Emotivism
Encyclopedia
Emotivism is a meta-ethical
view that claims that ethical sentence
s do not express proposition
s but emotional attitudes. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy
and logical positivism
in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.
Emotivism is also known colloquially as the hurrah/boo theory. This makes emotivism a form of non-cognitivism
or expressivism
. It stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism (such as quasi-realism
and universal prescriptivism
), as well as to all forms of cognitivism
(including both moral realism
, and ethical subjectivism
).
In the 1950s, emotivism appeared in a modified form in the universal prescriptivism
of R. M. Hare
.
Emotivism reached prominence in the 20th century, but it was born centuries earlier. In 1710, George Berkeley
wrote that language in general often serves to inspire feelings as well as communicate ideas. Decades later, David Hume
espoused ideas similar to Stevenson's later ones. In his 1751 book An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
, Hume considered morality to be related to fact but "determined by sentiment":
G. E. Moore published his Principia Ethica
in 1903 and argued that the attempts of ethical naturalists
to translate ethical terms (like good and bad) into non-ethical ones (like pleasing and displeasing) committed the "naturalistic fallacy
". Moore was a cognitivist
, but his case against ethical naturalism steered other philosophers toward noncognitivism, particularly emotivism.
The emergence of logical positivism
and its verifiability criterion of meaning
early in the 20th century led some philosophers to conclude that ethical statements, being incapable of empirical verification, were cognitively meaningless. This criterion was fundamental to Ayer's defense of positivism in Language, Truth and Logic, which contains his statement of emotivism. However, positivism is not essential to emotivism itself, perhaps not even in Ayer's form, and some positivists in the Vienna Circle
, which had great influence on Ayer, held non-emotivist views.
R. M. Hare
unfolded his ethical theory of universal prescriptivism
in 1952's The Language of Morals, intending to defend the importance of rational moral argumentation against the "propaganda" he saw encouraged by Stevenson, who thought moral argumentation was sometimes psychological and not rational. But Hare's disagreement was not universal, and the similarities between his noncognitive theory and the emotive one — especially his claim, and Stevenson's, that moral judgments contain commands and are thus not purely descriptive — caused some to regard him as an emotivist, a classification he denied:
in their 1923 book on language, The Meaning of Meaning
, and by W. H. F. Barnes and A. Duncan-Jones in independent works on ethics in 1934. However, it is the later works of Ayer and especially Stevenson that are the most developed and discussed defenses of the theory.
He focuses on propositions of the first class—moral judgments—saying that those of the second class belong to science, those of the third are mere commands, and those of the fourth (which are considered in normative ethics
as opposed to meta-ethics
) are too concrete for ethical philosophy. While class three statements were irrelevant to Ayer's brand of emotivism, they would later play a significant role in Stevenson's.
Ayer argues that moral judgments cannot be translated into non-ethical, empirical terms and thus cannot be verified; in this he agrees with ethical intuitionists
. But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition as "worthless" for determining moral truths, since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another. Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":
Ayer agrees with subjectivists
in saying that ethical statements are necessarily related to individual attitudes, but he says they lack truth value because they cannot be properly understood as propositions about those attitudes; Ayer thinks ethical sentences are expressions, not assertions, of approval. While an assertion of approval may always be accompanied by an expression of approval, expressions can be made without making assertions; Ayer's example is boredom, which can be expressed through the stated assertion "I am bored" or through non-assertions including tone of voice
, body language
, and various other verbal statements. He sees ethical statements as expressions of the latter sort, so the phrase "Theft is wrong" is a non-propositional sentence that is an expression of disapproval but is not equivalent to the proposition "I disapprove of theft".
