Emotivism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Emotivism is the non-cognitivist[1] meta-ethical theory that ethical judgments are primarily expressions of one's own attitude and imperatives meant to change the attitudes and actions of another.[2] The theory was stated most vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic,[3] but its development owes even more to C. L. Stevenson,[4] whose 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."[5][6] A modified form of emotivism is seen in the prescriptivism of R. M. Hare.[7][8]

Contents

[edit] History

Emotivism reached prominence in the 20th century, but it was not born then. In 1710, George Berkeley wrote that language in general often serves to inspire feelings as well as communicate ideas.[9] Decades later, David Hume espoused ideas similar to Stevenson's later ones.[10] In his 1751 book Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume argued that morality was related to fact but "determined by sentiment":

In moral deliberations we must be acquainted beforehand with all the objects, and all their relations to each other; and from a comparison of the whole, fix our choice or approbation. … While we are ignorant whether a man were aggressor or not, how can we determine whether the person who killed him be criminal or innocent? But after every circumstance, every relation is known, the understanding has no further room to operate, nor any object on which it could employ itself. The approbation or blame which then ensues, cannot be the work of the judgement, but of the heart; and is not a speculative proposition or affirmation, but an active feeling or sentiment.[11]

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 arguments had significant influence in steering other philosophers toward noncognitivism, particularly emotivism.[12] After Moore, but before Ayer and Stevenson, influential statements of emotivism were made by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their 1923 book The Meaning of Meaning and also by W. H. F. Barnes and A. Duncan-Jones.[13]

[edit] Proponents

[edit] A. J. Ayer

Ayer's version of emotivism is given in a chapter of his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, a defense of logical positivism. It should be noted that logical positivism does not entail emotivism,[14] or vice-versa; some positivists in the Vienna Circle, which had a great influence on Ayer, held non-emotivist views.[15]

In chapter six, "Critique of Ethics and Theology", Ayer divides "the ordinary system of ethics" into four classes:

  1. "Propositions which express definitions of ethical terms, or judgements about the legitimacy or possibility of certain definitions"
  2. "Propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience, and their causes"
  3. "Exhortations to moral virtue"
  4. "Actual ethical judgments"[16]

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,[17] since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another. Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":

The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money," I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, "You stole that money." In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. 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 marks. … If now I generalise my previous statement and say, "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. … I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments.[18]

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-proposition which 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:

If our opponent concurs with us in expressing moral disapproval of a given type t, then we may get him to condemn a particular action A, by bringing forward arguments to show that A is of type t. For the question whether A does or does not belong to that type is a plain question of fact.[19]

[edit] C. L. Stevenson

Stevenson's 1944 book Ethics and Language agrees with Ayer that ethical sentences describe the speaker's feelings, but he adds that they also have an imperative component intended to change the listener's behavior.[20] Where Ayer spoke of values, Stevenson speaks of attitudes, and where Ayer spoke of disagreement of fact, Stevenson speaks of differences in belief; the concepts are the same.[21] Terminology aside, Stevenson uses two patterns of analysis for translating ethical statements.

[edit] 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."[22] 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:

If told to close the door, one may ask "Why?" and receive some such reason as "It is too drafty," or "The noise is distracting." … These reasons cannot be called "proofs" in any but a dangerously extended sense, nor are they demonstratively or inductively related to an imperative; but they manifestly do support an imperative. They "back it up," or "establish it," or "base it on concrete references to fact."[23]

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.

