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How Language Proves (That We Talk About) Moral Facts
MrMister
Jesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered User regular
Jesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered User regular
In this post, I'll talk a little bit about what's now known as the Frege-Geach problem. First: a disclaimer. The article I just linked to is a pretty top-notch introduction, and if you want a thorough discussion of the problem, you'll get a better one there than here. But, given that you probably do not want to read an article (even a top-notch introductory one!), I'll say something about it and what I take its significance to be.
1. Who Is It A Problem For?
The Frege-Geach Problem is a problem for non-cognitivists. That's a technical name for people who think that moral statements, such as "killing is wrong" or "gay marriage is permissible" don't express beliefs (which are cognitive states). Instead they express some state like approval or disapproval: for instance, AJ Ayer paraphrased the statement "killing is wrong" as really being equivalent to saying "boo killing!"--and boo killing! expresses a sentiment, not a belief, and unlike a belief it doesn't make sense to call a sentiment true or false.
Why would someone be a non-cognitivist? After all, it might seem strange to claim that when I say "I believe killing is wrong" I am not, in fact, reporting a belief I hold. Well, the traditional motives for non-cognitivism come from worrying about what this putative belief, that killing is wrong, could amount to. There are metaphysical questions: what could it be for killing to be wrong? We know what makes it the case, say, that the Earth orbits the sun--certain physical facts--but what sort of fact could make killing wrong? There are epistemic questions: how could we ever know what was wrong or right? How is moral knowledge possible when people disagree in such intractable ways? Finally, there are motivational questions: how could knowledge that something had the property of being 'good,' whatever that is, ever motivate a person? How could such knowledge even interact with a person, given that people are determined by physical rather than moral laws?
In sum, people have often found the idea of moral knowledge and the attendant moral facts to be somehow "spooky," or to fit ill at ease with a naturalistic picture of the world. But, the thought goes, there would be nothing "spooky" or objectionably anti-naturalistic if we interpreted moral discourse not as claims to knowledge of some special moral realm, but rather as the expression of certain attitudes pro and con that we hold towards each others goings on. Given that the general tenor of the forum has, in past threads, been very much of this opinion, it thus makes sense to talk about Frege-Geach.
2. What Is The Problem?
Non-cognitivists claim that when you call something "good" what you do is approve of that thing. But there is an immediate problem here. Namely, we can use the term "good" without approving of anything at all--good sometimes occurs in unasserted contexts. So, for instance, we use 'good' in the antecedents of conditionals: "if giving to charity is good, then I'll start donating." Notice that statement doesn't commit me to charity actually being good, nor does it do anything to praise charity. We can also use 'good' under negations: "it's not the case that giving to charity is good" most certainly does not involve my praising charity. We can insert it in questions: "is charity good?" Since the meaning of good was supposed to just involve commendation, the non-cognitivist appears to be committed to the claim that 'good' is systematically ambiguous, and means different things in when embedded in these unasserted contexts, where it is clearly not being used to commend, than it does when it's given widest scope in a sentence.
This is already awkward. But, Geach claimed, things are worse yet: if the non-cognitivist does say that 'good' is ambiguous, as it appears she has to, then she loses the ability to explain why these constructions have the inferential and logical inter-relations that they do. So, for instance, the traditional explanation for why "charity is good" and "it's not the case that charity is good" are inconsistent statements is that that they disagree over the very same thing--goodness. If 'good' meant something different in each of those sentences, we would lack an explanation for why they disagree. Similarly, the explanation for why "charity is good" counts as an answer to "is charity good?" is because the word 'good' means the same thing in both sentences; if it didn't, then rather than an answer it would be a non-sequitor. In general, the challenge for the non-cognitivist is to give an adequate account of the way that we use moral language: it appears that we can embed 'good' in all sorts of contexts--tensed, modal, complex logical constructions, etc.--and yet in all of those contexts it behaves exactly as if it had a single meaning which carried a truth-value, i.e. as if it expressed a belief rather than a state of approval or disapproval.
In somewhat technical terms, the challenge is for the non-cognitivist to give an adequate "compositional semantics," which is capable of explaining the role that 'good' plays in complicated constructions without positing that it, as it appears to, expresses beliefs that are capable of being true or false.
