Lecture 7
The Irrealist Option: Emotivism
[Revised Spring 2009]
So far we have looked at the most obvious kind of moral irrealism, moral nihilism. Moral nihilists accept one of the realists theses, semantic realism. They believe that our moral language is “cognitivist” in the sense that it is supposed or assumed to describe something objective and we think that when we get it right our judgments are true and are otherwise false. But, it rejects metaethical realism. It says that, as a matter of fact, there is no such moral realm. Morality involves a large scale error or illusion. In this lecture I will turn to a second kind of moral irrealism, emotivism. Emotivism came in to its own in the middle of the twentieth century.i Its most important proponent was Charles Stevenson.ii Emotivism agrees with moral nihilism that there is no objective moral truth. But emotivism also rejects the nihilist’s analogy between morality and fairy tales. It rejects error or illusion theory. For emotivism, moral judgments are not supposed to capture a truth, so there is no room for error. Rather, moral judgments are like expressions of tastes, of likes and dislikes, of pro and con attitudes. As such, they are not true, but neither are they false the way a fairy tale is false. The idea is this. For many people, the metaethical question about the nature of morality is a question about reality, what we call a “metaphysical” question. As such, it might be put “Do moral facts exist in some objective way.” For emotivism, the basic question is not this metaphysical one (though it has an answer to it) but rather a question about language. Emotivism grows out of a tradition that converts philosophical questions into questions about language. 1
“What is the nature of morality?” becomes “What is the nature of moral language?” The nature of language, and of key notions associated with language like “meaning,” is much contested. There is an entire philosophical discipline, the philosophy of language, devoted to studying it. Charles Stevenson did the most to develop and promulgate a distinctive theory of moral language I will call the “emotivist theory of moral language,” though it goes beyond merely talking about moral language. For Stevenson, the meaning of a word or sentence is given by the psychological causes and effects it has a tendency to be connected with for all those who speak the language in question. We get different kinds of meaning depending on the different kinds of psychological states that are typically connected, as cause and effect, with words. It is important to distinguish between two kinds of meaning, descriptive and emotive. A sentence has descriptive meaning if it is typically used by someone with a belief to record, clarify or communicate that belief. I will refer to sentences for which this is the main function as “descriptive sentences.” These purport to describe the world. They can be specific and concrete, for example, “Clinton was president in 1987." Or they can be more general, say, “Cats eat dogs for supper.” Other descriptive sentences are “theoretical,” as in descriptions of the quantum world. Though a descriptive sentence purports to describe the world, it might describe the world incorrectly. The sentence about Clinton describes the world correctly and the sentence about cats does not. The former is true and the latter is false. Besides descriptive sentences, there are non­descriptive sentences. These are sentences that do not even purport to describe the world and hence are neither true nor false. One kind is the question, say, “Did you summer in the South Bronx?” or “How fast is the speed of light?” These sentences ask about the world; they do not describe it. A question can be good 2
or bad, thoughtful or mindless, but it cannot be true or false. Two other kinds of non­descriptive sentences are requests and commands, for example, “Please pass the barbequed frog tongues,” or “Do not run into the street without looking both ways.” A request or a command does not purport to describe the world. It asks or tells us to make the world a certain way. They can be wise or foolish, but they cannot be true or false. I will mention one last kind of non­descriptive sentence. These are sentences which have as their main function the expression and perhaps the communication of emotion or feeling. Stevenson speaks of such sentences as having “emotive meaning” since they are typically used by someone with an “affective” state, for example, pro and con attitudes or emotions, to express and sometimes to communicate that affective state to others. I slam my thumb with a hammer and out comes “!#$%*&^!”. Superman once more goes off to save Lois Lane and Perry White shouts “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” I discover a nut in my chocolate chip cookie and shriek “Yuck!” with all the appropriate spitting behavior. These expressions are not designed to describe the world. They are meant to express feelings. When Perry White shouts “Great Caesars Ghost,” he is not saying “Oh, there is that pesky ghost again.” He is giving vent to feeling. When I say “Yuck!” upon biting into a peanut, I am not saying that my cookie has the property of “yuckiness” the way it has the property of being full of sugar. Rather, I am giving vent to my horror. Such expressions might be appropriate or out of line, but they are neither true nor false. When I shriek and sputter in response to a surprise nut in my cookie, my companions might say “How you do carry on about nothing” and “Grow up,” but they cannot reasonably say “What you just said is false.”
