Non-cognitivism is the
meta-ethicalIn philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, and ethical statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being ethical theory and applied ethics...
view that ethical
sentenceIn linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language—a grammatical and lexical unit consisting of one or more words, representing distinct and differentiated concepts, and combined to form a meaningful statement, question, request and command....
s do not express
propositionA proposition is a sentence expressing something true or false. In philosophy, particularly in logic, a proposition is identified ontologically as an idea, concept, or abstraction whose token instances are patterns of symbols, marks, sounds, or strings of words...
s and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the
cognitivistCognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world." If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot
knowKnowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or awareness or familiarity gained...
something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.
Non-cognitivism entails that non-cognitive
attitudesAn attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event-- this is often referred to as the attitude object...
underlie moral discourse and this discourse therefore consists of non-declarative
speech actSpeech act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Precise conceptions vary.-Speech act as an illocutionary act:Following the usage of, for example, John R. Searle, "speech act" is often meant to refer just to the same thing as the term illocutionary act, which John L...
s, although accepting that its surface features may consistently and efficiently work as if moral discourse were cognitive. The point of interpreting moral claims as non-declarative speech acts is to explain what moral claims mean if they are neither true nor false (as philosophies such as
logical positivismLogical positivism is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in epistemology.[See, e.g., : ...]
entail). Utterances like "Boo to killing!" and "Don't kill" are not candidates for truth or falsity, but have non-cognitive meaning.
Varieties of non-cognitivism
EmotivismEmotivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences do not express propositions.# Instead, ethical sentences express emotional attitudes....
, associated with A. J. Ayer, the
Vienna CircleThe Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers who gathered around Moritz Schlick when he was called to the Vienna University in 1922, organized in a philosophical association, of which Schlick was chairman, named the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach...
and C. L. Stevenson, suggests that ethical sentences are primarily emotional expressions of one's own attitudes and are intended to influence the actions of the listener. Under this view, "Killing is wrong" is translated as "Killing, boo!" or "I disapprove of killing; do so as well."
A close cousin of emotivism, developed by
R. M. HareRichard Mervyn Hare was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983 and then taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...
, is called
universal prescriptivismUniversal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences do not express propositions....
. Prescriptivists interpret ethical statements as being universal
imperatives, prescribing behavior for all to follow. According to prescriptivism,
phrases like "Thou shalt not murder!" or "Do not steal!" are the clearest expressions of morality, while reformulations like "Killing is wrong" tend to obscure the meaning of moral sentences.
Other forms of non-cognitivism include
Simon BlackburnSimon Blackburn is a British academic philosopher known for his efforts to popularise philosophy. He attended Clifton College and went on to receive his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1965 and his doctorate in 1970 from Trinity College, Cambridge...
's
quasi-realismQuasi-realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences do not express propositions.# Instead, ethical sentences project emotional attitudes as though they were real properties....
and
Allan GibbardAllan Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Allan Gibbard has made several important contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics...
's norm-expressivism.
Arguments in favor of non-cognitivism
Arguments for prescriptivism focus on the
function of normative statements.
Prescriptivists argue that factual statements and prescriptions are totally different, because of different expectations of change in cases of a clash between world and sentence.
If the descriptive sentence If one premises, that "red is a number," according to he lexical rules of English grammar, this statement is obviously false. Since this premise describes objects for which anyone with an adequate understanding of English would understand, the statement is obviously false. However, if the norm "Thou shallt not Kill!" is uttered, and this premise is negated (by the fact of a person being murdered), the speaker is not to change his sentence upon observation of this into: "Kill other people!", but is to reiterate the moral outrage of the act of killing. Adjusting statements based upon objective reality and adjusting reality based upon statements are contrary uses of language, so descriptive statement are a different kind of sentences than norms. If truth is understood according to
correspondence theoryThe correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes that world...
, the question of the truth or falsity of sentences not contingent upon external phenomena cannot be tested (see tautologies ).
Some cognitivists argue that some expressions like "courageous" have both a factual as well as a normative component which cannot be distinguished by analysis. Prescriptivists argue, that according to context, either the factual or the normative component of the meaning is dominant. The sentence "Hero A behaved courageous." is wrong, if A run away in the face of danger. But the sentence "Be brave and fight for the glory of your country!" has no truth value and cannot be falsified by someone who doesn't join the army.
