Abstract
Let cognitivism be the view that moral judgments are cognitive mental states and noncognitivism the view that they are noncognitive mental states. Here I argue for moral judgment pluralism: some moral judgments are cognitive states and some are noncognitive states. More specifically, according to my pluralism some judgments are moral because they carry a moral content (e.g., that genocide is wrong) and some are moral because they employ a moral attitude (e.g., indignation, or guilt); the former are the cognitive moral judgments and the latter the noncognitive ones. After explaining and motivating the view, I argue that this kind of pluralism handles quite elegantly several of the core issues that have structured the debate on cognitivism versus noncognitivism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
If one formulates cognitivism and noncognitivism as generics rather than universals, it becomes trickier to formulate pluralism. But this is mostly because the exact degree of freedom involved in withdrawing from a universal to a generic is unclear at present, with many different theories proposed but none commanding consensus (see Leslie and Lerner, 2016 for a partial review). On the simplest theory, generics are disguised universals about typical or normal instances (see, e.g., Nickel, 2008). Thus, to say that moral judgments are cognitive states is to say that all typical moral judgments are cognitive states. Pluralism would then become the thesis that some typical moral judgments are cognitive and some are noncognitive. On other views of what a generic exactly says, pluralism would have to be formulated differently. Most generically, so to speak, pluralism could be formulated as the conjunction of two negations of generics: “moral judgments are cognitive” is false & “moral judgments are noncognitive” is false.
I am assuming here that emotions cannot be exhaustively reduced to belief or some other cognitive state. There are of course theories of emotion that do reduce them entirely to beliefs, but against the background of those theories the debate between cognitivism and noncognitivism becomes considerably less interesting anyway.
This does commit us to a specific picture of what is involved in the relevant form of endorsement. It would have to be a process that effects a transition from a mental state that represents-as-F < x > to one that represents-as-true < x is F > (e.g., from a state that represents-as-morally-wrong < sleeping with C > to a state that represents-as-true < sleeping with C was morally wrong >). What endorsement does, on this view, is to take information which is in some sense implicit in the attitude and make it explicit in the content.
It might be objected that prominent error theorists such as Mackie (1977) and Olson (2014) deny that empirical facts can make moral judgments fitting. But this is because Mackie and Olson hold that all moral judgments are beliefs, and moreover that the moral concepts invoked in the contents of those beliefs are concepts that purport to pick out non-natural, irreducibly normative properties. We take no stand here on how moral concepts present the properties they purport to pick out, but in any case we deny that all moral judgments are beliefs, and therefore that making a moral judgment implies applying moral concepts. How our moral concepts present the putative fittingness-makers is irrelevant to what might make fitting a moral judgment that does not involve any moral concept.
The only pressure toward a unitarian account here comes from the demand that moral judgment be intimately linked to motivation, but as we saw the nature of the link is quite ambiguous and claims to accommodate it best are made by the cognitivist, the noncognitivist, and indeed pluralist alike.
References
Brink, D. (1989). Moral realism and the foundations of ethics. Cambridge University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2006). Perception and the fall from eden. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Darwall, S. L. (1977). Two kinds of respect. Ethics, 88, 36–49.
Geach, P. T. (1960). Ascriptivism. Philosophical Review, 69, 221–225.
Greenspan, P. S. (1992). Subjective guilt and responsibility. Mind, 101, 287–303.
Johnston, M. (1989). Dispositional theories of value. Proceedings of Aristotelian Society, 63, 139–174.
Kriegel, U. (Forthcoming). Indignation, appreciation, and the unity of moral experience. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
Kriegel, U. (2012). Moral motivation, moral phenomenology, and the alief/belief distinction. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90, 469–486.
Leslie, S.-J., & Lerner A. (2016). Generic generalizations. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Mackie, J. L. (1946). A refutation of morals. Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 24, 77–90.
Mackie, J. L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin.
Mason, M. (2003). Contempt as a moral attitude. Ethics, 113, 234–272.
McDowell, J. (1985). Values and Secondary Qualities. In T. Honderich (Ed.), Morality and Objectivity. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Nickel, B. (2008). Generics and the Way of Normality. Linguistics and Philosophy, 31, 629–648.
Olson, J. (2014). Moral error theory: History, critique, defence. Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, T. (1998). What we owe to each other. MIT Press.
Smith, M. (1994). The moral problem. Blackwell.
Velleman, J. D. (1999). Love as a moral emotion. Ethics, 109, 338–374.
Acknowledgments
For comments on a previous draft, I am grateful to Abe Roth and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies. I have benefited from presenting material relevant to this paper at Brown University and Rice University, as well as at the Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop. I am grateful to the audiences there, in particular Mustafa Aghahosseini, Christian Blacèt, Gwen Bradford, Alex Campbell, Jamie Dreier, Anna Giustina, Eric Guindon, Max Khan Hayward, Richard Heck, Thomas Hofweber, Christa Johnson, Hitkarsh Kumar, Andrew Lee, Chad Marxsen, Daniel Pinto, Gideon Rosen, Reuben Sass, Josh Schechter, Sarah Stroud, Patricia Thornton, Anna Tsvetkov, Alex Worsnip, and Orfeas Zormpalas.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kriegel, U. Moral judgment and the content-attitude distinction. Philos Stud 179, 1135–1152 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01690-5
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01690-5