3. What Does The Problem Show?
I actually think that Frege-Geach has gotten more focus recently than it deserves--it's a problem amenable to a certain sort of technical wizardry, and that tends to suck people in. I don't think it shows, as some have posited, that non-cognitivism must be false. At best, what it shows is that non-cognitivism is an error theory. Namely, it shows that non-cognitivism, if it is correct, requires that we radically revise our normal ways of ethical thinking, which, as our language reveals to us, are cognitivist through and through.
Is that the end of the world? I don't think so. But it does, at least, show that non-cognitivists cannot claim that they are offering an account of what we really meant all along when we went about using words like 'good' and 'bad.' They are not telling us what we always meant all along. At best, they are telling us what we would have to mean, were we to abide by their various metaphysical, epistemological, and naturalistic demands.
1. Who Is It A Problem For?
The Frege-Geach Problem is a problem for non-cognitivists. That's a technical name for people who think that moral statements, such as "killing is wrong" or "gay marriage is permissible" don't express beliefs (which are cognitive states). Instead they express some state like approval or disapproval: for instance, AJ Ayer paraphrased the statement "killing is wrong" as really being equivalent to saying "boo killing!"--and boo killing! expresses a sentiment, not a belief, and unlike a belief it doesn't make sense to call a sentiment true or false.
Why would someone be a non-cognitivist? After all, it might seem strange to claim that when I say "I believe killing is wrong" I am not, in fact, reporting a belief I hold. Well, the traditional motives for non-cognitivism come from worrying about what this putative belief, that killing is wrong, could amount to. There are metaphysical questions: what could it be for killing to be wrong? We know what makes it the case, say, that the Earth orbits the sun--certain physical facts--but what sort of fact could make killing wrong? There are epistemic questions: how could we ever know what was wrong or right? How is moral knowledge possible when people disagree in such intractable ways? Finally, there are motivational questions: how could knowledge that something had the property of being 'good,' whatever that is, ever motivate a person? How could such knowledge even interact with a person, given that people are determined by physical rather than moral laws?
In sum, people have often found the idea of moral knowledge and the attendant moral facts to be somehow "spooky," or to fit ill at ease with a naturalistic picture of the world. But, the thought goes, there would be nothing "spooky" or objectionably anti-naturalistic if we interpreted moral discourse not as claims to knowledge of some special moral realm, but rather as the expression of certain attitudes pro and con that we hold towards each others goings on. Given that the general tenor of the forum has, in past threads, been very much of this opinion, it thus makes sense to talk about Frege-Geach.
2. What Is The Problem?
Non-cognitivists claim that when you call something "good" what you do is approve of that thing. But there is an immediate problem here. Namely, we can use the term "good" without approving of anything at all--good sometimes occurs in unasserted contexts. So, for instance, we use 'good' in the antecedents of conditionals: "if giving to charity is good, then I'll start donating." Notice that statement doesn't commit me to charity actually being good, nor does it do anything to praise charity. We can also use 'good' under negations: "it's not the case that giving to charity is good" most certainly does not involve my praising charity. We can insert it in questions: "is charity good?" Since the meaning of good was supposed to just involve commendation, the non-cognitivist appears to be committed to the claim that 'good' is systematically ambiguous, and means different things in when embedded in these unasserted contexts, where it is clearly not being used to commend, than it does when it's given widest scope in a sentence.
This is already awkward. But, Geach claimed, things are worse yet: if the non-cognitivist does say that 'good' is ambiguous, as it appears she has to, then she loses the ability to explain why these constructions have the inferential and logical inter-relations that they do. So, for instance, the traditional explanation for why "charity is good" and "it's not the case that charity is good" are inconsistent statements is that that they disagree over the very same thing--goodness. If 'good' meant something different in each of those sentences, we would lack an explanation for why they disagree. Similarly, the explanation for why "charity is good" counts as an answer to "is charity good?" is because the word 'good' means the same thing in both sentences; if it didn't, then rather than an answer it would be a non-sequitor. In general, the challenge for the non-cognitivist is to give an adequate account of the way that we use moral language: it appears that we can embed 'good' in all sorts of contexts--tensed, modal, complex logical constructions, etc.--and yet in all of those contexts it behaves exactly as if it had a single meaning which carried a truth-value, i.e. as if it expressed a belief rather than a state of approval or disapproval.
In somewhat technical terms, the challenge is for the non-cognitivist to give an adequate "compositional semantics," which is capable of explaining the role that 'good' plays in complicated constructions without positing that it, as it appears to, expresses beliefs that are capable of being true or false.