Having argued that his theory of ethics is noncognitive and not subjective, he accepts that his position and subjectivism are equally confronted by G. E. Moore's argument that ethical disputes are clearly genuine disputes and not just expressions of contrary feelings. Ayer's defense is that all ethical disputes are about facts regarding the proper application of a value system
to a specific case, not about the value systems themselves, because any dispute about values can only be resolved by judging that one value system is superior to another, and this judgment itself presupposes a value system. If Moore is wrong in saying that there are actual disagreements of value, we are left with the claim that there are actual disagreements of fact, and Ayer accepts this without hesitation:
work has been seen both as an elaboration upon Ayer's views and as a representation of one of "two broad types of ethical emotivism." An analytic philosopher, Stevenson suggested in his 1937 essay "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" that any ethical theory should explain three things: that intelligent disagreement can occur over moral questions, that moral terms like good are "magnetic" in encouraging action, and that the scientific method
is insufficient for verifying moral claims. Stevenson's own theory was fully developed in his 1944 book Ethics and Language
. In it, he agrees with Ayer that ethical sentences express the speaker's feelings, but he adds that they also have an imperative component intended to change the listener's feelings and that this component is of greater importance. Where Ayer spoke of values, or fundamental psychological inclinations, Stevenson speaks of attitudes, and where Ayer spoke of disagreement of fact, or rational disputes over the application of certain values to a particular case, Stevenson speaks of differences in belief; the concepts are the same. Terminology aside, Stevenson interprets ethical statements according to two patterns of analysis.
Imperatives cannot be proved, but they can still be supported so that the listener understands that they are not wholly arbitrary:
The purpose of these supports is to make the listener understand the consequences of the action they are being commanded to do. Once they understand the command's consequences, they can determine whether or not obedience to the command will have desirable results.
In second-pattern analysis, rather than judge an action directly, the speaker is evaluating it according to a general principle. For instance, someone who says "Murder is wrong" might mean "Murder decreases happiness overall"; this is a second-pattern statement that leads to a first-pattern one: "I disapprove of anything that decreases happiness overall. Do so as well."
Logical methods involve efforts to show inconsistencies between a person's fundamental attitudes and their particular moral beliefs. For example, someone who says "Edward is a good person" who has previously said "Edward is a thief" and "No thieves are good people" is guilty of inconsistency until she retracts one of her statements. Similarly, a person who says "Lying is always wrong" might consider lies in some situations to be morally permissible, and if examples of these situations can be given, his view can be shown to be logically inconsistent.
Rational psychological methods examine facts that relate fundamental attitudes to particular moral beliefs; the goal is not to show that someone has been inconsistent, as with logical methods, but only that they are wrong about the facts that connect their attitudes to their beliefs. To modify the former example, consider the person who holds that all thieves are bad people. If she sees Edward pocket a wallet found in a public place
, she may conclude that he is a thief, and there would be no inconsistency between her attitude (that thieves are bad people) and her belief (that Edward is a bad person because he is a thief). However, it may be that Edward recognized the wallet as belonging to a friend, to whom he promptly returned it. Such a revelation would likely change the observer's belief about Edward, and even if it did not, the attempt to reveal such facts would count as a rational psychological form of moral argumentation.
Non-rational psychological methods revolve around language with psychological influence but no necessarily logical connection to the listener's attitudes. Stevenson called the primary such method "'persuasive,' in a somewhat broadened sense", and wrote:
Persuasion may involve the use of particular emotion-laden words, like "democracy" or "dictator", or hypothetical questions like "What if everyone thought the way you do?" or "How would you feel if you were in their shoes?"
offered several criticisms of emotivism in his 1959 book Ethical Theory. His first is that "ethical utterances are not obviously the kind of thing the emotive theory says they are, and prima facie
, at least, should be viewed as statements." He thinks that emotivism cannot explain why most people, historically speaking, have considered ethical sentences to be "fact-stating" and not just emotive. Furthermore, he argues that people who change their moral views see their prior views as mistaken, not just different, and that this does not make sense if their attitudes were all that changed:
James Urmson's 1968 book The Emotive Theory of Ethics also disagreed with many of Stevenson's points in Ethics and Language, "a work of great value" with "a few serious mistakes [that] led Stevenson consistently to distort his otherwise valuable insights".
It would make little sense to translate a statement such as "Galileo should not have been forced to recant on heliocentricism" into a command, imperative, or recommendation. In fact, it is not clear how such a task would even be possible without radically changing the meaning of these ethical statements. Under this criticism, it would appear as if emotivist and prescriptivist theories are only capable of converting a relatively small subset of all ethical claims into imperatives.
