism if the apparatus is only playing the role of a model to mapindependently determined logical relations. But if the world-norm pair apparatus isused to generate genuine contents for the judgments in question — contents which areindependent of the force with which sentences are used and which explain the logicalrelations among them, it might be worrisome that the contents are not distinctivelynoncognitivist. World-norm pairs might be used to capture the thoughts of a moralrealist who believes that there are genuine moral properties supervening on the natural

properties of the world. The possible worlds component of the model would represent beliefs about the supervenience base, while the norms would be needed to represent a person's beliefs involving the supervenient moral properties. On this proposal thenorms would be needed to represent the contents of the realist's thought becausedifferent realist theories might have the moral properties supervene on differentnonmoral properties and a person could be a realist without being committed to the

truth of any particular realist theory. An opinionated realist might have views aboutthe exact supervenience relation which would be represented by a set of pairs in whichthe second member — the norms — was the same for each pair in the set. But a lessopinionated realist might have her beliefs represented by a set in which the secondmember varied. Similarly, indexical relativism can also make use of the apparatus torepresent moral beliefs consistent with its analysis (Dreier 1999).

Debate in this realm continues to be robust with much of the argument turning onissues which require a great deal of attention to detail.

4.1.3 Minimalism as offering a solution to the problem

It has been suggested that minimalism or deflationism about truth or truth aptness canride to the rescue of non-cognitivists at this point. If so, perhaps the non-cognitivistcan bypass the above debates. A very rough characterization of minimalism will



hopefully suffice to explain. Minimalist theories are often presented by contrast withtheories of truth according to which truth is some sort of ―substantial‖ relation or

property. For example correspondence theories which claim that truth involves a realrelation between truth-bearers and reality are often cited as paradigm cases of the

contrast class. Minimalists about truth suggest that truth is not such a substantial property. Others propound a version of minimalism by claiming that to understandwhat truth is one need not grasp anything more substantial than some rather minimalclaims. These proponents suggest that the minimal claims needed are insufficient torequire anything very substantial that all truths must have in common. Differentminimalists formulate these claims in somewhat different ways: Some suggest thatwhat one needs to know is simply that calling a sentence true is just to assert or affirmthe sentence (Ramsey 1 927). Others hold that sentences of the form ‗S is true‘ can

generally be replaced by ‗S‘. Still others suggest that one has only to accept the theoryconsisting of all the sentences of Tarski's Schema T — ‗S‘ is true iff S — where thesentence ‗S‘ is ment ioned on the left hand side and used on the right hand side. Andothers require that one accept all propositions of the form: The proposition that P istrue iff P (Horwich 1990, 18 – 22). More would need to be said to give a fullexplanation of deflationism about truth, but this should suffice for our purposes.

For more detail on minimalism see the entry on deflationary theories of truth .

It should be reasonably obvious how deflationism about truth can help with one sortof embedded context — those in which a moral sentence follows ‗It is true that.‘ Ifexpressivists can give us an adequate account of a moral sentence, such as ‗Teasingthe cat is wrong,‘ then deflationism tells us that the s ame account should be sufficientfor sentences like ‗It is true that teasing the cat is wrong.‘ But it has been suggestedthat minimalism can provide help in other contexts as well (Blackburn 1988; Stoljar1993; Horwich 1993). The thought seems to be that all it takes to solve the embedding

problem is for it to be appropriate to call moral sentences true, and for those sentencesto embed grammatically in longer sentences in the usual ways, and lastly for us tomake the usual inferences. Minimalism about truth plus the non-cognitivist account ofthe use of moral utterances secures the first requirement, while the indicative form ofthe relevant atomic moral sentences plus our linguistic practices of allowing them toembed wherever predicative sentences embed secures the latter. The motivating ideashere may be as follows: We know how to explain the meanings of more complicatedtruth-functional embeddings by showing how the truth values of the whole are

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/








literature, it remains controversial what more, if anything, is needed, but the general point is quite powerful (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2000).