Meaning in the world of real language is complex and Stevenson's theory must 3
acknowledge this complexity. For example, a sentence or word might be ambiguous and have several distinct meanings, as the word “right” can be an evaluative term (the opposite of “wrong”) or a term indicating a direction (the opposite of “left”). Again, a sentence or word might have both emotive and descriptive meaning, that is, it might typically be used to communicate both ideas and attitudes, without being ambiguous. For example, “This apple is good” is probably communicating a favorable attitude as well as some specific information, say, that the apple is crisp. Things get even more complex when we consider that words and sentences can be used in ways that are idiosyncratic to an individual and a situation. For example, I might use the sentence “It is cold in here” descriptively, to state a fact, but also emotively, to express my displeasure. I can even use it, in Stevenson’s terms, “dynamically,” to get someone to close the window, and to remind you of Joe who died the year before from a draft in this very room. When one makes a moral judgment, or an evaluative judgment generally, one typically uses sentences that appear on the surface to be descriptive sentences. “That action is right” looks a lot like “The chair is blue.” Both pick something out, an action or a chair, and seem to assign a property to it, rightness or blueness. This is part of the argument, mentioned above, that morality embodies an assumption of objectivity: our very language seems to embody this assumption. But, says the emotivist, the appearance is deceiving. When we make an evaluative judgment, whether or not moral, we are not generally trying to describe the world at all. Rather, the primary meaning of such sentences is emotive. Whatever the surface appearance of this language, what we are really doing is expressing our tastes and attitudes. When I say “It was 4
wrong for Luke’s father to turn to the Dark Side,” I am saying something like ”Luke’s father’s turning to the Dark Side, yuck!” All our evaluative vocabulary, whether in morality, aesthetics, or elsewhere, mainly consists of fancy ways to say “yuck” and “yum,” or “boo” and “hurrah.” Thus the simplest version of emotivism has been called the “boo­hurrah” theory of ethics. Stevenson’s own view is more complex than this, but we do not need the details here. If evaluative judgments like “It is wrong for Luke’s father to turn to the Dark Side” are really ways of saying “yuck!” and “yum,” then strictly speaking, moral and other evaluative judgments are no more true or false than Perry White’s “Great Caesar’s Ghost” is true nor false. These are not the sorts of sentences that can be true or false. Does this mean that evaluations in general, and moral judgments in particular, are somehow defective and to be rejected the way the moral nihilist believes? Not at all. According to the moral nihilist, moral judgments are descriptive sentences, but defective ones since they embody a fundamental error: there is no moral reality to talk about. For the emotivist, moral judgments are not defective descriptive sentences. Their purpose is very different from that of descriptive sentences. It is to express emotion and to affect the emotions of others. Since this is a valuable purpose, as important in its own way as accurately describing the world, moral language must be kept and used, so long as we properly understand what it involves. Tossing out emotive language on the grounds that it is not descriptive is as dumb as tossing out questions, requests, commands, and a host of other non­
descriptive sentences, on the grounds that they are not descriptive. This view is a species of what has come to be called “non­cognitivism.” The idea is that the main content of an evaluative judgment is not “cognitive,” that is, descriptive, but something else, perhaps to express and 5
communicate emotions. Of course, as already mentioned, one and the same sentence can have multiple uses and multiple meanings. There is, in fact, no simple answer to the question “What is the meaning of the word ‘good’?” For one thing, there are many meanings for the word “good.” It is ambiguous in ways I will illustrate shortly. In this respect, it is like a host of other words with multiple meanings including the one we saw earlier, “right,” but also ones having nothing to do with morality such as “mug” which can refer to a sort of cup or to a person’s face. Further, the meaning of the term as it is used on any particular occasion can include both emotive and descriptive meanings. In general, the emotive meaning of “good” is positive: it expresses and communicates a positive attitude. But descriptive meaning can vary widely, depending on case. For example, when I say that “The