The imperative is used to alter the hearer's attitudes or actions. … The supporting reason then describes the situation which the imperative seeks to alter, or the new situation which the imperative seeks to bring about; and if these facts disclose that the new situation will satisfy a preponderance of the hearer's desires, he will hesitate to obey no longer. More generally, reasons support imperatives by altering such beliefs as may in turn alter an unwillingness to obey.[24]

[edit] Second pattern analysis

Stevenson's second pattern of analysis is used for statements about types of actions, not specific actions. Under this pattern, "'This is good' has the meaning of 'This has qualities or relations X, Y, Z … ,' except that 'good' has as well a laudatory meaning which permits it to express the speaker's approval, and tends to evoke the approval of the hearer."[25] The speaker is evaluating the action based on a general principle. For instance, someone who says "Murder is wrong" might mean "Murder decreases happiness overall"; this is a second-pattern statement which leads to a first-pattern one: "I disapprove of anything which decreases happiness overall. Do so as well."[26]

[edit] Methods of argumentation

Moral disagreements are settled through argumentation. Stevenson divides these methods of argumentation into three groups, which Colin Wilks refers to as:

  1. "Logical methods", in which one tries to show that the other person is inconsistent in applying a general principle to specific cases,
  2. "Rational psychological methods", in which one argues about the facts of a case in order to change a person's judgment without changing their principles, and
  3. "Non-rational psychological methods", which seek to try to change a person's "fundamental attitude" with questions like "What if everyone thought the way you do?" or "How would you feel if you were in their shoes?"[27]

[edit] Critics

[edit] Richard Brandt

Utilitarian philosopher Richard Brandt offered several criticism 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."[28] 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:

Suppose, for instance, as a child a person disliked eating peas. When he recalls this as an adult he is amused and notes how preferences change with age. He does not say, however, that his former attitude was mistaken. If, on the other hand, he remembers regarding irreligion or divorce as wicked, and now does not, he regards his former view as erroneous and unfounded. … Ethical statements do not look like the kind of thing the emotive theory says they are.[29]

Brandt also criticizes "the 'magnetic influence' thesis",[29] the idea of Stevenson that ethical statements are meant to influence the listener's attitudes. He thinks 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.

[edit] Sir David Ross

Sir William David Ross criticized emotivism as unintentionally restricting ethical statements to a very limited subset of possible ethical utterances in his 1939 book The 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.

… There is no doubt that such words as 'you ought to do so-and-so' may be used as one's means of so inducing a person to behave a certain way. But if we are to do justice to the meaning of 'right' or 'ought', we must take account also of such modes of speech as 'he ought to do so-and-so', 'you ought to have done so-and-so', 'if this and that were the case, you ought to have done so-and-so', 'if this and that were the case, you ought to do so-and-so', 'I ought to do so-and-so.' Where the judgement of obligation has referenced either a third person, not the person addressed, or to the past, or to an unfulfilled past condition, or to a future treated as merely possible, or to the speaker himself, there is no plausibility in describing the judgement as command.[30]

It would make little sense to translate statements such as "Galileo should not have been forced to recant on heliocentricism" or "The United States should have entered World War 2 before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor" 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.