Like Ross and Brandt, Urmson disagrees with Stevenson's "causal theory" of emotive meaning—the theory that moral statements only have emotive meaning when they are made to change in a listener's attitude—saying that is incorrect in explaining "evaluative force in purely causal terms". This is Urmson's fundamental criticism, and he suggests that Stevenson would have made a stronger case by explaining emotive meaning in terms of "commending and recommending attitudes", not in terms of "the power to evoke attitudes".
Stevenson's Ethics and Language, written after Ross's book but before Brandt's and Urmson's, states that emotive terms are "not always used for purposes of exhortation." For example, in the sentence "Slavery was good in Ancient Rome", Stevenson thinks one is speaking of past attitudes in an "almost purely descriptive" sense. And in some discussions of current attitudes, "agreement in attitude can be taken for granted," so a judgment like "He was wrong to kill them" might describe one's attitudes yet be "emotively inactive", with no real emotive (or imperative) meaning. Stevenson is doubtful that sentences in such contexts qualify as normative ethical sentences, maintaining that "for the contexts that are most typical of normative ethics, the ethical terms have a function that is both emotive and descriptive."
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...
view that claims that ethical sentence
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
s do not express proposition
Proposition
In logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to either the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence...
s but emotional attitudes. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
and logical positivism
Logical positivism
Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.
Emotivism is also known colloquially as the hurrah/boo theory. This makes emotivism a form of non-cognitivism
Non-cognitivism
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false...
or expressivism
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...
. It stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism (such as quasi-realism
Quasi-realism
Quasi-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 universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts...
), as well as to all forms of cognitivism
Cognitivism (ethics)
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
(including both moral realism
Moral realism
Moral 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....
, and ethical subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are about the attitudes of people.This makes ethical subjectivism a form of cognitivism...
).
In the 1950s, emotivism appeared in a modified form in the universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts...
of R. M. Hare
R. M. Hare
Richard 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. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...
.
History
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
wrote that language in general often serves to inspire feelings as well as communicate ideas. Decades later, David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
espoused ideas similar to Stevenson's later ones. In his 1751 book An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is a book by Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume. In it, Hume argues that the foundations of morals lie with sentiment, not reason....
, Hume considered morality to be related to fact but "determined by sentiment":
G. E. Moore published his Principia Ethica
Principia Ethica
Principia Ethica is a monograph by philosopher G. E. Moore, first published in 1903. It is one of the standard texts of modern ethics, and introduced the term naturalistic fallacy.-External links:* of Principia Ethica....
in 1903 and argued that the attempts of ethical naturalists
Ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true....
to translate ethical terms (like good and bad) into non-ethical ones (like pleasing and displeasing) committed the "naturalistic fallacy
Naturalistic fallacy
The 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...
". Moore was a cognitivist
Cognitivism (ethics)
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
, but his case against ethical naturalism steered other philosophers toward noncognitivism, particularly emotivism.
The emergence of logical positivism
Logical positivism
Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
and its verifiability criterion of meaning
Verificationist
Verificationism is the view that a statement or question is only legitimate if there is some way to determine whether the statement is true or false, or what the answer to the question is...
early in the 20th century led some philosophers to conclude that ethical statements, being incapable of empirical verification, were cognitively meaningless. This criterion was fundamental to Ayer's defense of positivism in Language, Truth and Logic, which contains his statement of emotivism. However, positivism is not essential to emotivism itself, perhaps not even in Ayer's form, and some positivists in the Vienna Circle
Vienna Circle
The Vienna Circle was an association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922, chaired by Moritz Schlick, also known as the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach...
, which had great influence on Ayer, held non-emotivist views.
