“And Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments:
‘Hoorah! to having no other gods before me.
‘Boo! to making unto thee any graven image.
[five boos and two hoorahs follow; then …]
‘Boo! to coveting thy neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s.’”
So spake the Lord, according to emotivism, or the “boo/hoorah theory” of ethics. Put like this, emotivism may not seem like a very serious attempt to represent the force of ethical assertions—and the feeling is doubtless reinforced by the tongue-in-cheek nickname. In fact, however, emotivism is a highly influential theory with a distinguished history, and it is motivated by deep concerns over what may seem a more commonsensical understanding of our moral lives.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
William Shakespeare, c.1600
The shift to subjectivism There are different kinds of facts in the world that are objectively true—facts whose truth does not depend on us. Some of these are scientific, describing physical events, processes and relations; others are moral, describing things in the world that are right and wrong, good and bad. Such a picture may appeal to common sense, perhaps, but it has proved far less attractive to many philosophers.
Take a putatively moral fact: killing is wrong. We can describe an act of killing in minute detail, citing all sorts of physical and psychological facts to explain how and why it was done. But what further property or quality are we adding to the picture when we ascribe wrongness to it? Basically we are saying that killing is the kind of thing we shouldn’t do—that amongst all the other things we may truly say of killing, it also has an intrinsic property of “not-to-be-doneness.” Struck by the sheer oddity of finding such a property in the world (the supposedly value-free world described by science; see Science and pseudoscience), many philosophers propose that we replace the notion of objective moral properties existing in the world with some kind of subjective response to things in the world.
The chief inspiration for modern forms of moral subjectivism is the Scottish philosopher David Hume. His famous plea for a subjectivist account of morality appears in his Treatise of Human Nature:
“Take any action allowed to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, toward this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object.”
According to Hume’s own account of moral action, all humans are naturally moved by a “moral sense” or “sympathy,” which is essentially a capacity to share the feelings of happiness or misery of others; and it is this sentiment, rather than reason, that provides the motive for our moral actions. Reason is essential in understanding the consequences of our actions and in rationally planning how to achieve our moral aims, but it is itself inert and unable to provide any impetus to action: in Hume’s famous phrase, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
From description to expression According to a naïve subjectivist view, moral assertions are simply descriptions or reports of our feelings about the way things are in the world. So when I say “Murder is wrong,” I am simply stating my (or perhaps my community’s) disapproval of it. But this is too simple. If I say “Murder is right” and that is an accurate description of my feelings, then that will be true too. Moral disagreement is apparently impossible. Something more sophisticated is needed.
“I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it.”
Bertrand Russell, 1960
Emotivism (or expressivism)—the boo/hoorah theory—is a more subtle form of subjectivism, suggesting that moral judgments are not descriptions or statements of our feelings about the world but expressions of those feelings. So, when we make a moral judgment, we are expressing an emotional response—our approbation (“hoorah!”) or disapprobation (“boo!”) of something in the world. “Killing is wrong” is an expression of our disapproval (“boo to murder!”); “it is good to tell the truth” is an expression of our approval (“hoorah for truth-telling!”).
The big problem for emotivists is to bring their theory into some sort of alignment with the way that we actually think about and conduct our moral discourse. This discourse presupposes an external world of objective values: we deliberate and argue about moral questions; we appeal to moral (and other) facts in order to settle them; we make ethical claims that may be true or false; and there are moral truths that we may come to know. But according to the emotivist, there is nothing ethical to know—we are not making claims at all but expressing our feelings, and such expressions cannot of course be true or false. The emotivist may allow that deliberation and disagreement are possible over our background beliefs and the context of our actions, but it is difficult to flesh this out into something like our normal conception of moral debate. The logical connections between moral assertions themselves appear to be missing, and moral reasoning is apparently little more than an exercise in rhetoric—morality as advertising, as it has been caustically put.
The most common criticism of emotivism is that it fails to capture the logic of ethical discourse—the characteristic patterns of reasoning and rational argument that underlie it. Success in this respect is considered to be one of the chief recommendations of a rival subjectivist theory known as prescriptivism, closely associated with the English philosopher R.M. Hare. Taking as its starting point the insight that moral terms have a prescriptive element—they tell us what to do or how to behave—prescriptivism proposes that the essence of moral terms is that they are action-guiding; saying that killing is wrong is equivalent to giving and accepting a command—“Don’t kill!” According to Hare’s account, the feature of ethical judgments that distinguishes them from other kinds of command is that they are “universalizable”: if I issue a moral injunction, I am thereby committed to holding that that injunction should be obeyed by anyone (including myself) in relevantly similar circumstances (i.e. I must comply with the golden rule; see The golden rule). Moral disagreement, the prescriptivist proposes, is analogous to giving conflicting commands; inconsistency and indecision are explained by there being several injunctions, not all of which can be simultaneously obeyed. In this way prescriptivism apparently allows more space for disagreement and debate than emotivism does, though some still question whether it really mirrors the full complexity of moral dialogue.
The staunch response to this is simply to bite the bullet: yes, the emotivist may say, the theory does not square with our usual assumptions, but that is because the assumptions are wrong, not the theory. According to this so-called “error theory,” our normal ethical discourse is simply mistaken, because it is based on objective moral facts that do not actually exist. Many attempts have been made to bring the emotivist picture closer to our realist-sounding ethical discourse, but for many the gap is still too wide and other approaches have been proposed. Probably the most important of these alternatives is prescriptivism.
the condensed idea
Expressing moral judgments
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.375BC | The divine command theory |
| c.AD30 | The golden rule |
| 1739 | The boo/hoorah theory Hume’s guillotine Science and pseudoscience |
| 1974 | What is it like to be a bat? |