3. What Does The Problem Show?
I actually think that Frege-Geach has gotten more focus recently than it deserves--it's a problem amenable to a certain sort of technical wizardry, and that tends to suck people in. I don't think it shows, as some have posited, that non-cognitivism must be false. At best, what it shows is that non-cognitivism is an error theory. Namely, it shows that non-cognitivism, if it is correct, requires that we radically revise our normal ways of ethical thinking, which, as our language reveals to us, are cognitivist through and through.
Is that the end of the world? I don't think so. But it does, at least, show that non-cognitivists cannot claim that they are offering an account of what we really meant all along when we went about using words like 'good' and 'bad.' They are not telling us what we always meant all along. At best, they are telling us what we would have to mean, were we to abide by their various metaphysical, epistemological, and naturalistic demands.
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What would a cognitivist say to a statement such as "I am here." Would they say that I am expressing my belief that I am, in fact, present, or is it more performative and expresses a sort of vocative evidence of my own presence?
(this sounds a lot like emotivism)
Anyways, still mulling. Good read, and thank you for posting MrMister.
I think this is just a language game, and this doesn't actually matter.
Say your non-cognitivist insists: "Any moral claim is really just a statement of sentiment!".
And your moral realist says: "Killing is objectively wrong (is a true statement!)!"
All the moral realist has done is state something in direct opposition to the non-cognitivist. They have a meta-disagreement about the nature of moral truths. You can't really evaluate "Killing is objectively wrong!" as a sentiment because it isn't a sentiment. It's a proposition. It's both the statement of a moral fact, and the assertion that the moral fact has a truth value.
This doesn't disprove non-cognitivism, it just illustrates that two people disagree about moral epistemology.
More simply, I don't really see how someone believing a false statement to be true really hurts non-cognitivism.
Now, I'll admit I didn't read the article but instead just MrMister's summary, so I might be missing out on something here, but he says:
All those anti-naturalistic issues that arise from the idea that "killing is wrong" is a statement of belief can be swept away very simply by saying that anyone who believes that "killing is wrong" is actually just mistakenly believing something that is logically incoherent. We don't have to evaluate the statement because it's just meaningless. This doesn't disprove non-cognitivism, but if this is the case then there's no valid reason for non-cognitivism in the first place.
You could argue that obviously someone is saying something when they make a statement like "killing is wrong", because despite it apparently being logically incoherent we tend to derive information from such a claim. There's the possibility that you could have a kind of a variation on the non-cognitivist's thesis, which is based upon the idea that the person really believes that "killing is wrong", but that this belief arises from a confusion that originates in their sentiment about killing. That is to say, their statements about moral facts are nonsensical but reveal their moral dispositions.
A cognitivist about that statement would presumably say that it (primarily) states a belief. But it's important to note that you can be a cognitivist/non-cognitivist about all sorts of things, and they don't have to go together across the board. So, for instance, I might be a non-cognitivist about moral language while being a cognitivist about possibility--so, you might think that "charity is good" serves to express an attitude rather than to state a belief, but "it's possible that the sun might explode" serves to state a belief rather than express an attitude. Or vice versa. Or, in this example, you could be a (non)-cognitivist about "I am here" while being the opposite about moral discourse.
As a side note, possibility is another area of discourse, alongside moral discourse, that people are interested in giving non-obvious interpretations. This is partially because possibility-talk also seems spooky; the old rationalists used to point out contra the empiricists that we never encounter necessity or possibility in experience--experience can only tell us how things are, not how they must be or how they could have been.
Emotivism was one of the earliest forms of non-cognitivism, and it's one that still gets a fair amount of discussion just by virtue of being easier to talk about than its successors.
And, yeah, a lot of non-cognitivists are motivated by Hume's dictum that reason is at best "a slave of the passions," which are entities that control reason and which reason cannot criticize.
I'm not sure that I understand the problem correctly, because I'm not really seeing how it invalidates non-cognitivism. (That said, I think non-cognitivism is silly, so I don't really feel like we need the Frege-Geach problem to invalidate non-cognitivism.)
Let's say I accept the non-cognitive position that "stealing is bad" is meaningfully equivalent to "I condemn stealing!" then we can similarly rephrase conditionals.
"Stealing might be bad given X" becomes "I might condemn stealing given X."
"If stealing is bad, then it is bad for John to steal" becomes "If I might condemn stealing given X, then I would condemn John stealing."
