Emotivism

A reader writes:

I love your blog! And apologetics articles by that James Akin guy were
also very helpful when I was coming back to the faith – could you let
him know?

Who’s James Akin?

Anyway, a very quick email – I am having a dialogue with someone whose
ethical philosophy is explicitly emotivist – they don’t believe morality
exists at all, it’s just how people feel. Nobody ever does anything
wrong, not even the Nazis, because ‘wrong’ is just a word we use to
describe things we don’t like. She’s mentioned cost/benefit analysis and
evolution, so I suspect she is planning to use these to try to explain
away the existence of internal ‘shoulds’. I’ve talked with moral
relativists and rationalist atheists before, but this is new to me.

Do you have any suggestions for how to deal with emotivism?

Sure thing. It’s been a number of years since I’ve interacted with emotivism in a serious way (it was back in grad school), but here goes . . .

For those who may not be familiar with the term, emotivism is a philosophical interpretation of moral utterances ("Killing is morally wrong," "Compassion is morally praiseworthy") as merely emotive expressions that lack cognitive value. In other words, they are not propositions that can be true or false, just expressions of emotions.

This is sometimes expressed as the "Boo! Hurrah! theory," according to which statements like ‘Killing is wrong" can be understood as essentially "Boo, killing!" and statements like "Compassion is good" can be understood as essentially "Hurrah, compassion!"

"Boo, killing!" and "Hurrah, compassion!" are not propositions. As a result, they cannot be true or false. "Boo, killing" is no more a true proposition than "Hurrah, killing!" is a false one. They are simply expressions of attitudes.

(One should note, though, that one can express an attitude insincerely. For example, one might say "Hurrah, killing!" with gusto when among Cthulhu worshippers to make them think you are one of them and not raise suspicions even though "Boo, killing!" is your true attitude.)

Emotivism has always struck me as a remarkably weak interpretation of moral statements.

For a start, it’s got grammar agin’ it. If you look at statements like "Killing is wrong" or "Truth-telling is good" they do not fit the grammatical form that we normally use when we are merely making emotional expressions.

When we do the latter, we tend to simply use an interjection, coupled with a noun if needed to make the context of the interjection clear. For example, we might say, "Broccoli? Ugh!" or "Lakers, boo!" or "Cool! Payday!" or "Cthulhu! Aaaaagh!"–or, if the context is clear enough that we don’t need the noun then we just use the interjection: "Ugh!" "Boo!" "Cool!" "Aaaaagh!"

So if moral statements were merely emotional utterances, why would we use the grammatical form of predication when we make them? If I say "Killing is wrong," I’m using a noun, a copula (the verb "to be"), and an adjective to predicate the quality of wrongness on killing.

I seem to be asserting the existence of wrongness no less than I am asserting the existence of greenness when I say "The grass is green." This does not mean that wrongness or greenness are things that can exist independently, as concrete objects on their own, but it does seem that I’m assering them as objectively real qualities.

So to restate the question: Why would we want to use one grammatical form (predication) to make emotional expressions when it comes to morals when we have a perfectly good grammatical way (interjection) of making these already?

You could suppose English-speakers just got into this habit and that it’s just part of the idiom of English, but it ain’t.

People do this in every language from what I can tell. Even languages that commonly use nominal sentences (sentences with a subject and a verb-less predicate) like Latin or Hebrew or Arabic still understand moral statements as involving predication rather than mere interjection.

So grammar definitely seems to count against emotivism as a theory of moral utterances. There seems to be something about human consciousness that regards moral utterances as different than mere emotive utterances.

Further, if moral utterances are just emotive utterances than how can one even tell which grammatical form to use for them? In the case of an individual working over well-trod ground, habit can certainly make this determination, but how did these cutoms even develop? Why are certain statements regarded as moral and some regarded as merely emotive?

