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Non-Cognitivist Pragmatics and Stevenson's ‘Do so as well!’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Michael Ridge
Michael Ridge*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UKEH8 9JX
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Extract

Meta-ethical non-cognitivism makes two claims—a negative one and a positive one. The negative claim is that moral utterances do not express beliefs which provide the truth-conditions for those utterances. The positive claim is that the primary function of such utterances is to express certain of the speaker's desire-like states of mind. Non-cognitivism is officially a theory about the meanings of moral words, but non-cognitivists also maintain that moral states of mind are themselves at least partially constituted by desire-like states to which moral utterances give voice. Non-cognitivists need a plausible account of what distinguishes whims, addictions and cravings from genuinely moral judgments. For while non-cognitivists maintain that in a suitably broad sense moral judgments just are constituted by desire-like states they also insist that not any old desire constitutes a genuinely moral judgment. Since the challenge is to demarcate what is distinctive about moral attitudes we might usefully call this the demarcation challenge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 563 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2003

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References

1 Thanks to two referees for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and the participants in the Work in Progress series in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

2 At least, as I am using the term ‘non-cognitivism’ here this is true. There is a broader sense of ‘non-cognitivism’ which could include views according to which moral utterances function to express neither beliefs nor desires. For example, the judgment that an action is unreasonable might express a speaker's puzzlement about how anybody could be willing to make the trade-offs involved in such an action. In this respect, the negative thesis is more essential to non-cognitivism. Thanks to an anonymous referee for emphasizing this broader notion of ‘non-cognitivism.’

3 Michael Smith has recently emphasized the importance of a plausible non-cognitivist way of meeting this challenge. See Smith, M. ‘Which Passions Rule?’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002) 157-63CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Blackburn, S. ‘Replies,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for Blackburn's reply.

4 James Lenman has usefully suggested this label for the problem; see his forthcoming reply to Smith, M. ‘Evaluation, Uncertainty, and Motivation,’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (2002) 305-20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Stevenson, CL. Ethics and Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1944)Google Scholar

6 Blackburn, S. Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon 1998), 9Google Scholar

7 Gibbard, A. Wise Choices, Apt Peelings (Oxford: Clarendon 1990), 173Google Scholar

8 Thanks to an anonymous referee for highlighting the importance of different moral concepts and their connections here.

9 Grice, P. Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989)Google Scholar

10 In a suitably robust Humean sense of ‘beliefs’; minimalists about truth and truthaptness argue that any indicative sentence can serve to express a belief in a very thin sense. Non-cognitivism must be characterized in terms of beliefs in some richer sense. The standard move here is to invoke the idea of states with a particular ‘direction of fit’ — beliefs are made ‘to fit the world’ whereas desires are made ‘to make the world fit them.’ Cashing out the direction of fit metaphor is no easy task, though, and I shall not attempt to do so here. The arguments presented in the text should go through on any of a number of ways of drawing the distinction. For useful discussion, see Humberstone, L. ‘Direction of Fit,’ Mind (1992) 59-83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Smith, M. The Moral Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994)Google Scholar.

11 I do not actually mean to endorse this principle, but simply to indicate that my discussion is consistent with it and that any connection stronger than it is almost certainly too strong.

12 Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica (New York: Cambridge University Press 1903Google Scholar

13 For a detalled case against the very idea of conventional implicature see Bach, K. ‘The Myth of Conventional Implicature,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (1999) 327-66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Thanks to Alexander Bird for useful discussion here.

15 Gibbard might agree, as he notes that conversational demands are ‘revocable’ (172) in that a speaker can rescind those demands.