I don't get why this is a big deal?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
As I see this, there is an underlying precursor or assumption here along the lines of "without God, there is no primary logical method of evaluating good and bad." Like, if we assume there is only physical existence and reason, then there doesn't seem to be any way for us to ultimately resolve a statement such as "killing is wrong." Someone else might say, "nuh-uh, killing is the best" and unless there is a shared acceptance of some ultimate authority like the Bible, there isn't really any way to resolve the dispute. God and the Bible I guess being the "spooky" moral knowledge that philosophers were trying to distance themselves from.
What follows then is an attempt to better understand statements like "killing is wrong" so that we can analyze them logically instead of just throwing up our hands. What non-cognitivists seem to be invoking is something akin to moral relativism. An assertion that "killing is wrong" is equivalent to "ice cream is yummy," perhaps. A sentiment and largely subjective claim. So far this is, well, ok, even though it isn't my preferred cup of tea.
The debate gets a little weird here, but I guess I get it. When I say "ice cream is yummy" I am sort of saying something different than "ice cream is not yummy." And I don't mean the contradiction. When I say, "ice cream is yummy" people know what I mean and think, "great, good for you, have some!" If I say "ice cream is not yummy" they may think "says you... that's just an opinion, who are you to say it isn't yummy for others?" Negating a opinionated sentiment like "yummy" in that sense implies something different; it implies a statement about ice cream and everyone rather than a statement about ice cream and me; something which in predicate logic might be expressed with "alls" and "somes."
Or, even better, to put it in their terms: you might yell "hooray" or "boo" in a sporting event and be understood, but to yell "not hooray!" or "it is not the case that boo!" would be absurdity and the words would pretty much have no meaning in those sentences. It seems non-cognitivists are saying that calling something good is like yelling "hooray" such that it doesn't necessarily invoke God or moral knowledge, and doesn't really have a consistent place in logical statements like "not hooray" or "if hooray." And then, of course, the response is, "but then why does 'good' still seem to work linguistically in those kinds of sentences, when 'hooray' doesn't?"
My take on it is that the impetus for the whole discussion is a bit flawed to begin with. Or, at least, misguided. Which sets the tone for anything that follows. I am of the mind that truth itself can't beat Godel. Forget moral truth, ALL truth is limited by incompleteness. No one system of evaluating true vs. false can ever be complete and consistent. The very nature and definition of truth requires acceptance of necessary inconsistency or incompleteness or both. If we want "better" truths, all we can do is devise and use systems for evaluating truth that minimize the emergence of inconsistency and incompleteness. Once you accept this of truth, you can accept of any possible moral truth as well. If you don't like the level of inconsistency and incompleteness offered by, say, the Bible, or faith in God, the answer is not necessarily to abandon consistency and completeness altogether. The answer is not to throw up one's hands and say "there is no moral truth." If you do this, but then attempt to proceed to continue evaluating ad debating the logic of moral truth statements, you are in fact moving in the direction of even less useful or meaningful truth, and will only find even more problems.
Rather, seek out system that allows moral reasoning and moral truth but with greater completeness and less inconsistency. tl;dr: saying "X is good" is saying that X, within the applicable context(s) of the statement, leads to increased happiness and decreased sorrow, compared to not X.
I suspect that's just a psychological quirk. Pondering whether that actually affects meaning, though, is giving me a small headache, so I'm stopping.
Stopping already? It is not the case that hooray!
Yeah, I actually tried to cast "Killing is objectively wrong!" as a sentiment but I think the best I came up with was, "I do not favor killing, I favor everyone not favoring killing, and I do not favor any system in which killing is favored." or something like that.
-redacted my own idiocy in completely missing the point here-
This is a very difficult concept to wrap my head around, I'm going to have to read more on this subject and try again later.
The question is basically "what does it mean when we say something is good or bad?"
You can appeal to a higher value. For instance, food is good because starvation is bad. Starvation is bad because starvation is suffering and suffering is bad.
Eventually you get to a first-order value that cannot be justified in terms of other values. Why is suffering bad? I tend to agree with Peter Singer and Thomas Nagle: why is suffering bad? It just is.
So what does it mean when we say "suffering is bad?" Is the phrase "suffering is bad" a statement of fact, that can either be true or false, in the way that "the sky is blue" or "2+2=4" are also statements of fact? Or is it simply an expression of feeling, similar to "Yuck! Brussel sprouts!"
Non-cognitivists would say that there is no objective truth value in the phrase "suffering is bad." It is neither true nor false. It's just equivalent to "Yuck! Suffering!"