Fictionalism can bypass much of this debate while defending psychological non-

cognitivism. Recall that fictionalists accept psychological non-cognitivism, but rejectsemantic nonfactualism. Thus the semantics of moral sentences is just as the realistsays it is. Moral sentences do predicate properties both in their free-standing uses andwhen embedded (MacIntrye 1981; Kalderon 2005) . Hence the fictionalist postulatesno equivocation and can use whatever a realist is entitled to use to explain relations ofimplications between contents. The fictionalist would be free from the task of solvingGeach's problem taken as the task of explaining why modus ponens and other formsof inference validly apply to moral utterances (Kalderon 2005). But she does shoulderthe related task of making sense of moral reasoning, and of explaining the point offictive use of moral sentences. In this latter task she may have at her disposal many ofthe resources and arguments proposed by fully non-cognitivist theories.

4.2 The Wishful Thinking Objection

A recent objection to non-cognitivism pays close attention to the distinction betweenexplaining logical relations on the one hand, and explaining the use of moral

judgments in reasoning on the other. Even if the embedding problem is solved, so thatwe know what moral utterances mean and what complex sentences embedding themalso mean, we might still think it irrational to reason in accordance with ordinarylogical principles applied to such judgments. The basic idea here is that conditionalswith moral antecedents and nonmoral consequents should, together with the moral

judgment in the antecedent, license acceptance of the consequent. Thus someone whoaccepts such conditionals would be rational to infer the consequent upon coming toaccept the antecedent. But if expressivism is correct, accepting the antecedent just isholding a non-cognitive attitude. Thus the licensed inference is really a form ofwishful thinking, for a non-cognitive change of attitude has licensed a change of

belief. For example, suppose someone accepts a judgment expressible by saying, ifdoing an action is wrong, George will do it. Normally we think that it would berational for that person to infer the belief that George will hit Sam upon coming toaccept that hitting Sam is wrong. But, according to noncognitivism, coming to acceptthat hitting Sam is wrong is just a change of non-cognitive attitude, and it can seemwrong to think that a change in such attitudes can rationalize a change in belief. It



looks like the non-cognitivist is committed to approving of something analogous towishful thinking. That is they believe something, not because of a change in theirevidence, but because of a change in attitude alone (Dorr 2002). Non-cognitivists willresist by suggesting that the conditionals themselves are only rational to accept when

one thinks that changes of mind about the antecedent will depend on beliefs aboutfacts that are evidentially relevant to the conclusion. How far this strategy can bemade to work is as yet an open question.

4.3 Non-cognitivism and Relativism

It has seemed obvious to many that non-cognitivism has much in common withvarious relativist metaethical views. Though non-cognitivists may deny that the truthvalues of moral judgments are relative to speakers or agents because such judgments

have no truth values, non-cognitivists often have accepted something similar torelativism. For non-cognitivists hold that it is semantically appropriate for a person toutter a moral judgment whenever she wishes to express the relevant non-cognitiveattitude. If there are few rational constraints on holding the relevant attitude, as mostnon-cognitivists believe, consistent moral judgments cannot be mistaken (Carnap1937, 30; Hare 1963, 110). If relativism is problematic, it isn't obvious that non-cognitivism avoids the problems.

Still many non-cognitivists have argued that the view does not entail or justifyrelativism. They claim that whether or not a moral judgment is mistaken is itself amatter for moral theorizing. A speaker should only call a moral judgment true if he orshe accepts that judgment. A speaker who expresses his or her acceptance ofrelativism in the normal way would then seem to be expressing commitment to a verydeferential moral theory. What seems to be a higher level metaethical claim that noconsistent set of moral judgments is mistaken, is really just another moral judgmentand hence one which would be rejected by any moral judge with substantive moralcommitments (Blackburn 1998, 296 & 304; Timmons 1999). If this line of argument

works it will allow non-cognitivism to gain the allegiance of those who wish to denyrelativism while giving the motivations that lead to both it and non-cognitivism theirdue.



