Cognitivism and Ethics

Cognitivism in ethics maintains that ethical convictions (regarding actions, states of affairs, or character traits) function the same way as other ordinary beliefs in that they are capable of being true or false. Cognitivism, therefore, holds that such convictions have propositional content and their correctness or incorrectness is determined by whether they are true or false, respectively. So, for instance, ethical claims such as “it would be unjust to terminate that employee” or “it is dishonorable for him to deceive her like that” are conveying states of mind regarding just and honorable behavior that can be determined to be true or false. In this regard, cognitivism is a metaethical thesis regarding the semantic status of ethical claims that has both ontological and epistemological implications regarding what is true and what we can know to be true.

Cognitivists disagree with noncognitivists who maintain that ethical convictions actually express attitudes, feelings, desires, or other affective states of mind and, as such, are not capable of being true or false. This disagreement has significant implications for the supposed objectivity of ethical claims; cognitivist views tend to defend the objectivity of ethical judgment because they ground the correctness of ethical evaluations in what is literally true and false—either about the world or as a matter of reason. Noncognitivists of various stripes are thought to advocate a kind of subjectivism whereby ethical convictions express nothing more than attitudes, feelings, desires, or preferences. One needs to exercise caution here, however, since subtle differences between various forms of cognitivism and noncognitivism may not easily map on to the distinction between objectivism and subjectivism in ethics. One plausible form of cognitivism, for instance, asserts that ethical claims function as summary reports of attitudes, desires, or preferences toward a certain kind of act. On this variant of cognitivism, to think that “it would be unjust to terminate that employee” is tantamount to thinking “I (or my group) disapprove of that employee's termination.” We can evaluate the truth or falsity of this ethical conviction by simply consulting whether the relevant individual (or group) possesses the attitude, feeling, or desire implied by the claim. This is undoubtedly a cognitivist account of one's convictions, but it remains fundamentally subjectivist because it identifies what is ethically true with prevailing human attitudes, desires, or feelings. In short, there is a fundamental difference between reporting facts about what an individual or group prefers (a cognitive, truth-apt matter) and the expression of such preferences (a noncognitive, affective matter). Despite this kind of [Page 339]complexity, there is a clear tendency among cognitivist theorists to defend a notion of moral truth that is not reducible to desires, attitudes, and preferences, hence the generalization that cognitivism supports objectivism in ethics.

To the extent that cognitivists assert the truth aptness of ethical claims, an important question immediately arises for cognitivism, “What does ethical truth consist in?” The answer to this question is complicated and will occupy the remainder of this entry.

One avenue that theorists have taken to defend cognitivism in ethics is represented by so-called moral realists. Realists maintain that (1) ethical claims are genuine claims in the sense that they purport to describe intrinsic ethical facts found in the world and (2) such ethical facts actually exist. So, in the above examples, there are facts about whether certain actions are unjust or dishonorable, independent of our judgments about them. More important, the normative force of such predicates—that we have inescapable obligations to refrain from unjust and dishonorable behavior—is irreducibly part of the very nature of unjust and dishonorable actions. Realists assert that actions have an ethical character just as they have other factually identifiable properties.

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