Author: Rodrigo Valencia Pacheco
Category: Ethics
Word Count: 999
Consider a common ethical judgment, e.g., that unprovoked assault is wrong. People who say this seem to believe that these actions are wrong: such assaults have the characteristic of being wrong.
Advocates of ethical non-cognitivism, however, argue that ethical judgments are, strictly speaking, not beliefs.[1]
There are different types of non-cognitivists. Some argue that to judge that assault is wrong is to express disapproval of such actions; others argue it’s like urging people to not act like that, or wanting people to not hurt others. They all agree though that ethical judgments are not literal beliefs.[2]
This essay introduces ethical non-cognitivism, an important view in metaethics, which focuses on fundamental philosophical issues concerning what ethical judgments are.
1. Beliefs and Desires
Our minds are made up of different mental states.
Beliefs are mental representations of the world. We have beliefs about where we live, what’s dangerous, and much more. Beliefs are often called cognitive mental states, meaning that they can be true or false.
Mental states that don’t represent the world are often called non-cognitive: these include desires, emotions, and preferences, which are all neither true nor false. While it’s true that someone has, say, a particular desire, that desire itself is neither true nor false.
Non-cognitive mental states play roles other than representing the world. Desires motivate us to act: unless a person has a desire to, say, eat a piece of cake, they won’t be motivated to get some, no matter what they believe about cake. [3] Emotions influence how situations feel to us and make us more likely to respond in certain ways. Preferences rank our wants and guide choices.
2. Varieties of Non-Cognitivism
Early versions of non-cognitivism focused on what people do when they make ethical judgments. Emotivists held that to say, for example, “Lying is wrong” is to try to influence people not to lie, akin to emoting “Boo for lying!”[4] Prescriptivists held that such judgments are commands to not lie, something like “Don’t lie!”[5]
More recent versions of non-cognitivism focus on the mental states we express with ethical judgments: judging that lying is often wrong is more like disapproving of lying or planning not to lie in most situations.[6] Like desires, these mental states are primarily meant to guide action.[7]
3. Why Non-Cognitivism?
There are two common motivations for non-cognitivism.
Some non-cognitivists hold their views because of how they see moral judgment as related to action and motivation. They argue that moral judgments always motivate the people who make them, at least to some extent.[8] Suppose someone sincerely judges that they should donate to charity, but never shows the slightest inclination to do this. Non-cognitivists find this puzzling: they think that if the person is sincere, they would usually act, or at least want to act, accordingly.
Non-cognitivists use this consideration to argue that, although action normally requires both beliefs and desires, moral judgments seem to bring their own motivational push in a way beliefs do not. So they conclude that moral judgments must be inherently desire-like, or non-cognitive.
Another argument for non-cognitivism is that if moral judgments were primarily about representing the world, like beliefs, they would represent moral truths or facts. But it is unclear what those facts would be, beyond facts we are most familiar with: facts we can observe, measure, and test. Moral facts do not seem to be the kind of thing we encounter in those ways, and so they conclude it’s more likely that moral judgments are non-cognitive.
4. Responses
In response, some find it not surprising that people are sometimes not motivated by their moral judgments: they think this happens all the time. So they reject the non-cognitivists’s claim that sincere moral judgments always motivate.
About ethical truths or facts, some respond that, yes, these would not be like ordinary facts or truths about common physical objects. But they might be like mathematical facts—known by thought alone—or very complex scientific facts, or a type of general “normative” fact, comparable to facts about how people should reason and form their beliefs.[9] So perhaps there are more types of facts than those that non-cognitivists initially recognize.
5. Objections
5.1. Moral Criticism
Non-cognitivism is subject to a number of objections.
First, imagine someone says, “dictatorships are good.” If non-cognitivism is true, this claim expresses a desire-like attitude, such as wanting dictatorships or approving of dictatorships. What sort of criticism can such attitudes be subject to?
With beliefs, the answer is straightforward: some beliefs are false. But non-cognitive attitudes, however, are not true or false.[10] So, if moral judgments are non-cognitive attitudes, this seems to undermine our ordinary ability to criticise anyone’s moral views, about any topic.[11]
5.2. The Frege-Geach Problem
Another challenge for non-cognitivism is to explain how moral judgments interact with other mental states, including other moral judgments. The problem becomes clear when we think about conditional (i.e., “if-then”) moral claims like “if lying is wrong, then getting your brother to lie is wrong,” or when they clash, as when someone judges both that “lying is wrong” and that “getting your brother to lie is not wrong.”