apple is good,” the emotive meaning is positive and part of the descriptive meaning is that it is crisp. When I say that “This car is good,” the emotive meaning is positive and part of the descriptive meaning is about reliability. It says nothing about crispness. In most cases, the positive emotive meaning of the word “good” dominates, as in the above two examples. In fact, often when we use the word “good” there is no descriptive meaning at all. It is simply used to express and communicate positive attitudes. But emotive meaning does not have to dominate. For example, a person can grade apples who does not like apples and who would never really want to express a pro­attitude about apples. A confirmed apple hater could be hired as an apple grader and he will probably have little trouble grading them as good and bad. Again, if I say that “Jack the Ripper was the greatest of the serial killers,” I am probably not expressing a pro­attitude, and neither would most other speakers of the 6
language. In fact, in some contexts, “good” can take on a negative emotive meaning as in the disparaging “Your too good to live with” and the rather nasty “goodie two shoes.” (It is interesting, that in modern talk, the word “bad” can take on the emotive meaning usually associated with “good.”) A word of warning. I have explained the emotivist’s views on the nature of moral judgments by analogy with our judgments about food using highly technical terms like “yum” and “yuck.” But the analogy between moral judgments and judgments about food is not perfect, and it will help if I mention one reason for this. We usually take our moral tastes to be important in ways that we usually do not take food tastes to be important. Of course, some people have moral opinions that are not very lively, and some people have food tastes that are very strong. Food tastes are often stronger than moral tastes. Still, no matter how strongly we feel about food, for most of us, our moral tastes have a special importance that our food tastes do not have. I have some very strong food tastes. There are foods I am quite passionate about, and others are so repugnant that I would have trouble chocking them down were my life to depend on it. Yet, I feel little or no impulse to try to get others to share even my strongest food tastes. In fact, I feel it would be bad if people shared some of my food hates, and I wish I did not have them myself. My hatred of peanuts means there are innocent pleasures I cannot enjoy. I would shed this hate if I could and I would never try to talk someone else into sharing it. Nor would I act against people who eat peanuts, or to try to pass a law against eating them. (Though, for some inexplicable reason, many lovers of the repulsive peanut are quite offended at my dislike and have the odd view that they need to argue with me about it. I take these to be people who are so corrupt as to 7
confuse the moral with the culinary.) My moral tastes are often different. I care that others share them and act in accordance with them, whether or not I would impose penalties on those who do not conform. This suggests a possible characterization of specifically moral tastes that an emotivist might like. My moral tastes are those I want others to share, and so on. This may or may not be quite right. After all, there are obnoxious folk who treat even their most trivial likes and dislikes as if they were of moral significance: those of us who strongly dislike the putrid taste and smell of certain cheeses know the scorn of the “true connoisseur” of cheese. But the distinction seems to be in the ballpark. In any event, the main point here is that, good as it is, we cannot push the analogy between taste in food and moral judgment too far.
The Origin of Modern Emotivism. It will help us understand emotivism to see where it came from, though those less interested in history might skip this section. Actually, there are two stories to be told here. One story traces its origin to a problem faced by the rise of philosophical naturalism. We have already briefly touched on emotivism’s connection with philosophical naturalism and how it is a possible view for the irrealist who wishes to avoid metaethical nihilism. More specifically, it grew out of the concerns of a group of thinkers called “logical positivists” or “radical empiricists,” especially the British philosopher A. J. Ayer.iii Ayer and his fellow logical positivists rejected a long standing view which I will call the “traditional view” since it was popular before Ayer, though it is less so today. To understand the traditional view, and Ayer’s rejection of it, we need two standard distinctions widely used in philosophy for a long time. The first is between two kinds of sentences and the second is between two kinds of knowledge.