4.4 Capturing The Varieties of Normative Ethical Theories Within A Non-cognitivist

Metaethic

Many think it a desideratum in metaethical theorizing that a candidate theory be

consistent with all or most normative theories actually defended by serious normativeethical proponents. This idea has played some role in the debate over the embedding

problem insofar as some of the proposals have been inconsistent with substantive positions taken in the debate about the possibility of moral dilemmas. (van Roojen1996, 324; Gibbard 1990, 88.) But even aside from that particular issue, thedesideratum can make a good deal of work for the non-cognitivist because of thevariety of kinds of moral theory and the variety of differing but allegedly consistent

judgments proposed by theorists.

A simple example involves what a non-cognitivist should say to differentiate related but differing moral judgments about what is right and what is good. According tostandard non-consequentialist theories, rightness and goodness can come apart. Inother words, a right action can be such as not to produce the most goodness. Of courseconsequentialists deny this, and non-consequentialists who use agent-relative valuesto specify the rightness of actions can also deny that rightness and goodness comeapart in this way (Broome 1991, chapter 1). But even if they are incorrect as a matterof substantive moral philosophy, it would seem that competent moral judges can hold

views of the sort described without contradiction. Non-cognitivists would like to beable to give an explanation of this consistent with their analyses. Hence they need away of distinguishing judgments of rightness and judgments of goodness.

A simple strategy might be to claim that they attach to different things — rightness toactions and goodness to states of affairs. But it isn't obvious that no competent speakercould consistently judge an action right but not good. Another strategy would be todistinguish varieties of positive attitudes such that one sort involves a kind of approvaldistinctive of rightness, whereas another involves a kind distinctive of goodness. Yet

another method would be to use something like the two step approach Gibbard useswhen he analyzes judgments of rightness in terms of judging it rationally appropriateto feel guilt and anger at certain actions. The approval could be all of the same sort,

but the objects of approval might be feelings of guilt in one case and feelings ofsorrow in the other, even when these feelings are directed at one and the same objectsuch as an action. No doubt there are other available strategies so the problem does



not by itself constitute an objection. It can however complicate the task ofconstructing and adequate non-cognitivist theory, especially since it can impact theforce of other objections as with the embedding problem and moral dilemmas notedabove.

A discussion of an additional issue raised in trying to account for the variety of moral judgments with in a non-cognitivist framework is found in the followingsupplementary document.

Supplement on Agent-Centered Teleology

5. Can The Cognitivist/Non-cognitivist Distinction Be Sustained?

Non-cognitivist success in handling the embedding problem and related worries aboutreasoning would put non-cognitivists in a stronger argumentative position. Butrecently some commentators have suggested that success at this endeavor might be amixed blessing. Success may indicate not that non-cognitivism is the right account ofmoral judgments, but instead that the contrast with cognitivism is not stark enough tomake out a real distinction. Perhaps the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism collapses as non-cognitivist theories are modified to capture all of the

phenomena that cognitivists challenge them to explain. While both its advocates andthose who argued strenuously against it would likely find themselves somewhatdisoriented if this were correct, it does seem that noncognitivists would be most upset

by this result. For that position was defined by denying key components of standardrealist positions. If the cognitivist/noncognitivist dichotomy does not hold up, it wouldseem to show either that the standard positions were not after all committed to thosecomponents, or that those commitments could not be avoided by plausible theories.

