Emotivism
Read the section on Emotivism in the textbook, particularly the first full paragraph on page 42 ("This conception of the function . . . cannot make") and write down what you think are Vaughn's arguments against emotivism.
Then read the following emotivist replies to Vaughn's arguments, and get those written down clearly in your own words.
Firstly, the fact that emotivism does not conform to our ordinary expectations and intuitions about moral judgements does not prove anything. Our ordinary, "commonsense" ideas are often wrong. For instance, it was long believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, but this commonsense idea eventually turned out to be completely wrong. It was long believed that women were intellectually inferior to men, even though this belief has been provably wrong throughout human history. "Cognitivism," the view that there are such things as moral facts, is very much like sexism the ordinary, "commonsense" idea that of course women are not as rational as men. For thousands of years, virtually all human beings took this "fact" as intuitively obvious, even though they had in fact absolutely no reason to believe it. The history of cognitivism is exactly the same, albeit without the vile results. For thousands of years, virtually all human beings took the "fact" of cognitivism as intuitively obvious, even though they have had in fact absolutely no reason to believe it. We have plenty of evidence that people make all kinds of moral claims on the basis of their emotions. We acually have no evidence for the existance of moral facts, and if cognitivists want to claim that emotivism is wrong, the cognitivists have to provide evidence that moral facts exist. The fact that people feel and believe in moral facts is no reason to believe in moral facts, any more than the fact that people felt and believed in the intellectual inferiority of women was a reason to agree with sexism. If the cognitivists cannot provide actual evidence that moral facts exist, they have no basis for saying that emotivists are wrong when they say that moral facts do not exist.
Secondly, the emotivist analysis of moral argument is not simply that they are the use of nonmoral facts to bring about changes of attitude. If that was their view, they would simply deny that moral arguments are possible because facts, all by themselves, cannot change attitudes. The emotivist analysis of moral argument is that, at its very best, it consists of attempts to show people that their surface attitudes do not actually conform to their most fundamental attitudes. Remember that the difference between cognitivism and emotivism is that while both accept that emotions and attitudes heavily influence the actual moral disagreements and arguments of actual people, cognitivism believes that moral facts exist which make some people right and some people wrong, emotivists believe that universally false claims of moral fact are merely one of the ways that individual arguers attempt to influence each other's attitudes. To cognitivists, emotions and attitudes are an impediment to moral argument. To emotivists, they are what those arguments are about. To see the emotivist position, look at the bulk of moral arguments in the United States. If you look closely, very few of them are about the validity or invalidity of moral principles. Just about everybody seems to share the values of fairness, freedom, equality under law, and protection of children. The vast majority of "moral" arguments given in the US are about nonmoral factual issues. Take homosexuality, for instance. In Roman society, the traditional attitude was that homosexuality was wrong. Why? It just was. Later, after Christianity was imposed on the peoples of Europe, the Bible was cherry-picked to provide something that would "justify" this attitude, and so, while the surrounding verses were ignored, one verse in Leviticus was trumpeted as God's condemnation of masses of innocent, harmless people. Later, as Christianity began to be partially replaced by science, psychiatry was co-opted, and homosexuality was painted as a mental disorder, and therefore still "wrong" without any evidence that being homosexual involved any dysfunctions whatsoever. The advantage of cognitivism, as a belief system, is that the belief in moral facts facilitates a certain form of "moral" reasoning. Emotivists do not believe that moral facts actually exist, but they acknowledge that people tend to believe in moral facts as an unconscious way of rank ordering their attitudes. From the emotivist viewpoint, people have "basic" or "core" attitudes, such as a love of fairness, or a desire that children be protected from harm, that they are strongly committed to, as well as "surface" attitudes which arise from the interaction of core attitudes with beliefs about the world. Thus a person may oppose same-sex marriage because he (falsely) believes it has a negative effect on opposite-sex marriages, or another may condemn homosexuality because she (falsely) believes that it involves pedophila. Thus for the emotivist, there is a lot to argue about, and there is a right and a wrong in every issue. If you oppose marriage equality, an emotivist will argue against you on the assumption that you have love of fairness as a core attitude, and that if you understand that equality does not harm straight marriages, and that inequality is unfair you will realize on some level that your surface attitude conflicts with your core attitude, and your core attitude of fairness will drive you to give up the surface attitude of opposition to marriage equality.