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The first distinction is one we already touched on in our discussion of Moore. It is between analytically true or false sentences and synthetically true or false sentences. Analytically true or false sentences are sentences that are supposed to be true or false simply by virtue of the meanings of the words. It is sometimes said that the predicate of an analytically true sentence is “contained in” the subject. Once one has the concept of the subject, one can simply think one’s way to the concept of the predicate. In the case of analytically false sentences, the rejection of the predicate is already contained in the subject, so once one has the concept of the subject, one can simply think one’s way to the rejection of the predicate. Examples of analytically true sentences include “All bachelors are unmarried” and “All triangles have three sides.” Examples of analytically false sentences include “All bachelors are married” and “Triangles have eight sides.” Synthetically true or false sentences are those whose truth or falsity does not turn simply on the meanings of words. The concept of the predicate is not included in, or automatically excluded from, the concept of the subject. “I (Levy) live in Bozeman” is synthetically true and “The earth is the center of the universe” is synthetically false. One can understand quite well who I am and what the earth is and still not know whether I live in Bozeman or whether the earth is the center. The second distinction is between A posteriori knowledge and a priori knowledge. A posteriori knowledge is empirical knowledge, that is, knowledge that can only be obtained on the basis of experience. For example, the only way I can know whether or not John is in the room is by some sort of experience: I see him, hear him, consult with someone else who has seen or heard him, and so on. A priori knowledge is knowledge that can be had without experience. It is sometimes described as knowledge that can 9
be obtained by pure thought. For example, I can know a priori, by pure thought, that a triangle has three sides and that the sum of the interior angles equals two right angles. Given these categories, the traditional view makes three claims. (1) All analytic sentences are knowable a priori, without need of experience. For example, that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles is analytic and is knowable a priori. (2) Many synthetic sentences are knowable only a posteriori, on the basis of experience. That Clinton did, or did not, drop his pants, or that Bush did, or did not, show up for all his National Guard duty are synthetic and knowable only by experience. (3) Some synthetic sentences are knowable a priori. This includes many sentences most loved by metaphysicians such as “Everything has a cause.” That everything has a cause is synthetic. It is not like “All triangles have three sides.” But unlike many synthetic statements, it is hard to see how this one can be proven by experience. Experience can show us that this or that event has a cause, but how could experience show us that everything has a cause? So if we know that everything has a cause, we must know it a priori. Many metaphysicians have said just that. Readers acquainted with Descartes will recall that, at crucial points in the development of his “First Philosophy,” he pulls this principle out of the air, attributing our knowledge of it to “the light of nature.” Not all traditionalists agree on just what goes into which category. One person might argue that a given synthetic sentence is knowable a priori, and another that it is knowable only a posteriori, or not at all. Again, are the truths of arithmetic or geometry analytic and a priori? Or might they be synthetic and a priori? One might even try to argue that they are not analytic at all, but rather synthetic a posteriori.
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The traditional view’s identification of the analytic with the a priori seems plausible. When a predicate is just contained in a concept, we should be able to pull it out by pure thought. And the identification of much of the synthetic with the a posteriori is also reasonable. Usually, when a predicate is not contained in a concept, pure thought cannot tell us whether or not they are connected. We need to inspect the world. But the third claim, that many synthetic sentences are a posteriori, struck people like Ayer as questionable. The radical empiricists argued that all synthetic statements are a posteriori, and if they cannot be known on the basis of experience, they cannot be known at all. This is important for traditional philosophy, especially metaphysics. Prior to the rise of radical empiricism (and even after), philosophers routinely made wide use of principles that seemed synthetic, but which did not seem provable on the basis of experience. If they were to use these principles, and avoid the charge of sheer arbitrariness, they had to say they were knowable a priori. The radical empiricists thought that these metaphysicians were cheating. Since their synthetic metaphysical claims were not empirically provable, and since the metaphysicians really wanted to use them, they simply did so and then invented fancy jargon to rationalize what they did. They really wanted to use these claims and thought that if they shouted them very loud (or whispered them very softly, hoping no one would notice), and shut their eyes very tight and muttered over and over again the magical mantra ­­ “synthetic a priori, light of nature”­­everything would turn out fine. For the radical empiricists, if a synthetic sentence is not knowable through experience, it is not knowable at all. But they go further than that. They argue that the supposed synthetic a priori sentences were outright gibberish. They were meaningless just like “This house is 11
