Emotivism again
Emotivists, by contrast, face neither of these objections. The actionguiding character of pro-attitudes means that they have an automatic answer to the second objection.
The reason why moral demands are categorical is that they express attitudes. So you do not have to have desires over and above those attitudes in order for them to be actionguiding: they are action-guiding in themselves already. Nor can we object to emotivism on the basis of its views about moral perception, since emotivists do not think that there is any such thing. Indeed, the major difficulty for emotivists is precisely that they do not have very much to say about moral epistemology. On the simplest emotivist view, knowing what you think on a moral question is simply a matter of finding out what you really feel.Emotivism is often associated with moral relativism, which is the view that what is good depends on who you are (or in what culture or when you live). For if moral sentences are expressions of attitudes and not of beliefs, then which moral beliefs you assent to will depend on what attitudes you (or your community) happen to have.
It is not obvious, however, that an emotivist has to be a relativist. It is indeed natural to suppose, to begin with, that what you feel is simply up to you. How you feel about swimming in cold water does indeed depend on you and your circumstances, and it doesn't usually make much sense to suppose that it is either correct or incorrect to have the feelings one has on this topic. But, on the other hand (as I shall show in a moment), there is a whole range of feelings where an assessment of their correctness does make sense. And if it does make sense to justify or criticize feelings, then emotivism might have scope for being nonrelativist, even if it didn't justify feelings in the way we justify our beliefs.
We normally justify beliefs about matters of fact by finding perceptual evidence in their favor. But some feelings can be justified by means other than finding evidence for them, and this is a reason to hope that there could be similar ways of justifying moral beliefs other than by finding evidence for them. This argument would be circular if the only feelings we normally sought to justify were moral feelings, but they aren't.There are, in fact, two sorts of criticism of desires that we can make. One way to criticize desires is to show that the desire is based on false beliefs. My desire to take my godchild to the zoo can be criticized by pointing out that she hates animals. I want to take her to the zoo in order to give her an enjoyable afternoon. But if she hates animals, she won't enjoy the visit. This sort of criticism involves only the assessment of the truth value of the belief on which the desire is based. The possibility of criticizing desires in this way does not help answer the relativist, however. For moral attitudes are categorical imperatives: they do not depend, in this way, on beliefs.
Some nonmoral desires, however, do not depend in this way on beliefs, either. My desire to give my godchild an enjoyable afternoon is not based on beliefs. Whereas taking Liza to the zoo is a means to the end of giving her an enjoyable afternoon, giving her an enjoyable afternoon is something I want to do for its own sake. (And even those who would claim that the desire to give a child some fun was in some sense a moral desire would surely admit that there need be nothing moral in Liza's craving for chocolate!) So a second way to criticize desires is to say not that they depend on false beliefs about the means to some end, but that the ends themselves are irrational. Let us call a desire that is not dependent in this way on a belief a “basic desire.” People who are pleased when they are offered buckets of mud for which they have no use are likely to be criticized as irrational.
We would naturally be inclined to suppose that someone with a basic desire for buckets of mud needs not tolerance but treatment. Indeed, such a desire might seem to be evidence that they did not know how to reason. One way to resist relativism, then, is just to hold that some attitudes—even though logically consistent—are irrational. As we shall see, this was Kant's view.But many philosophers have felt that rejecting attitudes or desires that we don't share by calling them “irrational” is simply an expression of a prejudice. Unless we can say why it is irrational to want useless buckets of mud, rejecting such a desire may just be a reaction to the fact that we do not share it.
How else might we combine the view that moral sentences express not beliefs but attitudes with the claim that morality is not simply a matter of what you happen to feel? Perhaps we should begin with a more sophisticated version of emotivism, which gives a richer view of the content of moral judgments.
In a more sophisticated emotivism we need to say more exactly what sorts of pro-attitudes are expressed by saying “Doing A is right.” The American philosopher C. L. Stevenson developed one influential answer to this question under the name “emotivism.”
Stevenson saw that if you said that people who made moral claims were just expressing their feelings, then two people who made apparently opposed moral claims would not be disagreeing with each other. If I say
T: Tom ought to be kinder to his dog
and Cynthia says
not-T: It's not true that Tom ought to be kinder to his dog,
then if T is simply a fancy way of saying
T': I don't like the way Tom treats his dog
and not-T is simply a fancy way of saying
not-T': I don't mind the way Tom treats his dog,
then Cynthia and I are not really disagreeing.