Emotivists recognize that people making moral claims frequently appeal to ignorance, arrogance, racism and fear, but they don't necessarily think that such appeals are legitimate or rational. Anti-semites created hatred of Jews by telling lies about them. Anti-semitism can sometimes be addressed, and even cured by exposing the lies and telling the truth. Emotivism even allows a robust sense in which something can be called "morally wrong" without there being any objective moral facts. If I have fairness as a core attitude, an attitude that, above all else, I want to act fairly, and someone get me to act unfairly by telling lies to me, my attitude of wanting to be fair will make me angry with that person, and I will want to tell him "what you did was wrong" as a way of expressing my anger at being tricked into acting against my core attitude.
Emotivism therefore can make a clear distinction between influencing people's attitudes and showing that a claim is true or false. Under emotivism, moral argument does not make any attempt to influence anyone's core attitudes, which the arguer tacitly assumes she shares with her audience. Rather the arguer attempts to convince her audience that some surface attitude held by the audience actually conflicts with one of their core attitudes. This is done by attempting to convince the audience about relevant matters of fact, which can be true or false, in order to influence surface attitudes, which are held or not held.
Furthermore, emotivism provides the best explanation for the fact that some moral arguments, in the sense of two actual people discussiong a moral issue between themselves, turn out to be actually unresolvable. A person with a core attitude that children and the mentally ill should not be allowed to live on the streets is not likely to be able to come to any agreement with someone who fundamentally believes that property rights exist and are inviolable. One will insist that taxation is morally required because it funds social services, while the other will insist insist that taxation is morally prohibited because it involves taking someone's property against his will. Such conflicts are generally not resolved by careful discussion of moral facts. Instead, they generally degenerate into shouting matches, or one side will flounce off.
Emotivism also provides the best explanation of most people's actual moral reasoning process. It's a fact that the vast majority of people start out with attiudes, and then look around for reasons to "justify" them. Generally, a factual belief or a claim of moral principle will not be believed on the basis of independent evidence-based reasoning, it will be believed because it appears to support the attitude the believer happens to have.
Emotivists are perfectly happy with the idea of people using talk about moral facts in moral arguments, because moral-fact-talk can be the most efficient way of exposing some people's dishonesty about their own attitudes. In emotivist terms, asking someone to cite a moral principle supporting their position actually amounts to asking them to demonstrate that their surface attitudes are conform to their core attitudes, or that their core attitudes are consistent with the core attitudes of others in their society. For instance a person with the attitude that society should care for impoverished and at-risk children might argue with a person whose attitude is that taxation is theft by asking him to provide a rational justification for this principle that no person, no matter how rich, should ever be forcibly relieved of even the smallest amount of money, even if a billion children would otherwise die in agony. It's easy to argue for social programs for children because most people have the attitude that society should care for children, it's no so easy to argue that the property of the ultra-rich should be absolutely inviolate because most people do not share the attitude of protecting absolutely all property at absolutely any cost.
Emotivists share the attitude that the sufferings of a napalmed child are absolutely horrible and should be prevented if at all possible. Emotivists also believe that this attiude can motivate people to march, protest and even vote against warmongers. Ask an emotivist what should be done, and his attitude will probably to support efforts to prevent future atrocities, and punish the people who caused this horror. And an emotivist may very well express his attitude by saying that hurting the child was evil, and punishing the perpurtrators would be good. An emotivist might also have attitudes about warmaking and witchburning, about Katyn and Dachau, and might even be willing to express his attitude by picking up a rifle and going off to kill a few of those people whose attitude towards human life is such that they are willing to drop napalm on villages, burn uppity women, execute prisoners of war or work harmless people to death, but the one thing the emotivist does not have to admit is that there are any special moral facts that "justify" his attitudes. For the emotivist, the fundamental attitude is what underpins his belief that "evil" has occured and should be opposed, and if the cognitivist thinks otherwise, he has to do more than say that the idea that there are no moral facts seperate from attitudes is "implausible," he has to actually prove that these moral facts exist.
Vaughn claims that it is obvious that "emotivism does not fare well when examined in light of our commonsense moral experience," but he is confusing two things here. What we experience is the acts and omissions of various people, together with our emotional reactions to their acts. What Vaughn calls "common sense" is just how we are used to thinking and talking about all these experiences. Given that emotivism actually does a better job than cognitivism in explaining what we actually experience when people think and talk and act about morality, and the fact cognitivism has never come up with an independent, evidence-based reason to think that moral facts exist, it's clear that emotivism is the correct theory.
Based on the treatment of emotivism in the textbook and the hypothetical reply given in this page, which theory, cognitivism or emotivism, is most likely to be true, based on the information you have so far. State your thesis as the first sentence of an essay, and explain all your reasoning clearly and completely.
Copyright © 2015 by Martin C. Young