supercalefragelisticexpialadoscious” is meaningless. To be meaningful, a sentence had to be testable, that is, confirmable or disconfirmable. That does not mean it must actually be confirmed or disconfirmed. It only means that it had to be open to confirmation or disconfirmation. This is the famed and still influential “verificationist principle.” They said that the only possible tests for a synthetic sentence must rely on experience. So, if you have synthetic sentences that are not open to empirical testing, they have no meaning at all. They are literally meaningless gibberish fit to amuse children like Lewis Carroll’s: "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
Armed with their verificationist theory of meaning, in one blow, the radical empiricists swept aside all supposed synthetic a priori sentences and all the philosophy that rested on them. This included much traditional metaphysics, but also many religious beliefs since most religious beliefs are synthetic but not open to empirical testing. Into the can went claims about God, the soul, and the afterlife. They did not say that these views are false. To say they are false would accord them too much respect. Rather, these statements are meaningless babble. As you might guess, the radical empiricists had an underlying goal. They were not simply concerned with the purely philosophical task of contesting metaphysical views. They were engaged in the battle for our allegiance between empirical science and certain kinds of philosophy and religion. They wanted to show that for synthetic knowledge, at least, empirical 12
science is not only the leading, but the only alternative. Properly done, science formulates hypotheses, and does so in a way that makes them empirically testable, thereby giving them meaning. Sometimes a scientist’s hypothesis is disconfirmed by experience, and sometimes it is confirmed by experience. But all genuine scientific hypotheses are testable. The claims of philosophical metaphysicians, as well as religious folk, to alternative and possibly better ways of knowing were dismissed. We have taken a digression, and it is time to return to ethics. The logical positivist view has a significant consequence for ethics. Most interesting ethical statements seem to be synthetic. For example “Abortion is wrong” or “Abortion is morally acceptable” are synthetic statements. Their truth or falsity does not turn simply on the meanings of words or the analysis of concepts. So, the radical empiricists said, if they are verifiable at all, it will have to be empirically, through experience, more or less like scientific claims are. But the radical empiricists thought that they are not empirically verifiable. So by the verificationist theory of meaning, moral statements are meaningless just as many metaphysical and religious statements are. However, though Ayer was satisfied with this result for metaphysics and religion, he was not happy with it for ethics. He thought that even though moral and other normative judgments were not meaningful in the strict sense, they were not babble. He had to come up with an alternative theory of meaning for such sentences. Verificationism came to be viewed as a theory of meaning only for descriptive sentences, sentences that purport to describe the world, but evaluative sentences, he said, were not supposed to be descriptive. They have another job and a different kind of meaning. Their job was to express emotion and their meaning was found in the emotion 13
expressed. This meant that a sentence like “That action is right” has more or less the meaning “That action, hurrah!” and the sentence “That action is wrong” has more or less the meaning, “That action, boo!” Thus, modern emotivism was born.
As I said, there is another story to be told about the rise of emotivism, a story told by Alasdair MacIntyre.iv I will be more brief with this one. MacIntyre’s story implicates G. E. Moore as the unwitting source of the view. MacIntyre is a critic of emotivism, and of other views he takes to be related to emotivism. He thinks its rise is a symptom of a disorder in our moral thinking. But what is interesting here is his account of the rise of emotivism. Emotivists claim, he says, to be giving a theory of moral language generally, but what they are really doing is, perhaps, giving an account of moral language in England at the start of the twentieth century, and more particularly, of the moral language of a group of philosophers centered around G. E. Moore. Now on this face of it, this seems very strange. For Moore and his followers were intuitionists and presumably would be using moral language in accordance with Moore’s own theory. But this is rendered problematical by the fact that, as MacIntyre says, much of Moore’s theory is plainly false. MacIntyre takes a point from one of the participants in the discussions with Moore, the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes described people sitting around trying to determine whether this was better or worse than that. Interestingly, the questions this group focused on would seem odd to moral philosophers today, questions like “If A was in love with B under a misapprehension as to B’s qualities, was this better or worse than A’s not being in love at all?” (p. 17). Now the answer to such a question, for Moore, would involve the apprehension of the presence or absence of the non­natural property of goodness, or 14
of its degrees. But, says Keynes, what really happened in these discussions was this. Victory went to those who could speak with the greatest clear conviction and could best use the “accents of infallibility.” MacIntyre writes “these people take themselves to be identifying the presence of a non­natural property, which they call ‘good’; but there is in fact no such property and they are doing no more and no other than expressing their feelings and attitudes, disguising the expression of preference and whim by an interpretation of their own utterance and behavior confers upon it an objectivity that it does not in fact possess” (p. 17). It is no wonder, MacIntyre goes on to say, that some of the most important founders of emotivism, including Stevenson, were students of Moore’s and may have just been reporting the reality that underlay Moore’s self­deception. The Nature of Emotivist Argument