T and not-T look as though one is the negation of the other, so they cannot both be true. But T' and Not-T' are just the expressions of two different attitudes. Of course, the same person could not agree to both T' and not-T', because one person cannot both approve and disapprove of the same acts. Two different people can assent to them at the same time, however, without there being any inconsistency between their utterances. In fact, people very generally differ in what they like and dislike.Of course, Cynthia and I might utter not-T and T, respectively, because we were in disagreement about the facts. Perhaps she had not seen Tom dragging his dog on its chain or heard the dog howling when Tom forgot to feed it. But even if we were agreed on all the facts, she could still continue saying not-T and I could go on saying T. At this point, if T meant T' and not-T meant not-T', our “disagreement” would amount simply to the fact that we had different attitudes.
But Stevenson suggested that there was more to it than that. When I say T, I am not simply expressing my feelings. What I mean is not so much T' as
T": I don't like the way Tom treats his dog and I want everybody else to adopt the same attitude.
My objection to Cynthia's position is based on the fact that when I make a moral claim I am expressing an attitude that I want everybody to share. So whereas on the simple emotivist view that moral sentences express our attitudes to things Cynthia and I are disagreeing only in the sense that we have incompatible attitudes, on Stevenson's view we are disagreeing in a more fundamental way. For Stevenson, what Cynthia says means
Not-T": I don't mind the way Tom treats his dog and I want everybody else to adopt the same attitude
and the second conjunct here expresses a desire that I want her— and everybody else—not to have.
Though my moral judgment is not inconsistent with hers, her having the judgment is itself something I am opposed to.This element of universality, the desire that everyone should share our moral attitudes, is what differentiates moral sentences, on Stevenson's view, from simple expressions of feeling. And it also means that someone who is a metaethical emotivist need not be a moral relativist. For metaethical emotivists can say that their own moral claims make demands on other people, whatever those people happen to feel and wherever they live. Thus, when I say “Kindness is good,” according to the sophisticated emotivist I am expressing a pro-attitude to kindness and expressing a pro-attitude to everyone else's having that pro-attitude. I am not saying, as the relativist would require, that I only want everyone who happens to share my feelings (or my culture) to have this attitude.
Many people hold, however, that even sophisticated emotivism makes it very difficult to resist relativism. Of course you can tell people that you want them to share your attitudes; but why should the mere fact that you want this give them a reason to come to share them? And if it gives them no reason to agree with you, then even if you are not a relativist, you will still have to accept that whether people will agree with you will depend on what attitudes, pro and con, they happen to have. You will have to accept that what principles people hold does depend on what they feel, even if, not being a relativist, you do not think that it ought to depend on what they feel.
Now, Stevenson in fact argued that we utter moral sentences in order to try to get other people to share our attitudes, just as we utter factual sentences in order to get them to share our beliefs. Thus, on his view,
size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">A is the right thing for X to do
is not so much equivalent to
I want X to do A and I want everybody else to want it
too
as to
I want X to do A.
Please want it too.Moral remarks are not so much expressions of my feelings as attempts to get others to feel the same.
This aspect of Stevenson's theory is much less satisfactory than his basic recognition of the universality of moral claims. For it still leaves the major challenge of relativism unanswered: why should the mere fact that I ask you to share my attitude lead you to come to share it? When I express my factual belief that something is yellow, you have a reason to come to believe it too, provided that
a) you think that I am in a position to know—because, for example, I have seen it—and
b) you think that I don't want to deceive you (or, at any rate, you don’t think that I do want to deceive you).
But when I ask or order you to share my feelings, you can have no analogous reasons for coming to share my attitude. On Stevenson's view, there is no such thing as knowing that something is right or wrong, and so you cannot have a reason like (a). Nor can you have a reason like (b), in his view, since deceiving someone is getting them to believe something false, and he has no way of explaining how moral statements could have truth values.
Nevertheless, as I say, the recognition of the claim to universality of moral sentences is a very important insight about the content of moral judgments. It was central to the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who suggested that moral claims had two distinguishing marks:
a) they were action-guiding—in fact, they were categorical imperatives—and
b) they were in a very specific way addressed universally to all rational people.
This second mark of the moral claim is expressed in the principle of universalizability, which we shall discuss next.
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