R. M. Hare
R. M. Hare
Richard 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. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...
unfolded his ethical theory of universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts...
in 1952's The Language of Morals, intending to defend the importance of rational moral argumentation against the "propaganda" he saw encouraged by Stevenson, who thought moral argumentation was sometimes psychological and not rational. But Hare's disagreement was not universal, and the similarities between his noncognitive theory and the emotive one — especially his claim, and Stevenson's, that moral judgments contain commands and are thus not purely descriptive — caused some to regard him as an emotivist, a classification he denied:
Proponents
Influential statements of emotivism were made by C. K. Ogden and I. A. RichardsI. A. Richards
Ivor Armstrong Richards was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician....
in their 1923 book on language, The Meaning of Meaning
The Meaning of Meaning
Although the original text was published in 1923 it has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics. The book has been in print continuously since 1923. The most recent edition is the critical edition prepared...
, and by W. H. F. Barnes and A. Duncan-Jones in independent works on ethics in 1934. However, it is the later works of Ayer and especially Stevenson that are the most developed and discussed defenses of the theory.
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer's version of emotivism is given in chapter six, "Critique of Ethics and Theology", of Language, Truth and Logic. In that chapter, Ayer divides "the ordinary system of ethics" into four classes:- "Propositions that express definitions of ethical terms, or judgements about the legitimacy or possibility of certain definitions"
- "Propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience, and their causes"
- "Exhortations to moral virtue"
- "Actual ethical judgments"
He focuses on propositions of the first class—moral judgments—saying that those of the second class belong to science, those of the third are mere commands, and those of the fourth (which are considered in normative ethics
Normative ethics
Normative ethics is the study of ethical action. It is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking...
as opposed to meta-ethics
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...
) are too concrete for ethical philosophy. While class three statements were irrelevant to Ayer's brand of emotivism, they would later play a significant role in Stevenson's.
Ayer argues that moral judgments cannot be translated into non-ethical, empirical terms and thus cannot be verified; in this he agrees with ethical intuitionists
Ethical intuitionism
Ethical 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,...
. But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition as "worthless" for determining moral truths, since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another. Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":
Ayer agrees with subjectivists
Ethical subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are about the attitudes of people.This makes ethical subjectivism a form of cognitivism...
in saying that ethical statements are necessarily related to individual attitudes, but he says they lack truth value because they cannot be properly understood as propositions about those attitudes; Ayer thinks ethical sentences are expressions, not assertions, of approval. While an assertion of approval may always be accompanied by an expression of approval, expressions can be made without making assertions; Ayer's example is boredom, which can be expressed through the stated assertion "I am bored" or through non-assertions including tone of voice
Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication is usually understood as the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless messages. Messages can be communicated through gestures and touch , by body language or posture, by facial expression and eye contact...
, body language
Body language
Body language is a form of non-verbal communication, which consists of body posture, gestures, facial expressions, and eye movements. Humans send and interpret such signals almost entirely subconsciously....
, and various other verbal statements. He sees ethical statements as expressions of the latter sort, so the phrase "Theft is wrong" is a non-propositional sentence that is an expression of disapproval but is not equivalent to the proposition "I disapprove of theft".
Having argued that his theory of ethics is noncognitive and not subjective, he accepts that his position and subjectivism are equally confronted by G. E. Moore's argument that ethical disputes are clearly genuine disputes and not just expressions of contrary feelings. Ayer's defense is that all ethical disputes are about facts regarding the proper application of a value system
Value system
A value system is a set of consistent ethic values and measures used for the purpose of ethical or ideological integrity. A well defined value system is a moral code.-Personal and communal:...
to a specific case, not about the value systems themselves, because any dispute about values can only be resolved by judging that one value system is superior to another, and this judgment itself presupposes a value system. If Moore is wrong in saying that there are actual disagreements of value, we are left with the claim that there are actual disagreements of fact, and Ayer accepts this without hesitation:
C. L. Stevenson
Stevenson'sCharles Stevenson
Charles Leslie Stevenson was an American analytic philosopher best known for his work in ethics and aesthetics....
work has been seen both as an elaboration upon Ayer's views and as a representation of one of "two broad types of ethical emotivism." An analytic philosopher, Stevenson suggested in his 1937 essay "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" that any ethical theory should explain three things: that intelligent disagreement can occur over moral questions, that moral terms like good are "magnetic" in encouraging action, and that the scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
is insufficient for verifying moral claims. Stevenson's own theory was fully developed in his 1944 book Ethics and Language
Ethics and Language
Ethics and Language is a 1944 book by C. L. Stevenson which was influential in furthering the metaethical view of emotivism first espoused by David Hume....