It might seem that for emotivists, there is no room for rational argument in ethics. The reason rational argument is proper in science is that science has the goal of finding truth. Rational argument is designed to increase the probability that we will find truth. Techniques that are not likely to lead to truth are dismissed as fallacious, as sophistry, as propaganda. But for the emotivist, moral judgment is just the expression of emotion. There is no moral truth. Hence, some have concluded, rational argument has no role in ethics for emotivists. I will begin by accepting this assumption and consider what moral argument might look like given that it is not rational argument. I will then drop that assumption and show that even for emotivists, there is room for clearly rational argument in morality. What will moral argument look like for the emotivist given that it is not rational argument? Like anyone else, emotivists can care passionately that others share their moral tastes 15
and behaviors. Moral argument will have the role of persuading others to share these tastes and behaviors. When our goal is truth, the criterion for proper argument is whether or not it helps attain truth. The study of such techniques includes logic and statistics. For the emotivist, the goal of moral argument is persuasion, or more accurately, to get others to share our attitudes, and the criterion for proper argument is whether or not it does this. Argumentative techniques which, if employed in science would be illegitimate since they are not conducive to finding truth, are legitimate in ethics, if they persuade. How do we persuade? The leading American emotivist, Charles Stevenson claims that the bare use of moral language, for example, saying "X is good," can cause others to share our attitudes, at least to some extent.v Perhaps attitudes are like yawns. Merely to express them causes others, to some extent, to share them. But when the bare expression of one's feelings do not persuade, argument can be brought in. The study of techniques of persuasion is a topic for psychology, or perhaps for "rhetoric." But for the philosopher, the natural place to begin the study of persuasion is the chapter of any logic book dealing with the fallacies. These are forms of argument that should be avoided in science and in most other places since they are not likely to lead to truth, but they are potentially powerful tools of persuasion, though ones that can backfire. Here is an example of an appeal to emotion, one of the standard fallacies in logic texts. Quite a few years ago, anti­abortionists made wide use of a film called "The Silent Scream." If my distant, secondhand memory of the discussion serves me ­­ I never actually saw the film­­it shows the silently screaming fetus as it is ripped from its mother’s womb. The film was condemned by the pro­choice crowd as a blatant appeal to irrational emotion, a fallacy. But they 16
themselves used similar techniques. For example, I remember a comic strip (unfortunately, I do not remember whose), in which a television interviewer conducts an interview with a zygote about to be aborted. The camera moves in on the "baby" and finally comes to rest on a spot the size of a speck of dust. The interviewer holds a microphone to the speck for a comment. There is none. Needless to say, the anti­abortion crowd condemned this satirical attack as mere propaganda. What would the emotivist say about all this? That both sides were using perfectly legitimate techniques of moral argumentation. Appeals to emotion met by ridicule met by indignation met by more appeals to emotion. Once again, there is no moral truth so such techniques cannot draw us from the truth. The only criterion is whether or not they are effective in persuading. Even if there is no role for rational moral argumentation in ethics, the appearance that one is using rational argument has a role. This is because most of us at least pretend to have a high regard for reason and resent being manipulated emotionally. Appearing to take the side of reason, even if there actually is no “side of reason,” and claiming that one's opponent is not, can be an effective technique of persuasion. Painting one's opponent with the colors of irrationality, of emotion, of sophistry, of propaganda, can effectively discredit him, while a cool, calm voice, careful, thoughtful pauses before rendering judgment, and so on, can be compelling, even if those judgments are every bit as much expressions of emotion as one's opponents’ judgments. Philosophers in particular often cloth moral argumentation with all the trappings of logic, carefully distinguishing premises from conclusion, arranging them in precise ways, and fastidiously clarifying all terms. Such techniques help to attain truth, where there is truth. 17
Where there is no truth, they cannot help us reach it. Yet, depending on one's audience, they can persuade even though they are only a trick. But such techniques can backfire. Depending on the audience, the fire of the preacher is sometimes more effective in persuading than the coolness of the philosopher. We only have to remember George Dukakis’s response, during his disastrous bid for the presidency, to the question of how he would feel about capital punishment if his wife were murdered. His cool, calm, unemotional anti­capital punishment response shocked many of the more blood thirsty and vengeful, and disturbed even anti­capital punishment folk. It all depends on the audience. Since the test is persuasiveness, and different techniques persuade different people, there is no reason to restrict ourselves to one or the other.