(I don't agree with non-cognitivism; I'm just describing it to the best of my ability. MrMister would probably be able to give a more accurate description.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Dang, somebody caught me before I realized my error and edited the post! I believe my primary mistake was in not understanding the premise properly when I originally commented.
I might even agree that there is no objective truth value in the phrase "suffering is bad." I certainly have no desire to suffer, but sometimes you have to suffer in order to later be rewarded, and in that case the suffering was not bad, but a price worth paying. Perhaps that isn't the best example, but trying to pull an objective truth from a simple statement is difficult for me as I can often come up with counter examples. "Killing is bad." Well that depends on if you believe killing in self-defense is permissible or even "good."
I think I'm still missing the real point here, though.
That's more or less C.L. Stevenson's analysis: saying the phrase "killing is wrong" is a way of expressing the attitude "I disfavor killing, and I favor you disfavoring killing too." As Jamie Dreier (and numerous others) have pointed out, though, he was never successful in giving an explanation of why I would care whether you favored my disfavoring killing or not. I certainly don't care whether you want me to like ice cream or sorbet, so why should I care whether you want me to favor killing or favor mercy?
What you're doing here is actually more or less answering the challenge: namely, you're giving a schematic translation manual which takes us from complex constructions involving moral terms to the attitudes that they express, and does so as a function of their logical and grammatical structure. People now are spending quite a bit of energy trying to do exactly this (Gibbard, Horgan and Timmons, Blackburn, Scroeder).
The particular translations you've given, though, don't seem like they're going to do the trick. Take, for instance, "if stealing is bad, then it is bad for John to steal;" which you translate as "if I might condemn stealing given X, then I would condemn John stealing" (I'm not sure what the 'given X' is doing for you in the translation, but it won't matter for the point that follows). The problem with your translation, though, is that it's actually a straightforwardly factual statement about your attitudes, not the expression of an attitude of approval or disapproval itself. To see this, just consider that the translation is a conditional claim about what I would do in certain circumstances; it's as straightforwardly true (or false) as "if I were about to go to bed, I would brush my teeth."
But if this is the correct translation of conditionals involving moral terms, then we aren't going to get the right disagreement relations. For instance: suppose you say "if stealing is bad, then getting John to steal is bad." Suppose I say: "no, if stealing is bad, then getting John to steal is good!" Intuitively, what we are doing here is disagreeing with each other. But on your translation it is perfectly possible that both of our statements are literally true: you may have correctly described the way that your attitudes relate to each other while I may have correctly described the way that my attitudes relate to each other. But if the meaning of our utterances are entirely compatible, then it's hard to see how we could be using them to contradict each other.
In order to get the right sort of disagreement (if it can be done), what we want is not to make the complex logical statements into factual claims about how our simple attitudes relate to one another, but rather, to make them into expressions of complex attitudes that are somehow built out of or relate to the simpler ones. So, for instance, Blackburn tried to analyze "if stealing is wrong, then getting John to steal is wrong" as the expression of the attitude of disapproval toward the act of holding the attitude of <disapproving of stealing, yet not disapproving of getting John to steal>. There are problems with this proposal too, but hopefully it illustrates the point.
So I don't think that you're confused about what the problem is, it's just hard to see all the wrenches that can get thrown into the works in the course of trying to formulate a solution. It's especially difficult because conditionals are just one case--moral terms embed under a massive variety of grammatical constructions, and manage to behave exactly truth-functionally under all of them. So we need a compositional semantics which not only captures conditionals, but captures all of those constructions and manages to explain how more terms employed in them have all the properties we would expect them to.
To put it more specifically a noncognitivist has already assumed through whatever source, be it God, the Law, their Parents, or some source of authority a complete moral and ethical structure. They have a strong emotional attachment to this, and do not believe it arises out of rational thought or consideration but rather is an inherent truth, as they received this entire system as a given from a source of authority. As such this creates a problem that such people will take any attempts to question or seriously investigate their own moral structures as an attack on the self and/or the authority which they received the structure from. It's like a fight or flight response to defending a child.
But when we evaluate moral statements from both a pragmatic and humanistic perspective we can make both a strong emotional and rational case for the provability and logic within all morality. It creates a framework which all people who do not accept morality as a given from an unquestionable source of authority can agree upon. Someone who has already placed their morality as beyond reproach however will never concede to this and instead react viciously and possibly violently at any encroachments upon what they see as their way of life.
