Argues that emotivism is compatible with cases where we seem to lack motivation to act according to our moral opinions.

Emotivists hold that moral opinions are wishes and desires, and that the function of moral language is to “express” such states. But if moral opinions were but wishes or desires, why would we see certain opinions as inconsistent with, or following from other opinions? And why should our reasoning include complex opinions such as the opinion that a person ought to be blamed only if he has done something wrong? Indeed, why would we think that anything is conditional on his (...) doing something wrong unless “doing something wrong” signifies a real kind of action? -/- Many have believed, and seemingly on good grounds, that these questions lack good answers, and that emotivism is doomed for that very reason. What I will argue, however, is that once emotivism is recognized for what it is, namely an empirical theory about the psychological nature of moral opinions, and once we relate it to a general theory of human reasoning, moral reasoning and intuitions of inconsistency and consequence are only to be expected. Recent objections to earlier emotivist or “expressivist” accounts can thus be met, and the phenomena of inconsistency and consequence fully embraced by emotivists. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Charles L. Stevenson’s metaethical view. Since his metaethical view is a form of emotivism, I will start by explaining what the core claims of emotivism are. I will then explore and comment on the specific claims of Stevenson’s proposal. Last, I will offer an overview of the objections that have traditionally been raised against emotivism.

I THE THEORY OF VALUE AND THE RISE OF ETHICAL EMOTIVISM i. The standard account Historical accounts of recent moral philosophy present the subject as going ...

By distinguishing between pragmatic and semantic aspects of emotivism, and by distinguishing between inflationary and deflationary conceptions of truth conditions, this paper defends emotivism against a series of objections. First, it is not the case (as Blackburn has argued) that emotivism must explain the appearance that moral sentences have truth conditions. Second, it is not the case (as Boghossian has argued) that emotivism presupposes that non-moral sentences have inflationary truth conditions. Finally, it is not the case (...) (as Geach and Blackburn have argued) that emotivism is inconsistent with the validity of certain simple arguments. (shrink)

Emotivism is the doctrine that ethical beliefs are nothing more than projections of emotion. In this concise study, it is shown that emotions themselves embody ethical beliefs and that, for that reason, emotivism implicitly presupposes the truth of a non-emotivism conception of ethical truth and therefore fails.

Hume is believed by many to hold an emotivist thesis, according to which all expressions of moral judgements are expressions of moral sentiments. However, most specialist scholars of Hume either deny that this is Hume's position or believe that he has failed to argue convincingly for it. I argue that Hume is an emotivist, and that his true arguments for emotivism have been hitherto overlooked. Readers seeking to understand Hume's theory of moral judgements have traditionally looked to the first (...) section of Book 3 of his Treatise, which discusses the relation between morality and reason. I argue that there is evidence elsewhere which better supports Hume's emotivist thesis. Hume's arguments for emotivism focus more on the causes of moral sentiments than on their relation to reason or belief, and he argues that moral sentiments are such as to arise whenever we contemplate morally relevant objects. He also holds that the presence of moral sentiments precludes any possibility of moral belief, because moral beliefs could only be less vivid copies of moral sentiments, and these cannot simultaneously exist. Hume concludes that all moral judgements must be expressions of sentiments. (shrink)

This is a brief overview of the view in metaethics called Emotivism.

In chapter VI of Language, Truth, and Logic, A.J. Ayer argues that ethical statements are not literally significant. Unlike metaphysical statements, however, ethical statements are not nonsensical: even though they are not literally significant, Ayer thinks that they possess some other sort of significance. This raises the question: by what principle or criterion can we distinguish, among the class of statements that are not literally significant, between those which are genuinely meaningless and those which possess some other, non-literal form of (...) significance. I suggest that Ayer needs a generalised version of the verification principle in order to answer this question. However, when we formulate the generalised version, it turns out that ethical statements do not satisfy it, so that the emotivist is committed to viewing ethics, like metaphysics, as meaningless verbiage. (shrink)

The paper investigates different ways to understand the claim that non-cognitivist theories of morality are incoherent. According to the claim, this is so because, on one theory of truth, non-cognitivists are not able to deny objective truth to moral judgments without taking a substantive normative position. I argue that emotivism is not self-defeating in this way. The charge of incoherence actually only amounts to a claim that emotivism is incompatible with deflationary truth, but this claim is based upon (...) a mistake. It relies upon a problematic understanding of both emotivism and the deflationary theory of truth. (shrink)

This chapter both explains the origins of emotivism in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, R. B. Braithwaite, Austin Duncan-Jones, A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson (along with the endorsement by Frank P. Ramsey, and the summary of C. D. Broad), and looks at MacIntyre's criticisms of emotivism as the inevitable result of Moore's attack on naturalistic ethics and his ushering in the fact/value, which was a historical product of the Enlightenment.

Emotivists like Ayer claim that moral sentences are devoid of cognitive meaning since they only evince attitudinal approval or disapproval of actions. In this paper, I explore two non-classical sem...