So far, I have considered what moral argument looks like for the emotivist on the assumption that there is no room for genuinely rational thought or argument in ethics. I now question that assumption. Emotivism does have room for rational moral argument in several ways. The reason some people deny it is that rational argument is designed to help us get at truth while emotivists believe there is no moral truth. However, this reasoning turns on an overly restrictive use of the word "rational." There is a legitimate use of the word that allows us to inquire about the rationality of emotion, including moral emotions. This point is easy to misunderstand. First, I am not saying that rational argument is adequate, on an emotivist view, to bring about complete agreement between people. There is no reason why it should be able to do this since rational argument does not always bring complete agreement even in science either. Second, I am not saying that rational argument in ethics is exactly the same as in science, though sometimes it is similar and can even borrow from science. 18
I will explain three ways in which rational argument can be employed by emotivists. First, for emotivists, moral judgments are expressions of emotion, but our emotions are often based on how we understand the facts. Clarifying the facts can rationally change emotions. Suppose I judge that capital punishment is right for murder and you judge it wrong. Our disagreement could be of several different kinds. We could differ on pure moral principles. You might hold life "sacred" in a way and to a degree that I do not. Alternatively, we could agree completely in our pure moral beliefs, say, that we should adopt a policy that preserves the most life on the whole. Our disagreement might be about whether capital punishment actually does this since I believe that it will have a significant deterrent effect while you do not. In this case, our dispute is about the facts and can be addressed using the tools of social science. These tools might not be able to answer our questions with certainty, but nevertheless, the issue of whether or not capital punishment deters, and if so, how much, is a factual matter. In so far as our attitudes about capital punishment turn on such facts, they are open to rational critique.
What I have said so far is pretty much beyond controversy for emotivists, but many emotivists think that this is as far as rational argument goes in ethics. We can argue about moral judgments when they are based on facts, but the ultimate moral principles themselves are beyond argument. I will now show that emotivists can go further, even if many do not actually take these further steps. The second place rational argument will be possible, even for emotivists, is this. Just as our beliefs can be inconsistent, so can our emotions be inconsistent, and just as rationality demands consistency in belief, so, arguably, does it demand consistency in emotion. This does not mean that everyone wants their emotions to be consistent – I have met people who pride 19
themselves on the inconsistency of their feelings. Nor does it mean that we are always able to make our emotions consistent. Often this is beyond our control. But in these respects, emotion is on all fours with belief. Many people do not prize consistency of belief, and many who want it find it hard to attain. Consistency arguments are very important in ethics. These are arguments designed to expose inconsistencies in one’s moral positions, and to do it in a way that suggests one resolution over another. Such arguments can be employed by and against emotivists just as they can be employed by and against objectivists. Here is a famous example having to do with the moral status of animals. Suppose Oscar is an objectivist and Eleanor is an emotivist. Both have long assumed that it is morally acceptable to eat and perform medical experiments on animals without their consent, but that it is usually wrong to perform medical experiments on humans without their consent, and virtually never right to eat them with or without their consent. When asked why, they respond in unison, “It is wrong to do this to humans because they are rational and it is permissible to do this to animals because they are not.” Oscar views this principle to be an objective moral fact while Eleanor views it as a matter of personal emotion, but they both feel strongly about it. One day they bump into Peter who points out to them that severely psychologically impaired humans can be much less rational than the average dog or cat. So, by their principles, it is wrong to do experiments on these individuals because they are human, and right to do it because they are not rational: a contradiction. Peter points this out in the hopes that they will stop eating animals. Oscar and Eleanor may or may not resolve the contradiction in the way Peter hopes, but they will probably both be disturbed by Peter’s argument and try, as best they can, to resolve the contradiction. The emotivist Eleanor will feel 20
the pressure just as much as the objectivist Oscar. So far, we have considered the possibility that emotions might be irrational because they are inconsistent, but some people believe emotions can be criticized on another basis, as irrational in themselves. This is a controversial view. Following Hume, many believe that reason is the handmaiden of emotion, and not its master. Emotion is neither rational nor irrational in itself. It is not, in itself, open to rational critique. In one of his most often quoted passages, Hume writes:
