Non-cognitivism

The following is a portion of , which consists of lectures given by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in courses that he taught at Ohio State University. Wikification and NPOVing are invited.

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences (e.g. "Killing is wrong") do not

express propositions
convey factual beliefs
have cognitive meaning
have a truth value (i.e. it makes no sense to say they are true or false)
make claims about the world

(These conditions are different ways of saying more or less the same thing.) This is in constrast to statements such as "The sky is blue", which do do the above things.

Note that non-cognitivism is not saying that whether ethical sentences are true or false is "subjective" (compare Ethical subjectivism), or that all ethical sentences are false (compare Moral skepticism). True and false simply don't apply to ethical sentences.

Nonetheless, non-cognitivists maintain that moral sentences do serve a purpose. Different schools within non-cognitivism have different ideas about what that purpose might be. Emotivists say that ethical sentences express and evoke certain kinds of emotion regarding the what appears to be the sentence's cognitive content. Thus saying "Kindness is good" would not very different from yelling "Hurray for kindness!" Alternatively, saying "Murder is bad" would have a somewhat similar effect to first saying the word "murder" and then booing in the manner of a sports fan.

Another way to think of emotivism is like this: Suppose I say, "If you steal money from your employer, you're doing something wrong." Under emotivism, this would be quite similar to saying, in a tone of shock or revulsion, "Stealing money from your employer!!" Note that the "emotions" expressed in emotivism are not limited to the ones one might first think of -- happy, sad, etc. --, but also include approval, disapproval, preference, etc..

Note that it may be temping to confuse emotivism with some versions of ethical subjectivism. Consider the case of "Kindness is good". Instead of taking this as akin to "Hurray for kindness!", some moral subjectivists might take this as akin to "I strongly approve of kindness." Although these two paraphrases may seem similar, the emotivist will claim that three differences are critical: First, only the latter is a literal statement about the speaker's mental state. Second, only the latter can be literally true or false. Third, there are clearly situations where the former cannot be substituted for the latter.

Prescriptivists, on the other hand, say that ethical sentences are implicit commands or recommendations. "Kindness is good" would then mean something like "Be kind" or "I suggest you be kind."

Table of contents

1 Arguments in its favor
2 Arguments against it
3 Non-cognitivism today

Arguments in its favor

Here are two arguments in favor of non-cognitivism:

The first argument is that, since if "goodness", "rightness", etc. exist they must be unacceptably odd sorts of things, we would be better of saying that they don't exist. G.E. Moore's open question argument suggests that we can't define these things in terms of non-ethical properties, such as "desire". Whereas Moore concludes that "good" is an indefinable but nonetheless real property (perhaps knowable by a faculty of moral intuition), the non-cognitivst might suggest that ethical properties are rather different from other indefinable properties (e.g. "yellow") -- they are certainly not objects or properties that we can directly observe with our senses. Since this seems like an odd sort of property, the non-cognitivist concludes that its existence is simply illusory.

The second argument is not conclusively in non-cognitivism favor, but it may make non-cognitivism seem more reasonable. It begins with the observation that when we use moral sentences -- when we morally praise or blame people and their actions -- what we're doing doesn't reduce to making factual statements, pure and simple. Even if ethical sentences do make factual statements, they also express our attitudes toward someone or something, or try to shape other people's attitudes. For example, consider the sentence, "Mary is a good person." Suppose that Mary's is friend saying this, and that we know what the friend thinks about her to justify saying this: for example, Mary never lies, she is a very responsible person, she is always nice, and so forth. Now when the friend says "Mary is a good person", the friend is not only saying that Mary has these characteristics, but also approving of them. It's as though the friend is saying, "Mary is good -- go thou and do likewise." But this latter meaning is not a simple declarative meaning. Thus ethical sentences, regardless of whether they express propositions or not, do definitely have the function of expressing our attitudes and our recommendations. The non-cognitivist goes one step further than most of us, and says that that is all that ethical sentences express.

Arguments against it

I'm just going to make one criticism of non-cognitivism. We could go on all day explaining objections to it, I think, but one objection is particularly powerful. Before I explain it, remember how we criticized the definition of "meaningfulness" as "understandability." The proposal was that a sentence is meaningful if it's understandable. Our criticism of that proposal was: that might be true, doesn't give the meaning of the word "meaningful." Why? Because it doesn't explain what it is about meaningful sentences, that makes them meaningful. It certainly seems that there is something about those sentences that makes them meaningful -- and which, incidentally, makes us able to understand them.

Now we can make a similar sort of criticism of non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism claims that the meaning of ethical sentences consists entirely in how we feel about the person, or thing, or situation described; or what our recommendations are with regard to the item in question. But this just raises a question: what it is about the item in question that makes us feel the way we do, or that makes us recommend what we do? Take the case of the good Mary again. The question in this case is: What is it about Mary that makes us say that she is a good person -- that makes us express moral approval of her, and that makes us recommend to others that they emulate her? Surely there's something about her that makes us say she's good. It's not like she is just some nonentity with no properties at all, and we just arbitrarily say of a nonentity that we approve of it! No, Mary is a complex human being about which (in our example) we know a lot. And the question is: What is it about her, out of all the things we know (or believe) about her, that makes us say that she's good?

It's not like the answer to that question is any big puzzle or anything. It's rather obvious to anyone who knows Mary: she has a number of habits, like telling the truth, taking care of her responsibilities, treating others kindly and fairly, and so forth. And it's seeing all of those habits together which make us say that she's a good person.

Now I wonder if you can see what's coming next in this criticism of non-cognitivism. Just think about it. If it's Mary's habits that make us say that she's a good person, well then, why don't we just say that we can translate the ethical sentence, "Mary is a good person," into a sentence about Mary's habits? Why not say that "Mary is a good person" means "Mary tells the truth, takes care of her responsibilities faithfully, treats others kindly, and so forth"? Notice, the latter sentence doesn't contain any ethical terms. It just describes her habits. So the point is that if it's Mary's habits that make us call her good, then we can just say that her goodness consists in her having all those habits. By "Mary's goodness" we just mean "Mary's habits X, Y, and Z." And if Mary has habits like that then she's good; and if she doesn't, or if she has other habits like the unfortunate tendency to kill people and eat their livers with fava beans, then she's bad.

So to generalize now, we can criticize non-cognitivism by saying that it seems to ignore the perfectly legitimate possibility, that we can reduce ethical sentences to sentences about whatever it is about the items that make us state those ethical sentences. We can reduce a claim about the wrongness of stealing, or about the goodness of banana splits, to claims about what it is about stealing or banana splits that makes us state the ethical sentences in question.

Now as I said, there's a lot more we could say about non-cognitivism. For example, how do we distinguish moral feelings from other sorts of feelings.

Non-cognitivism today

Non-cognitivism was fairly widely advocated in the middle of this century. It isn't as popular as it once was, but it still has quite a few proponents.

It allows you to hold onto a sort of sophisticated moral relativism.

Today non-cognitivism underlies some educational theories. I mean that some theories about teaching kids ethics in the schools seem to assume that non-cognitivism is true; when we talk about "good," "bad," "right," and "wrong," all we're doing is expressing how we feel. So you will find some modern educationists having schoolchildren "clarifying" their values by asking them how they feel about different situations.