A Refined Emotivism (original) (raw)
Related papers
The virtues of contemporary emotivism
Erkenntnis, 1986
The core of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is an attack on emotivism: "... it is indeed in terms of a confrontation with emotivism that my own thesis must be defined" (p. 21). But at best MacIntyre's arguments apply only to an early emotivist strawman, for MacIntyre ignores the sturdier version that developed in later logical positivism. That neglected later emotivism develops key emotivist points into a more comprehensive and powerful system: a mature emotivist theory that passes unscathed through the Maclntyre gauntlet. This essay will describe that stronger contemporary emotivism and defend it against MacIntyre's critique. In the early logical positivist fervor of Language, Truth and Logicwhen metaphysics was being razed and a scientific philosophy was dawning-Ayer was somewhat intemperate in formulating emotivism. No one denies it. Ayer later states that: To say, as I once did, that these moral judgements are merely expressive of certain feelings, feelings of approval or disapproval, is an oversimplification. 2 Despite Ayer's recognition of the inadequacy of his earlier view of moral judgments (as mere expressions of feeling), he continues to be chary of granting propositional status to pure value statements. 3 But a way is open to retain Ayer's major points (conflicts at the level of purely normative statements are not subject to rational resolution and one cannot meaningfully ask which of such conflicting views is true) without denying that basic value statements are propositions and can thus have logical implications and be consistent or inconsistent with other value statements (as Ayer now insists such statements can do). This can be accomplished by treating such purely normative statements as value postulates which form the superstructure of moral frameworks. Ayer suggests something very similar when discussing the status of the logical positivists' principle of verification. In interviewing Ayer, Bryan Magee notes that that principle requires: ... that every true statement must be either a tautology or a deduction from an
2012
I criticize the following three arguments for moral objectivism. 1. Since we assess moral statements, we can arrive at some moral truths (Thomson, 2006). 2. One culture can be closer to truths than another in moral matters because the former can be closer to truths than the latter in scientific matters . 3. A moral judgment is shown to be true when it is backed up by reason (Rachels and Rachels, 2010). Finally, I construct a dilemma against the view that there are moral truths and we can move toward them.
Two Arguments for Emotivism and a Methodological Moral
Russell, 2020
In 1913 Russell gave up on the Moorean good. But since naturalism was not an option, that left two alternatives: the error theory and non-cognitivism. Despite a brief flirtation with the error theory Russell preferred the non-cognitivist option, developing a form of emotivism according to which to say that something is good is to express the desire that everyone should desire it. But why emotivism rather than the error theory? Because emotivism sorts better with Russell’s Fundamental Principle that the “sentences we can understand must be composed of words with whose meaning we are acquainted.” I construct an argument for emotivism featuring the Fundamental Principle that closely parallels Ayer’s verificationist argument in Language, Truth, and Logic. I contend that Russell’s argument, like Ayer’s, is vulnerable to a Moorean critique. This suggests an important moral: revisionist theories of meaning such as verificationism and the Fundamental Principle are prima facie false. Any modus ponens from such a principle to a surprising semantic conclusion (such as emotivism) is trumped by a Moorean modus tollens from the negation of the surprising semantics to the negation of the revisionist principle.
2020
Logical positivists have tried to distinguish meaningful questions from meaningless ones for decades. Their criterion of verifiability (and later of falsifiability) has left a strong mark in modern philosophy. However, logical positivism has been declared dead and many of the topics considered meaningless by them, such as ethics and aesthetics, are still lively debated by philosophers. It could even be argued that the conclusion that ethics and aesthetics should be dismissed as meaningless is a reductio ad absurdum of any theory of meaning. However, it is an equally absurd position to dismiss the broader idea that we must respect certain criteria in order to be entitled to claim that our statements are meaningful. In this thesis, therefore, I will try to reconcile the principles of logical positivism with ethics, proposing an alternative set of criteria for meaning and a pragmatic approach to ethics that should respect this criteria. I will do this by using Parfit's (2011) arguments in defense of objectivism as a case study. In chapter one I introduce the concepts that will serve as a foundation for my thesis. In chapter two, I begin my argumentation by laying out a fuzzy theory of meaning that allows for different degrees of meaningfulness based on Wittgenstein’s later work and concepts from cognitive science such as prototype theory and conceptual metaphors. In chapter three I argue that Parfit’s objectivism has a low degree of meaningfulness because it relies on the assumption that there is a “fundamental metaphysical relation that holds between facts, on the one hand, and beliefs, desires, aims, and actions, on the other”, a view that Smith (2017) calls “reasons fundamentalism”. Smith rejects reasons fundamentalism but accepts Parfit’s metaphysical framing of the debate. I will argue that the metaphysical nature of the argument renders it largely meaningless. Finally, in chapter four, I argue that although most metaethics is indeed meaningless, especially questions concerning the ontology of moral claims, the dismissal of moral utterances as mere expressions of emotions is also unjustified, and therefore I promote a pragmatic universalist metaethics that is compatible with the criteria of meaning described in chapter one. Essentially, I defend the thesis that the purpose of ethics is to resolve moral conflict, and that this should be done by appeal to logic, consistency, and universal moral intuitions, not contentious metaphysical commitments and category mistakes.
Reasonableness, Murder, and Modern Science.pdf
Phi Kappa Phi Journal, 1979
Originally titled “Is It Murder in Tennessee to Kill a Chimpanzee,” this article argues in some detail that typical legal definitions of “murder” as involving the intentional killing of “a reasonable being” would require classifying the intentional killing of chimpanzees as murder.
Positivists versus Moralists: The Eichmann Trial and International Law
Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 2000
The Eichmann Trial and International Law "This is only one example among many to demonstrate the inadequacy of the prevailing legal system and of current juridical concepts to deal with the facts of administrative massacres organized by the state apparatus. If we look more closely into the matter we will observe without much difficulty that the judges in all these trials really passed judgment solely on the basis of the monstrous deeds. In other words, they judged freely, as it were, and did not really lean on the standards and legal precedents with which they more or less convincingly sought to justify their decisions." (Arendt 1963/1965, 294.