. . . it is only in two senses that any affection can be called unreasonable. First, when a passion such as hope or fear, grief or joy, despair or security, is founded on the supposition of the existence of objects, which really do not exist. Secondly, when in exerting any passion in action, we choose means insufficient for the designed end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects. Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chooses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian, or person wholly unknown to me. It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledge lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the later. (Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Sec.3.0)
Though the view that emotion can, contrary to Hume, be rationally critiqued is not usually associated with emotivism, emotivism can benefit from it. One approach to the idea that 21
emotion can be rationally critiqued comes from the philosopher Richard Brandt.vi It is a version of what is called a “full information theory.” Full information theory says that the good for a particular individual is to be identified with what that individual would choose were she fully informed. Brandt runs a special kind of full information theory. He has a particular take on what having full information involves. It does not just involve being given information which one assents to in a merely intellectual way. Rather, he calls a person’s desire or aversion “rational” if it would survive or be produced by careful “cognitive psychotherapy,” where cognitive psychotherapy is the “process of confronting desires with relevant information, by repeatedly representing it, in an ideally vivid way, and at an appropriate time” (p. 113). Brandt believes that many desires and aversions are irrational on this approach (115ff). First, there are desires and aversions that were formed not on the basis of direct exposure to the relevant objects, but on the basis of adopting the attitudes of those around us. For example, because a child hears many derogatory remarks from parents and friends, she might come to view as demeaning a potentially rewarding job or a marriage to someone of a different race, ethnicity or religion. Second, we sometimes improperly generalize responses from our experiences. For example, a child who was bit by a dog may come to see all dogs as fearsome. Third, someone deprived of some things in childhood, such as affection or recognition, might come to have an irrationally strong desire for them. Though Brandt’s theory is controversial in its details, the basic point is plausible. There are desires and aversions, as well as emotions generally, that are irrational. These might be rather trivial. I have a strong aversion to nuts, including anything with “nut” in the name, like 22
“coconut.” This is probably one of those irrational over generalizations Brandt talks about which is rooted in a genuine dislike of peanuts ­­ which everyone keeps telling me isn’t even a nut and tastes nothing like many other nuts. There are also more important examples, including morally important ones. Suppose Sue hates George just because he is black. She does not hate him because she believe all blacks are violent, shiftless, stupid, or whatever. She once believed those things, but now knows they are silly. In particular, she knows that George is not violent, shiftless, stupid, or anything else that might justify her dislike. It is an odd and sometimes unfortunate fact of human psychology that attitudes, including aversions, can survive the beliefs that originally gave birth to them. Like my aversion to nuts, this is probably an irrational emotion, and could well turn out to be irrational on Brandt’s approach.
Let me summarize the discussion of the nature of moral argument for emotivists. Moral argument has a large non­rational component. If an argumentative technique gets you to share my attitude, it is legitimate, even if the technique would be illegitimate in the search for truth. There is also room for rational techniques of moral argument. First, emotions, and the resulting moral judgments, might be based on a misunderstanding of the facts. Second, emotions can be inconsistent. Third, it is possible to directly attack the rationality of emotions using something like Brandt’s cognitive psychotherapy.
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Endnotes
i
Though it did have precursors, for example, in the work of David Hume and in the twentieth century, A. J. Ayre. ii
For two classic works on emotivism, see Charles Stevenson,, “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms” Mind (1937) 46, and Ethics and Language (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1945). iii
See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover Press, 1952) iv
After Virtue, third edition. (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 2007). First published in 1981. See chapter 2, especially p 14ff.
v
Charles Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1945; Facts and Values (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press,1963). vi
For an early version of Brandt’s view, see his “Rational Desires”, 1970 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, reprinted in Morality, Utilitarianism and Rights (Cambridge University Press, 1992). For a fuller development, of the view, see his A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).