Noncognitivism

Noncognitivists maintain that moral judgments are more appropriately viewed as expressions of attitudes, preferences, or desires rather than propositional claims about factual states of affairs. They typically subscribe to two related notions: First, moral statements are linguistically incapable of being true or false, and second, psychologically speaking, moral judgments are not reports of belief but indicators of other affective states of mind. Noncognitivism in ethics, thus, is a metaethical thesis regarding the truth aptness of moral judgments.

There are three principal forms of noncognitivism. Emotivism is the noncognitivist view that holds that moral utterances about good, bad, right, wrong, virtue, and vice (along with judgments concerning so-called thick moral concepts like justice, bravery, and beneficence) are emotional expressions of supportive or negative attitudes toward actions and individuals. So, for example, the moral judgment that “Charles was wrong to deceive her like that” is simply a complex speech act that expresses a brute attitude against Charles's deceptive act, much like “Charles's act of deception: terrible!” Even though moral judgments take the form of statements or assertions in many cases, prescriptivism maintains that judgments are actually imperatives: judgments like it is “dishonorable to deceive someone” amount to “do not deceive.” More contemporary versions of norm expressivism begin from the premise that general norms or principles are, at bottom, expressions of some attitude toward an action or individual; however, norm expressivists also recognize how such attitudes can form the basis of a system of derived beliefs that are subject to the rational standards of semantic consistency.

There are at least two noteworthy philosophical motivations behind noncognitivism. The first centers on the nature of moral facts (if there are to be any) and the second concerns the underlying motivational force of moral judgments.

If moral statements are genuinely cognitive, that is, capable of reporting beliefs that are true or false, then there are presumably factual states that such statements identify and describe. Noncognitivists find this hard to accept, however, because such factual states would either have to be (1) naturally occurring states composed of moral properties or (2) nonnatural states or properties that are wholly different from anything in the natural world. Both these options lead to unacceptable conclusions for the noncognitivist. Option 1 is implausible for a reason famously identified by G. E. Moore in his open question argument. His argument was designed to show that for any naturalistic account of moral claims, someone can always intelligibly ask why the identified natural state of affairs has the moral characteristic identified with it. For instance, suppose that someone asserts that honesty is morally good because it produces greater states of happiness. Such a naturalist would find the question “Is happiness good?” unintelligible because he or she has already implicitly reduced the meaning of goodness to states of happiness. Moore believed, however, that such a question is quite intelligible and [Page 1508]therefore demonstrates how moral appraisals cannot be reduced to the description of natural states of affairs. On the other hand, option 2 does not fare any better for many noncognitivists. To say that there are some nonnatural, intrinsically normative states that our ethical statements describe calls forth a deep skepticism about the existence of such metaphysically queer facts, especially when it is not clear how humans would come to know such facts.

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