Early versions of non-cognitivism did not seem subject to this sort of objection, precisely because they did not worry much about vindicating overall moral practice.Carnap (1937, 30 – 31) was happy to convict ordinary moral thinking of error. But asnon-cognitivists have attempted to make sense of and explain most of the seeminglyrealist features of moral practice, it might seem hard to sustain the claim of a sharpcontrast between factual language on the one hand and normative language on theother. Several challenges based on roughly this idea find a home in the recentliterature.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/agent-centered-teleology.html






5.1 Sophisticated Non-cognitivism vs. Sophisticated Cognitivist Relativism

One way to push the point is to challenge the non-cognitivist to distinguish non-cognitivism from cognitivist relativism. A speaker relativist is in a particularly good

position to highlight the suggestion that there is little difference between sophisticatednon-cognitivism and cognitivism. Both speaker relativists and non-cognitivists cansay that the appropriateness of a moral judgment depends on a speaker's attitudes. Ifthe non-cognitivist suggests that moral judgments predicate properties in a secondaryway (perhaps to handle embedding), the cognitivist relativist can agree. And thetheories can agree that the property predicated is determined as a function of thespeaker's moral attitudes. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult to say precisely whatthe difference between the views is (Dreier 1999).

5.2 Minimalism as Undermining Non-cognitivism

Another line of argument with a similar upshot proceeds from minimalism of the sortwe have already canvassed. Deflationism about truth or truth-aptness can be used toargue that there is no room for non-cognitivism of the sort that succeeds in vindicatingmuch of moral practice. If there is no more robust understanding of truth conditionsthan can be secured by minimalism about truth conditions, it will be impossible forthe non-cognitivist to make her distinctive negative claims short of accepting an errortheory about a large share of our moral practices. Suppose that all that there is to be acognitive enterprise or to have truth conditions is to meet certain minimalrequirements — requirements that will have to be vindicated in order to make non-cognitivism plausible. Then, if the quasi-realist program succeeds, there will be noway to distinguish plausible non-cognitivism from cognitivism.

More concretely, some have proposed that all that is needed to have minimal truthconditions is for a set of judgments to satisfy two constraints: (1) Sentences composedof the relevant expressions must exhibit the syntactic surface features of paradigmatic

truth-apt sentences such as assertions, and they must embed grammatically in morecomplex sentences such as conditionals, propositional attitude ascriptions, and so on.(2) Use of these expressions must exhibit a certain amount of discipline so that thereare clearly appropriate and inappropriate conditions for using them in sentences of theform noted in the first condition (Boghossian 1990, Wright 1993; Divers and Miller1994). Normative discourse seems to meet both of these constraints relatively





domains on which the view depends will be hard to sustain. Blackburn, for example,suggests quasi-realist approaches not just to moral discourse, but also to modality,causation and probability. One may wonder what he means to deny about thesedomains that is not also applicable to the rest of our seemingly contentful judgments

(Rosen 1998). Even Blackburn himself on occasion expresses worries about this problem (Blackburn 1993, 34), but more commonly he and other non-cognitivistsresist the worry by pointing to other domains of discourse which are not amenable tonon-cognitivist analysis.

A short discussion of a different collapse argument employed against noncognitivism by Jackson and Pettit which has generated quite a bit of literature can be found in thefollowing supplementary document.

Supplement on Assertion Conditions and Truth-Conditionality

6. Conclusion

Non-cognitivism first came on the scene as a rather starkly drawn alternative to prevailing cognitivist and realist construals of moral discourse. As it developed toenable it to explain features of moral discourse relied on by its critics, the view

became more subtle and presented a less stark contrast with realist positions. Themain negative claims were often somewhat moderated. For example, the claim thatmoral judgments had no descriptive meaning evolved into a claim that any suchmeanings were secondary. The claim that moral judgments could not be true or false

became the claim that they could be true or false only in a minimal or deflationarysense. Not all of the shifts have been embraced by all non-cognitivists, but it is fair tosay that current versions are more complex and subtle than the theories from whichthey descend. As a result the arguments for and against the views have gotten ratherintricate and even technical. That trend is likely to continue for at least a while longeras ideas from other areas of philosophy are employed to further hone the objections

and fill out the responses to them.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/assertion-conditions.html




Documents

Relativitas Moral