Stevenson's Ethics and Language, written seven years after Ross's book, states that emotive terms are "not always used for purposes of exhortation."[31] For example, in the sentence "Slavery was good in Ancient Rome", one is speaking of past attitudes in an "almost purely descriptive" sense.[31] 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.[32] Stevenson considers it a stretch to think of sentences in such contexts 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."[32]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Garner and Rosen 1967, chapter 13 ("Noncognitivist Theories") regards the ethical theories of Ayer, Stevenson and Hare as noncognitivist ones.
  2. ^ Ogden and Richards 1946, p. 125: "'Good' is alleged to stand for a unique, unanalyzable concept … [which] is the subject matter of ethics. This peculiar ethical use of 'good' is, we suggest, a purely emotive use. … Thus, when we so use it in the sentence, 'This is good,' we merely refer to this, and the addition of "is good" makes no difference whatever to our reference … it serves only as an emotive sign expressing our attitude to this, and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to actions of one kind or another." This quote appears in an extended form just before the preface of Stevenson's Ethics and Language.
  3. ^ Pepper 1960, p. 277: "[Emotivism] was stated in its simplest and most striking form by A. J. Ayer."
  4. ^ Brandt 1959, p. 239, calls Stevenson's Ethics and Language "the most important statement of the emotive theory", and Pepper 1960, p. 288, says it "was the first really systematic development of the value judgment theory and will probably go down in the history of ethics as the most representative for this school."
  5. ^ Wilks 2002, p. 1: "Stevenson's version, which was intended to qualify the earlier views of Ayer (and others) … will then be treated as an elaboration of Ayer's."
  6. ^ Satris 1987, p. 25: "It might be suggested that there are two broad types of ethical emotivism. The first, represented by Stevenson, is well grounded in philosophical and psychological theory relating to ethics … The second, represented by Ayer, is an unorthodox spin-off of logical positivism."
  7. ^ Brandt 1959, p. 221: "A recent book [The Language of Morals] by R. M. Hare has proposed a view, otherwise very similar to the emotive theory, with modifications …"
  8. ^ Wilks 2002, p. 79: "… while Hare was, no doubt, a critic of the [emotive theory], he was, in the eyes of his own critics, a kind of emotivist himself. His theory, as a consequence, has sometimes been depicted as a reaction against emotivism and at other times as an extension of it."
  9. ^ Berkeley 1710, paragraph 20: "The communicating of Ideas marked by Words is not the chief and only end of Language, as is commonly supposed. There are other Ends, as the raising of some Passion, the exciting to, or deterring from an Action, the putting the Mind in some particular Disposition …"
  10. ^ Stevenson 1944, p. 273: "Of all traditional philosophers, Hume has most clearly asked the questions that here concern us, and has most nearly reached a conclusion that the present writer can accept."
  11. ^ Hume 1751, "Appendix I. Concerning moral sentiment"
  12. ^ Moore, G. E. [1912] (2005). "Editor's Introduction", in William Shaw: Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, x. ISBN 0199272018. “Although this critique [of ethical naturalism] had a powerful impact, the appeal of Moore's nonnaturalistic cognitivism was, by contrast, relatively weak. In the decades following Principia, many philosophers who were persuaded by the former ended up abandoning cognitivism altogether in favor of the position that distinctively ethical discourse is not cognitive at all, but rather an expression of attitude or emotion.” 
  13. ^ Urmson 1968, p. 15: "The earliest statement of the emotive theory of value terms in the modern British-American tradition (as opposed to statements in such continental writers as Haegerstroem which became known to English-speaking philosophers only comparatively late and had no early influence) was, so far as I know, that given by I. A. Richards in a general linguistic and epistemological work, The Meaning of Meaning …"; Brandt 1959, p. 206: "The earliest suggestions of the theory in the [20th] century have been made by W. H. F. Barnes and A. Duncan-Jones."
  14. ^ Wilks 2002, p. 1: "… I do not take Ayer's ethical theory to hinge in any necessarily dependent sense upon his verificationist thesis … I take his ethical theory to hinge upon his verificationist thesis only to the extent that it assumes logic and empirical verification (and combinations thereof) to be the only means of firmly establishing the truth or falsity of any claim to knowledge."
  15. ^ Satris 1987, p. 23: "Utilitarian, rationalist and cognitivist positions are in fact maintained by the members of the Vienna Circle who wrote in the fields of ethics, social theory and value theory, namely, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Viktor Kraft and Karl Menger."
  16. ^ Ayer 1952, p. 103
  17. ^ Ayer 1952, p. 106
  18. ^ Ayer 1952, p. 107
  19. ^ Ayer 1952, p. 111
  20. ^ Stevenson 1944, p. 21: "Both imperative and ethical sentences are used more for encouraging, altering, or redirecting people's aims and conduct than for simply describing them."
  21. ^ Wilks 2002, p. 20
  22. ^ Stevenson 1944, p. 21
  23. ^ Stevenson 1944, p. 27
  24. ^ Stevenson 1944, pp. 27–28
  25. ^ Stevenson 1944, p. 207
  26. ^ Wilks 2002, p. 15, gives a similar example
  27. ^ Wilks 2002, pp. 25–26
  28. ^ Brandt 1959, p. 225
  29. ^ a b Brandt 1959, p. 226
  30. ^ Ross 1939, pp. 33–34
  31. ^ a b Stevenson 1944, p. 83
  32. ^ a b Stevenson 1944, p. 84

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../e/m/o/Emotivism.html"
In other languages