If we, again, think of these states as beliefs, the explanation is straightforward: two beliefs clash when they cannot both be true: this is an inconsistency.
But if moral judgments are non-cognitive states, it is unclear what it means for them to clash in this way. If moral judgements are neither true nor false, then it is unclear what kind of mistake one makes when holding both of the attitudes above. For the non-cognitivist, the challenge is to explain why the pair is inconsistent, rather than just an odd combination. This is a version of what is known as the Frege-Geach problem.[12]
5. Conclusion
Non-cognitivism understands moral judgments less like attempts to state ethical facts and more like attitudes that guide how we live. It faces challenges in explaining things like moral criticism and logical consistency. Whether these challenges can be met remains an open question in contemporary metaethics.[13]
Notes
[1] Likewise, they are not any of the contents of a belief, such as a statement, or assertion, or declarative sentence. Non-cognitivism contrasts with views like moral realism and error theory according to which moral judgments are classified as beliefs or the contents of those beliefs. About the former see Ethical Realism, or Moral Realism by Thomas Metcalf, about the latter see Moral Error Theory by Ian Tully.
[2] Ethical non-cognitivism can be understood as a theory of what mental states or states of mind people are in when they make moral judgments, or as as a theory about the “contents” of those mental states, and so a view about the meaning(s) of ethical concepts and language, or both. Here we will mostly focus on non-cognitivism as a view about moral mental states—sometimes called psychological non-cognitivism (Bedke, 2017: 294).
[3] This way of thinking about the connection between non-cognitive states and action is often associated with the views of David Hume and is called the Humean theory of motivation. See Reason is the Slave to the Passions: David Hume on Reason vs. Desire by Daniel Weltman. For a classic articulation and application of the view, see Smith (1987).
[4] See Ayer (1936) and Stevenson (1944) for representative examples of emotivism. Emotivism is often associated with emotions. Historically, however, it is more accurate to group emotivists in the way suggested here by their views about how moral language functions in a way similar to emoting (see Schroeder, 2024: 21). Still, emotions and their expression play an important role in many emotivist views. See Satris (1987) for a historical overview and further examples. Even later non-cognitivist views that moved away from the label “emotivism” still connect moral judgment to emotions in more indirect ways—for example, by linking moral judgment to when emotions like guilt or resentment are appropriate or rational (e.g. Gibbard 1990). Views that connect morality to emotions in similar ways are often grouped under the label sentimentalism, whether or not they are non-cognitivist.
[5] See Hare (1952) for a classic example of prescriptivism. Prescriptivism reflects a broader motivation shared by many views grouped under “non-cognitivism”: that moral thought and talk are distinctive and their close connection with action.
[6] It is important to observe that, for non-cognitivists, “subjective approval” is not that the person making an ethical judgment is saying, “I approve of this action” or “I disapprove of this action,” since those claims are either true or false and so cognitive. For some discussion of a simple version of what can be called “ethical subjectivism,” see “That’s Subjective”: Subjectivism about Truth, Beauty, and Goodness by Nathan Nobis: but see footnote 2 for caveats about that discussion.
[7] For contemporary variations of non-cognitivism based on different non-cognitive states see Blackburn (1998) for approvals, Gibbard (2003) for plans, and Silk (2015) preferences. Nowadays there are also more complex hybrid views that hold that moral judgments combine beliefs with non-cognitive states (e.g. Ridge, 2014), but which still count as non-cognitivist, since they take the non-cognitive element to be fundamental.
[8] Philosophers often call the thesis that moral judgment and motivation are necessarily connected is called motivational internalism: motivation is “internal” to moral judgment itself. For an introduction to motivational internalism, see Tiberius (2023). Those deny this connection are motivational externalists: motivation is “external” to moral judgment itself.
[9] For more on these proposals, see Ethical Realism, or Moral Realism by Thomas Metcalf and Moral Error Theory by Ian Tully.