Now, it is possible to use predication to make what seem to be emotional expressions. If one says "Ice cream is good" or "Jalapeno toothpaste is bad" then it is clear we are expressing something much more like "Hurrah, ice cream!" or "Boo, jalapeno toothpaste!" but we still recognize that, even though we are using predication to express our feelings, that we are not making moral statements when we do this. We recognize that "Ice cream is good" and "Not killing innocents is good" are different–the latter involves a different (and more important) kind of goodness than the first. In the same way, "Torturing babies is bad" seems to mean something different and more important than "Jalapeno toothpaste is bad."

Another problem with emotivism is that we often have emotions that are out of synch with our moral convictions. At a given moment, a person may feel emotionally numb yet still maintain that "Abortion is wrong" or "War is wrong" or whatever moral statement you might want to have him make at a moment of emotional numbness.

Further, our emotions may be directly contrary to our moral convictions. A young man looking at a pretty girl may maintain that "Sex outside of marriage is wrong!" even though at the moment his emotions at the moment are strongly urging him to violate his moral commitment.

The fact that our emotions may be absent or directly contrary to our moral convictions thus makes it seem doubly unlikely that when we utter our moral convictions we are merely expressing emotions.

Another problem is that emotivism is simply false in the case of many individuals. Myself, f’rinstance. When I say "Abortion is wrong" I mean that there is a moral quality known as "wrongness" that supervenes on acts of abortion the same way that greenness supervenes on well-watered grass. In other words, I mean that wrong things really are wrong.

I think most people fall into that category. Not having gone to grad school in philosophy, most folks may not have analyzed it to this extent or have the same vocabulary to express it, but I think that when most people say something is morally wrong that they mean it really is morally wrong and that they aren’t simply venting their emotions.

You might suppose that they are incorrect about this, that there are no moral properties in the world, and so that people are simply wrong when they attribute moral properties to things, but that tells you nothing about what people mean when they make these attributions.

In the old days a good number of people believed that luckiness and unluckiness were objectively real properties. Thus they would say that certain numbers or animals or omens were "lucky" and others were "unlucky" and think that they were talking about objectively real properties that supervened on these things.

Today we may still use the words "lucky" and "unlucky," but the great majority of folks don’t literally believe in the objective existence of luck-related properties (even if they may pretend for fun that they do when going to Vegas). If anyone today does have a naive belief in luck, we’d dismiss it as superstition, but we’d be wrong to try to tell him that he doesn’t mean "My rabbit’s foot is lucky" if he means that it really is lucky.

In the same way, I think emotivists (and other non-cognitivists) are simply mistaken when they say that folks don’t mean what they say when they claim that something is morally right or wrong. The non-cognitivist may not believe in moral rightness or wrongness, but that tells him nothing about what ordinary folks do mean.

Most folks are, as fer as I kin tell, cognitivists.

But here’s another issue: This is really an empirical question. Ever since grad school, I’ve thought that philosophers on both sides of the cognitivist divide have been spinning their wheels arguing about what moral statements "really" mean. They mean what people use them to mean! If you want to know what that is, analyze the possibilities (this has been done in spades) and then take a survey!

It’d have to be a very carefully worded survey to avoid biasing folks against one theory or another, but that’s the real way to get at what they mean when they make moral utterances.

And my intuition, interaction with others, and my knowledge of the history of moral thought tells me: Most folks are cognitivists. That is, they believe moral statements are true or false.

An emotivist may not believe that any more than I believe that statements about luck describe objectively real qualities but it’s a mistake to confuse a theory of what a class of utterance means with whether it describes the world.

It is thus a category mistake to try to substitute a theory about the existence of morals for a theory of the meaning of moral utterances. To use technical jargon, it’s a category mistake confusing ontology with semantics.

Which is a pity since the folks who pioneered the non-cognitive theories of morals were folks who were very much concerned with avoiding category mistakes–or at least of accusing others of making them.

MORE HERE.

AND HERE.