. In it, he agrees with Ayer that ethical sentences express the speaker's feelings, but he adds that they also have an imperative component intended to change the listener's feelings and that this component is of greater importance. Where Ayer spoke of values, or fundamental psychological inclinations, Stevenson speaks of attitudes, and where Ayer spoke of disagreement of fact, or rational disputes over the application of certain values to a particular case, Stevenson speaks of differences in belief; the concepts are the same. Terminology aside, Stevenson interprets ethical statements according to two patterns of analysis.
First pattern analysis
Under his first pattern of analysis, an ethical statement has two parts: a declaration of the speaker's attitude and an imperative to mirror it, so "'This is good' means I approve of this; do so as well." The first half of the sentence is a proposition, but the imperative half is not, so Stevenson's translation of an ethical sentence remains a noncognitive one.Imperatives cannot be proved, but they can still be supported so that the listener understands that they are not wholly arbitrary:
The purpose of these supports is to make the listener understand the consequences of the action they are being commanded to do. Once they understand the command's consequences, they can determine whether or not obedience to the command will have desirable results.
Second pattern analysis
Stevenson's second pattern of analysis is used for statements about types of actions, not specific actions. Under this pattern,In second-pattern analysis, rather than judge an action directly, the speaker is evaluating it according to a general principle. For instance, someone who says "Murder is wrong" might mean "Murder decreases happiness overall"; this is a second-pattern statement that leads to a first-pattern one: "I disapprove of anything that decreases happiness overall. Do so as well."
Methods of argumentation
For Stevenson, moral disagreements may arise from different fundamental attitudes, different moral beliefs about specific cases, or both. The methods of moral argumentation he proposed have been divided into three groups, known as logical, rational psychological and nonrational psychological forms of argumentation.Logical methods involve efforts to show inconsistencies between a person's fundamental attitudes and their particular moral beliefs. For example, someone who says "Edward is a good person" who has previously said "Edward is a thief" and "No thieves are good people" is guilty of inconsistency until she retracts one of her statements. Similarly, a person who says "Lying is always wrong" might consider lies in some situations to be morally permissible, and if examples of these situations can be given, his view can be shown to be logically inconsistent.
Rational psychological methods examine facts that relate fundamental attitudes to particular moral beliefs; the goal is not to show that someone has been inconsistent, as with logical methods, but only that they are wrong about the facts that connect their attitudes to their beliefs. To modify the former example, consider the person who holds that all thieves are bad people. If she sees Edward pocket a wallet found in a public place
Public space
A public space is a social space such as a town square that is open and accessible to all, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age or socio-economic level. One of the earliest examples of public spaces are commons. For example, no fees or paid tickets are required for entry, nor are the entrants...
, she may conclude that he is a thief, and there would be no inconsistency between her attitude (that thieves are bad people) and her belief (that Edward is a bad person because he is a thief). However, it may be that Edward recognized the wallet as belonging to a friend, to whom he promptly returned it. Such a revelation would likely change the observer's belief about Edward, and even if it did not, the attempt to reveal such facts would count as a rational psychological form of moral argumentation.
Non-rational psychological methods revolve around language with psychological influence but no necessarily logical connection to the listener's attitudes. Stevenson called the primary such method "'persuasive,' in a somewhat broadened sense", and wrote:
Persuasion may involve the use of particular emotion-laden words, like "democracy" or "dictator", or hypothetical questions like "What if everyone thought the way you do?" or "How would you feel if you were in their shoes?"