Such people create social destabilization and offer nothing of any substance other than proof that at times, yes, there are some people in a debate whose attempts to argue are so bad they do quite literally deserve to be shamed into silence.
The point is that, most of the time, when we state something with the construction "X is Y" what we are doing is asserting that there is a thing X which presents some property Y. That statement may be true or false, depending on whether X in fact presents property Y. If I say, "my desk is black" I am saying something false because my desk is actually brown.
To take a non-cognitivist position is to assert that the construction "X is Y" does not express or attempt to express anything in particular about the properties of X. The truth or falsity of the statement is not ascertainable by examining the properties of X. There are some kinds of "X is Y" statements that have plausible non-cognitivist interpretations. Someone might say, "This speech is too long." While someone might make the case that "too-longness" is a property that a speech may possess, it's not crazy to interpret "this speech is too long" as "I'm bored of this speech." Because you're not actually saying anything about the speech itself, there's no way for the statement to be true or false based on the particular properties of the speech. Contrast that with "this speech is three hours long." That kind of claim does say something about a particular property of the speech, and may be true or false depending on whether the speech does, in fact, last for three hours from beginning to end.
A moral non-cognitivist takes the position that all moral statements are like "this speech is too long." Notions of "goodness" and "badness" are merely signposts of our own reactions to events, as opposed to properties of the events themselves. Suffering is not bad, you just don't like suffering.
Yeah, this is going the route of "error theory" (which I mention briefly at the end of the OP). Many non-cognitivists don't want to go this route, though. They want to claim common sense for their side: they want to tell some story where the folk, innocent of any philosophical pretensions, have always gone around expressing their attitudes, and it's only the moral realists who started adding on all this ridiculous Platonic baggage about a special type of moral 'realm' or 'fact' that we have mysterious 'beliefs' about. But they certainly can't tell this story if they adopt an error-theory. The error-theory implies that the realists are the ones who are actually capturing common sense; it's just that, in this case, common sense is flat wrong.
[e]So the end result would be an infallible means of translating non-cognitivist grammar into cognitivist grammar?
I guess I'm confused as to what the people searching for this solution hope to accomplish. Is this a simple case of "because it's there", or is there an actual application for such a thing, and what form would that take?
Got it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Non-cognitivists make certain claims about the meaning of moral terms; but we also have lots of linguistic data about how moral terms behave that seems inexplicable if moral terms really were to mean what the non-cognitivists say they do. So the non-cognitivists need to find some sort of way of explaining that linguistic data which is compatible with their non-cognitivism--that's what I've been calling "an adequate compositional semantics." If they don't, then they're just going to look like they're flat out wrong about what these words mean--their thesis about the meaning of those words will look like it's incompatible with how they are actually used.
Understood, thank you.
My gut reaction is that the solution they are looking for is a way to make moral relativism (or even some sort of moral super-relativism) work within reasoned true/false evaluations at least as well as does "God says so." The problem, as it seems, is that "God says so" is a more complete system, albeit a much less consistent one. It's more complete because you can pretty solidly resolve truths with a final "God says so" statement, but more inconsistent because the things claimed to be what God says are so often in conflict with each other or with what we otherwise seem to think is rational. Moral relativism is potentially more consistent, but woefully incomplete. It's more consistent because saying "morality is all relative," or perhaps, "moral statements are sentiments, not truths," doesn't naturally lead to a lot of contradiction, but it's woefully incomplete because it also doesn't answer much of anything or provide much value in evaluating statements. The debate above, then appears to attempt to make non-cognitivism or moral relativism more complete by fleshing them out more with rational linguistics. And the problem with that, it seems, is that the attempt immediately starts to ruin the consistency benefit of non-cognitivism.
But like I said, I'd rather take an even more basic approach to coming up with something that maximizes consistency and completeness in practice, without overreacting to religion-based morality by throwing up our hands and denouncing moral truth or moral reason althogether.
I don't think you're giving the noncognitivists enough credit, seeing as their attempt to describe morality basically tries to combat the line of reasoning you seem to be ascribing them.
In fact, if you don't really have any problem with an error theory, moral relativism/nihilism does pretty much the exact opposite of "assume through whatever source, be it God, the Law, their Parents, or some source of authority a complete moral and ethical structure". It's actually saying that such a structure cannot really be assumed at all.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say.