Prescriptivism is also supported by the actual way of speaking. Many moral statements are de facto uttered as recommendations or commands, e.g. when parents or teachers forbid children to do wrong actions. The most famous moral ideas are prescriptions: the
Ten CommandmentsThe Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, are a list of religious and moral imperatives that, according to Judeo-Christian tradition, were authored by God and given to Moses on the mountain referred to as "Mount Sinai" or "Horeb" in the form of two stone tablets...
, the command of charity, the
categorical imperativeThe categorical imperative is the central philosophical concept in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as modern deontological ethics...
, and the
Golden RuleGolden Rule may refer to:*The Golden Rule in ethics, morality, history and religion, also known as Ethic of reciprocity*Golden Rule savings rate, in economics, the savings rate which maximizes consumption in the Solow growth model...
command to do or not to do something, they are not statements that something is the case or not.
Prescriptivism can fit the theist idea of morality as obedience towards god. It is however different from the cognitivist supernaturalism which interprets morality as subjective will of god, while prescriptivism claims, that moral rules are universal and can be found by reason alone without reference to a god.
According to Hare, prescriptivists cannot argue, that amoralists are logically wrong or contradictive. Everyone can choose to follow moral commands or not. This is the human condition according to the Christian reinterpretation of the Choice of
HeraclesIn Greek mythology, Heracles or Herakles , Alcides or Alcaeus , was a divine hero, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, foster son of Amphitryon and great-grandson of Perseus...
. According to prescriptivism, morality is not about knowledge (of moral facts), but about character (to choose to do the right thing). Actors cannot externalize their responsibility and freedom of will towards some moral truth in the world, virtuous people don't need to wait for some cognition to choose what's right.
Prescriptivism is also supported by
Imperative logicImperative logic is a field of logic that is concerned with imperatives . Unlike deontic logic, which is concerned with obligation and permission, imperative logic by itself is not necessarily tied to any ought judgments on its imperatives...
, in which there are no truth values for imperatives, and by the idea of the
Naturalistic fallacyThe naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica...
: even if someone could prove the existence of an ethical property and express it in a factual statement, he could never derive any command from this statement, so the search for ethical properties is pointless.
As with other anti-
realistMoral realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion....
meta-ethical theories, non-cognitivism is largely supported by the
argument from queerness"The Argument from Queerness" is a term used in the philosophical study of ethics first developed by J. L. Mackie in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong ISBN 0-14-013558-8...
: ethical properties, if they existed, would be different from any other thing in the universe, since they have no observable effect on the world. People generally have a negative attitude towards murder - calling it a disgust. This sentiment presumably keeps most of us from murdering. But does the actual
wrongness of murder play an
independent role? Is there any evidence that there is a property of wrongness that some types of acts have? Some people might think that the strong feelings we have when we see or consider a murder provide evidence of murder's wrongness. But it is not difficult to explain these feelings without saying that
wrongness was their cause. Thus there is no way of discerning which, if any, ethical properties exist; by
Occam's RazorOccam's razor , entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem , is the principle that can be popularly stated as "when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better." The principle is attributed to 14th-century English...
, the simplest assumption is that none do. The non-cognitivist then asserts that, since a proposition about an ethical property would have no referent, ethical statements must be something else.
Argument* In logic, an argument is a set of one or more meaningful declarative sentences known as the premises along with another meaningful declarative sentence known as the conclusion...
s for emotivism focus on what normative statements
express when uttered by a speaker. A person who says that killing is wrong certainly expresses her disapproval of killing. Emotivists claim that this is
all she does, that "Killing is wrong" is not a truth-apt declaration, and that the burden of evidence is on the
cognitivistsCognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
who want to show that in addition to expressing disapproval, the claim "Killing is wrong" is also true. Emotivists ask whether there really is evidence that killing is wrong. We have evidence that Jupiter has a
magnetic fieldMagnetic fields surround magnetic materials and electric currents and are detected by the force they exert on other magnetic materials and moving electric charges...
and that birds are oviparous, but as of yet, we do not seem to have found evidence of moral properties, such as "goodness". Emotivists ask why, without such evidence, we should think there
is such a property.