The process of decision making is predictable and irrational according to Daniel Ariely and other economic behaviorists, historians, and philosophers such as Daniel Kahneman or Yuval Noah Harari. Decisions made anteriorly can be, but don’t have to be, present in the actions of a person. Stories and shared belief in myths, especially those that arise from a system of human norms and values and are based on a belief in a “supernatural” order (religion) are important. Because of this, mass cooperation (...) amongst strangers is possible. (shrink)

In developing the metaethical foundation for the Land Ethic, J. Baird Callicott has relied on the cognitive plasticity and directionality of the moral sentiments in order to argue for an extension of those sentiments to the environment. As he sees it, reason plays a substantial role in determining which objects we direct those sentiments toward, and ecology has now shown to reason’s satisfaction that we are part of larger, land communities. In this essay, I would like to develop the claim (...) that we should be careful not to overemphasize the cognitive nature of the “moral sentiments” at the expense of their biological basis as an ecologicaladaptation. I hope to show that this is of special importance for the Land Ethic, where the metaethic involved is entirely dependent on a “felt” sense of community to generate the extension of moral consideration to the environment. (shrink)

This article provides a defense of a variety of MacIntyrean arguments against emotivism. In After Virtue MacIntyre explains that emotivism might be understood either as a theory about the meaning or about the function of moral language. He also argues that emotivism is false either way. I argue that MacIntyre is right about this by explaining and then answering the recent defenses of emotivism that have appeared in the literature. I conclude by reminding the reader that (...) according to MacIntyre his attacks on emotivism also serve as attacks on other subjectivist ethical theories, such as prescriptivism and existentialism. Thus, if he is right about this, then his critique of emotivism has more far ranging implications than one might initially suppose. (shrink)

This article provides a defense of a variety of MacIntyrean arguments against emotivism. In After Virtue MacIntyre explains that emotivism might be understood either as a theory about the meaning or about the function of moral language. He also argues that emotivism is false either way. I argue that MacIntyre is right about this by explaining and then answering the recent defenses of emotivism that have appeared in the literature. I conclude by reminding the reader that (...) according to MacIntyre his attacks on emotivism also serve as attacks on other subjectivist ethical theories, such as prescriptivism and existentialism. Thus, if he is right about this, then his critique of emotivism has more far ranging implications than one might initially suppose. (shrink)

Emotivism has enjoined a revival of sorts over the past few decades, primarily driven by a Darwinian interpretation of the Humean metaethic. Evolutionary ethics, the metaethical view that at the heart of our moral sense lies a set of moral sentiments whose existence 'pre-dates' in evolutionary terms our species' ability to engage in more explicit, cognitive moral deliberations and discourse, whether in the discovery of deontological rules or in the crafting of social contracts, figures prominently in Robert Solomon's work (...) in justice theory and J. Baird Callicott's work in environmental ethics, to name just two efforts to revive emotivism. Though the idea that our moral sense is grounded in our evolved biology lies at the heart of the new ethical emotivism, there has been a curious lack of a truly evolutionary account of the origin of that biological predisposition in the work of Solomon, Callicott, and others involved in the revival. In particular, what is missing is an account of how we evolved our moral sense as an adaptation to the ecology in which our very early ancestors existed. The typical explanation is to treat it as selected for by the pressure to cooperate that bore upon our early ancestors; for example, the advantage that cooperative effort confers in bringing down big game or warding off competing groups. But this type of explanation, I hope to show, rather than providing an account of how our moral sense came to be, actually must presuppose the existence of a rudimentary moral sense. If so, then the origin of our moral sense must be accounted for as an adaptation to our pre-social, ecological environment. As a model for what such an explanation might look like I will use Jared Diamond's recent work in biogeography, Guns, Germs and Steel. (shrink)

In 1913 Russell gave up on the Moorean good. But since naturalism was not an option, that left two alternatives: the error theory and non-cognitivism. Despite a brief flirtation with the error theory Russell preferred the non-cognitivist option, developing a form of emotivism according to which to say that something is good is to express the desire that everyone should desire it. But why emotivism rather than the error theory? Because emotivism sorts better with Russell’s Fundamental Principle (...) that the “sentences we can understand must be composed of words with whose meaning we are acquainted.” I construct an argument for emotivism featuring the Fundamental Principle that closely parallels Ayer’s verificationist argument in Language, Truth, and Logic. I contend that Russell’s argument, like Ayer’s, is vulnerable to a Moorean critique. This suggests an important moral: revisionist theories of meaning such as verificationism and the Fundamental Principle are prima facie false. Any modus ponens from such a principle to a surprising semantic conclusion is trumped by a Moorean modus tollens from the negation of the surprising semantics to the negation of the revisionist principle. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the relation between democratic values and emotions. The author argues that democratic values and emotional judgments are inter-reducible: political agents use emotional judgments to reflexively evaluate normative paradigms of political life. In the first part of the paper, the author describes the state of emotions in contemporary political philosophy and identifies Charles Stevenson?s ethical conception of emotivism as the first comprehensive attempt to neutrally conceptualize emotions in moral and political thinking. The (...) second part of the paper explores the shortcomings of emotivism and finds an adequate alternative in Martha Nussbaum?s concept of emotional judgment as the one that contains beliefs and values about social objects. In the final part of the paper, the author identifies that moral and political disagreements emerge in democracies from ranking of the importance of political objects. The evaluation criteria for this type of ranking is derived from democratic values which are reducible to agents? emotional judgments. (shrink)

In 1936, in a chapter of Language, Truth and Logic clearly influenced by Hume and influenced also by Ogden's and Richards's The Meaning of Meaning, Ayer claimed that judgments of value, in so far as they are not scientific statements, are not in the literal sense significant but are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false. To say ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’ is not to state any more than one would have stated by (...) merely saying ‘you stole that money’. To add that the action was wrong is not to make a further statement about it, but simply to evince one's moral disapproval. ‘It is as if I had said “you stole that money” in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation mark. The tone or the exclamation mark adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings of the speaker’. (shrink)