Criticism
Utilitarian philosopher Richard BrandtRichard Brandt
Richard Booker Brandt was an American philosopher of the utilitarian tradition in moral philosophy. He taught at Swarthmore College before spending the bulk of his career at the University of Michigan, where he taught with Charles Stevenson and William K. Frankena and served as Chairman of the...
offered several criticisms of emotivism in his 1959 book Ethical Theory. His first is that "ethical utterances are not obviously the kind of thing the emotive theory says they are, and prima facie
Prima facie
Prima facie is a Latin expression meaning on its first encounter, first blush, or at first sight. The literal translation would be "at first face", from the feminine form of primus and facies , both in the ablative case. It is used in modern legal English to signify that on first examination, a...
, at least, should be viewed as statements." He thinks that emotivism cannot explain why most people, historically speaking, have considered ethical sentences to be "fact-stating" and not just emotive. Furthermore, he argues that people who change their moral views see their prior views as mistaken, not just different, and that this does not make sense if their attitudes were all that changed:
James Urmson's 1968 book The Emotive Theory of Ethics also disagreed with many of Stevenson's points in Ethics and Language, "a work of great value" with "a few serious mistakes [that] led Stevenson consistently to distort his otherwise valuable insights".
Magnetic influence
Brandt criticized what he termed "the 'magnetic influence' thesis", the idea of Stevenson that ethical statements are meant to influence the listener's attitudes. Brandt contends that most ethical statements, including judgments of people who are not within listening range, are not made with the intention to alter the attitudes of others. Twenty years earlier, Sir William David Ross offered much the same criticism in his book Foundations of Ethics. Ross suggests that the emotivist theory seems to be coherent only when dealing with simple linguistic acts, such as recommending, commanding, or passing judgement on something happening at the same point of time as the utterance.It would make little sense to translate a statement such as "Galileo should not have been forced to recant on heliocentricism" into a command, imperative, or recommendation. In fact, it is not clear how such a task would even be possible without radically changing the meaning of these ethical statements. Under this criticism, it would appear as if emotivist and prescriptivist theories are only capable of converting a relatively small subset of all ethical claims into imperatives.
Like Ross and Brandt, Urmson disagrees with Stevenson's "causal theory" of emotive meaning—the theory that moral statements only have emotive meaning when they are made to change in a listener's attitude—saying that is incorrect in explaining "evaluative force in purely causal terms". This is Urmson's fundamental criticism, and he suggests that Stevenson would have made a stronger case by explaining emotive meaning in terms of "commending and recommending attitudes", not in terms of "the power to evoke attitudes".
Stevenson's Ethics and Language, written after Ross's book but before Brandt's and Urmson's, states that emotive terms are "not always used for purposes of exhortation." For example, in the sentence "Slavery was good in Ancient Rome", Stevenson thinks one is speaking of past attitudes in an "almost purely descriptive" sense. And in some discussions of current attitudes, "agreement in attitude can be taken for granted," so a judgment like "He was wrong to kill them" might describe one's attitudes yet be "emotively inactive", with no real emotive (or imperative) meaning. Stevenson is doubtful that sentences in such contexts qualify as normative ethical sentences, maintaining that "for the contexts that are most typical of normative ethics, the ethical terms have a function that is both emotive and descriptive."
Standard using and standard setting
As an offshoot of his fundamental criticism of Stevenson's magnetic influence thesis, Urmson wrote that ethical statements had two functions — "standard using", the application of accepted values to a particular case, and "standard setting", the act of proposing certain values as those that should be accepted — and that Stevenson confused them. According to Urmson, Stevenson's "I approve of this; do so as well" is a standard-setting statement, yet most moral statements are actually standard-using ones, so Stevenson's explanation of ethical sentences is unsatisfactory. Colin Wilks has responded that Stevenson's distinction between first-order and second-order statements resolves this problem: a person who says "Sharing is good" may be making a second-order statement like "Sharing is approved of by the community", the sort of standard-using statement Urmson says is most typical of moral discourse. At the same time, their statement can be reduced to a first-order, standard-setting sentence: "I approve of whatever is approved of by the community; do so as well."See also
- Analytic philosophyAnalytic philosophyAnalytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
- Logical positivismLogical positivismLogical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
- Prescriptivism (philosophy)
- Verification principle