Ethical intuitionistsEthical intuitionism is usually understood as a meta-ethical theory that embraces the following theses:# Moral realism, the view that there are objective facts of morality,...
think the evidence comes not from science or reason but from our own feelings: good deeds make us feel a certain way and bad deeds make us feel very differently. But is this enough to show that there are genuinely good and bad deeds? Emotivists think not, claiming that we do not need to postulate the existence of moral "badness" or "wrongness" to explain why considering certain deeds makes us feel disapproval; that all we really observe when we introspect are feelings of disapproval. Thus the emotivist asks why not to adopt the simple explanation and say that this is all there is; why insist that a genuine "badness" (of murder, for example) must be causing feelings, when a simpler explanation is available.
Arguments against non-cognitivism
One argument against non-cognitivism is that it ignores the external
causes of emotional and prescriptive reactions. If someone says, "John is a good person," something about John must have inspired that reaction. If John gives to the poor, takes care of his sick grandmother, and is friendly to others, and these are what inspire the speaker to think well of him, it is plausible to say, "John is a good person because he gives to the poor, takes care of his sick grandmother, and is friendly to others." If, in turn, the speaker responds positively to the idea of giving to the poor, then some aspect of that idea must have inspired a positive response; one could argue that that aspect is also the basis of its goodness.
Another argument is the "embedding problem." Consider the following sentences:
- Eating meat is not wrong.
- Is eating meat wrong?
- I think that eating meat is wrong.
- Mike doesn't think that eating meat is wrong.
- I once thought that eating meat was wrong.
- She does not realize that eating meat is wrong.
Attempts to translate these sentences in an emotivist framework seem to fail (e.g. "She does not realize, 'Boo on eating meat!'"). Prescriptivist translations fare only slightly better ("She does not realize that she is not to eat meat"). Even the act of forming such a construction indicates some sort of cognition in the process.
According to some non-cognitivist points of view, these sentences simply assume the false premise that ethical statements are either true or false. They might be literally translated as:
- "Eating meat is wrong" is a false statement.
- Is "eating meat is wrong" a true statement?
- I think that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
- Mike doesn't think that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
- I once thought that "eating meat is wrong" was a true statement.
- She does not realize that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
These translations, however, seem divorced from the way people actually use language. A non-cognitivist would have to disagree with someone saying, "'Eating meat is wrong' is a false statement" (since "Eating meat is wrong" is not truth-apt at all), but may be tempted to agree with a person saying, "Eating meat is not wrong."
One might more constructively interpret these statements to describe the underlying emotional statement that they express, i.e: I disapprove/do not disapprove of eating meat, I used to, he doesn't, I do and she doesn't, etc.; however, this interpretation is closer to individualist subjectivism than to non-cognitivism proper.
A similar argument against non-cognitivism is that of ethical argument. A common argument might be, "If killing an innocent human is always wrong, and all fetuses are innocent humans, then killing a fetus is always wrong." Most people would consider such an utterance to represent an analytic proposition which is true
a priori. However, if ethical statements do not represent cognitions, it seems odd to use them as premises in an argument, and even odder to assume they follow the same rules of
syllogismA syllogism or logical appeal is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition is inferred from two others of a certain form....
as true propositions. However, R.M. Hare, proponent of
universal prescriptivismUniversal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences do not express propositions....
, has argued that the rules of logical are independent of
grammatical moodGrammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive verb forms that are used to signal modality.It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar...
, and thus the same logical relations may hold between
imperativeImperative can mean:*Imperative mood, a grammatical mood expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions * A morphological item expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions...
s as hold between indicatives.
Many objections to non-cognitivism based on the linguistic characteristics of what purport to be moral judgments were originally raised by
Peter GlassenPeter Glassen was a professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1949 until his death in 1986. He was previously a member of the psychology department at the University of Saskatchewan. He developed a considerable reputation as an analytic moral philosopher on the basis of a number...
in "The Cognitivity of Moral Judgments", published in
MindMind is a British journal, currently published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association, which deals with philosophy in the analytic tradition. It was founded by Alexander Bain in 1876 with George Croom Robertson as editor at University College London. With the death of...
in January 1959, and in Glassen's follow-up article in the January 1963 issue of the same journal.
See also
- Expressivism
Expressivism in meta-ethics is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms–for example, “It is wrong to torture an innocent human being”–are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as “wrong,” “good,” or “just” do not refer...
- Theological noncognitivism
Theological noncognitivism is the argument that religious language, and specifically words like "God" , are not cognitively meaningful. Some thinkers propose it as a way to prove the nonexistence of anything named "God"...
- Frege-Geach problem
- Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism.-Life and work:Carnap was born to a west German family that had been humble...
- Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse career in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments...
External links