[10] Non-cognitive states can, in one sense, be truly or falsely attributed to us. For example, “it is true that Ana wants more crisps”. However, compare this with how beliefs can also be truly attributed to us independently of whether they are true or false themselves. “It is true that Ana believes there are more crisps in the kitchen” can be true independently of whether there really are crisps in the kitchen. It is in this latter sense that non-cognitive attitudes do not seem to be true or false. See Schroeder (2018) for further discussion.
[11] Contemporary non-cognitivists have developed various strategies to address this challenge. For example, when we consider more complex cases, it becomes less obvious that we cannot make sense of being mistaken about our non-cognitive attitudes. We are often pressured to revise or abandon our desires once we reflect on their consequences and costs; the same can be said about other non-cognitive attitudes. See Blackburn (1998: 296; 1999) for ways to develop this line of response. For alternative approaches, see Gibbard (1990: Ch. 3) and Schroeder (2014).
[12] The problem is called the Frege-Geach problem because Peter Geach (1916-2013) (1960) developed it as an objection to views like non-cognitivism, drawing on a more general point associated with Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). The problem is also more commonly presented as a problem about moral language, specifically about the meaning of moral claims. However, if one argues that the meaning of moral claims should be explained in terms of the non-cognitive mental states they express then the problem presented here and the problem about language are interconnected. An account of the inconsistency of our moral claims in this framework depends on an account of the inconsistency of our moral judgments. For a more advanced overview see Schroeder (2008).
[13] Contemporary non-cognitivists respond, for example, by arguing that some combinations of states can be practically inconsistent: you cannot hold them together while reasoning about what to do. For example, you cannot consistently intend to arrive at the airport at 3 p.m. and also intend to catch a flight that leaves at 2 p.m. Similarly, you cannot consistently hold both “lying is wrong” and “getting your little brother to lie is not wrong” even if these are desire-like states. One worry, however, is whether this practical inconsistency is really the same kind of inconsistency that the Frege–Geach problem seems to demand; see van Roojen (1996). For an overview of the main options in the debate see Woods (2017).
References
Ayer, Alfred Jules (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London: V. Gollancz.
Bedke, Matthew (2017). “Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism.” In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett, The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 292-307.
Blackburn, Simon (1998). Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. New York: Oxford University Press.
Geach, P. T. (1960). Ascriptivism. Philosophical Review 69 (2):221-225.
Gibbard, Allan (1990). Wise choices, apt feelings: a theory of normative judgment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gibbard, Allan (2003). Thinking How to Live. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hare, Richard Mervyn (1952). The Language of Morals. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ridge, Michael (2014). Impassioned Belief. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Roojen, Mark van (1996). Expressivism and irrationality. Philosophical Review 105 (3):311-335.
Schroeder, Mark (2008). “What is the Frege-Geach problem?” Philosophy Compass 3 (4):703-720.
Schroeder, Mark (2018). “The moral truth.” In Michael Glanzberg, The Oxford Handbook of Truth. Oxford, United Kingdom.
Schroeder, Mark Andrew (2023). Noncognitivism in ethics. New York, NY: Routledge.
Silk, Alex (2014). “How to Be an Ethical Expressivist.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (1):47-81.
Smith, Michael (1987). “The Humean theory of motivation.” Mind 96 (381):36-61.
Stevenson, Charles Leslie (1944). Ethics and Language. New York: Yale University Press.
Tiberius, Valerie (2023). Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction. 2d. Edition. London: Routledge.
Woods, Jack (2017). “The Frege-Geach Problem.” In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett, The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 226-242.
Related Essays
Ethical Realism, or Moral Realism by Thomas Metcalf
Moral Error Theory by Ian Tully
Reason is the Slave to the Passions: David Hume on Reason vs. Desire by Daniel Weltman
“That’s Subjective”: Subjectivism about Truth, Beauty, and Goodness by Nathan Nobis
Cultural Relativism: Do Cultural Norms Make Actions Right and Wrong? by Nathan Nobis
Because God Says So: On Divine Command Theory by Spencer Case
Ethics and God: the Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma by Nathan Nobis
About the Author
Rodrigo Valencia Pacheco is a postdoctoral fellow at National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute for Philosophical Research. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Leeds. His primary research area is metaethics and has a growing interest in the philosophy of social and political language. philpeople.org/profiles/rodrigo-valencia-pacheco
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