Perhaps that was an error in my wording, if so I apologize. What I mean to say is that attempting to dialogue with a noncognitivist will allow you to discover "what" they feel is right or wrong but breaks down upon a serious attempt to get them to describe their values exactly because you're right, it doesn't really have a structure. Well, rather it does not have a rational one. It is however a structure in that it is a set of usually interlocking (but not always consistent, unless you consider in some cases that the appearance of inconsistency is an intentional act by the noncognitivist to hide a partial or complete belief in their own authority to judge their own actions as moral despite any secondary belief structure they may have received. Which could be viewed as an artifact of a moral upbringing in which their moral instructor themselves practiced the same sort of inconsistent authoritative belief structure. The "Do as I say, not as I do" types.)
Perhaps there's a better qualifier I can append to this? Because this is more a descriptor of the typical "noncognitivist person" in practice. Who through whatever reason assumes the inability of morality to exist as a set of reasonable, rational or logical judgements and as such has instead assumed an inherently true belief to some level in a morality structure dictated to them through a source of authority. Such people often will practice inconsistently even with this inherently true belief structure when their own self-interest is presented as in conflict if they follow the morality they preach. (which could be the artifact of inherently not believing there is an ability to reason out morality)
For example the hypocritical judgement of sex and sexuality as an inherent sin, yet while practicing that same supposedly immoral act issuing irrational and illogical judgements regarding that same belief which in practice exist only to absolve noncognitivist only of their wrongdoing. Such people upon revelation of that same hypocrisy often will react rather viciously.
Yet if you were to ask them to attempt to define that same belief they in a vacuum would be unable to tell you anything other than "It's just wrong!"
So I suppose it's not really that helpful in discussing noncognitivism as a philosophy but it is often a very accurate descriptor of the people who I know that practice it, in fact it's almost eerily present in all of them.
I think we both were a bit, apologies.
A non-cognitivist would never-ever say anything is "an inherent sin".
I kind of think you're conflating "non-cognitivist" with "person that adheres to morally absolutist claims without being able to justify said claims".
While interpreting the word "non-cognitivist" as some sort of pejorative would align pretty closely with that latter definition, that's not really at all what it means.
Do you mean Fallout?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I would think noncognitivist would apply to anyone who cannot, or will consider morality as something determinable by reason/logic. Such people I always meet still have "rules" they follow and they call morality, and will often viciously defend. They're not "absolutists" since they don't usually practice what they preach. But I would think it's the definition of noncognitivist in that they refuse to believe that morality can ever be truly thought out or determined. Rather, you adhere to their rules, the way they want, or they make your life miserable. Such is the typical experience I've had with such people.
Well I suppose my own experiences with people who refuse to think at all or discuss the nature of morality normally adhere to that specific archetypal personality. So it may just be bad life experiences have left me somewhat jaded.
At least as far as academic philosophy is concerned, you would be wrong.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Your conception might include moral realists of a few different stripes, including relativists, egoists, and theological absolutists.
A) I find this problem fascinating, and
and then go back to lurking.
Couldn't this be the reason that linguistic data is not matching the non-cognitivist view? That people use language as if morality was something real, while in reality, it isn't, thus confusing moral semantics?
Absolutely.
Although, I was thinking about it recently, and it's not just that non-cognitivists are reluctant to say that people are mistaken in the way that they use language. It's that non-cognitivists are reluctant to say that those ways of using language are, in fact, mistakes. So, for instance, most non-cognitivsts want to say that:
P1) Killing is wrong
P2) If Killing is wrong, then the death penalty is wrong
C) Therefore, the death penalty is wrong
is a valid argument--that there would be some sort of logical mistake in holding the first two premises without holding the conclusion. In other words, they want to hold that reasoning in that manner is an instance of good moral reasoning, whatever that amounts to. But then they need an explanation of how anything like like logical requirement of consistency in beliefs could apply to non-truth-apt attitudes like approval and disapproval.
Wouldn't they be better off moving more towards embodied cognition and narrative theory (Lakoff & Johnson et al.)?
See, this is more up my alley, at the risk of creating a tangential discussion. What would a cognitivist say about modality? It seems like a tricky subject matter for both sides, hence your deigning it "spooky." It would seem that Possibility and Necessity would be more than just cognitive states, and if something IS necessary it is not just because I believe it to be so.
I'd agree with that. There's nothing particularly significant about moral claims relative to any other kind of claims.
Gah, counterfactuals. They're some of the most screwed-up things ever when you try to apply logic to them.