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Does Non-Cognitivism Rest on a Mistake?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2007

FRANS SVENSSON
FRANS SVENSSON*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

Philippa Foot has recently argued that non-cognitivism rests on a mistake. According to Foot, non-cognitivism cannot properly account for the role of reasons in moral thinking. Furthermore, Foot argues that moral judgements share a conceptual structure with the kind of evaluations that we make about plants and animals, which cannot be couched in non-cognitivist terms. In this article I argue that, in the form of expressivism, non-cognitivism is capable of accommodating most of what Foot says about reasons and morality. I then argue that the kind of evaluative judgements Foot suggests that we make about plants and animals, does not constitute a plausible alternative to an expressivist understanding of moral judgements. Finally I consider an account similar to Foot's, defended by Rosalind Hursthouse, which, I argue, suffers from an inconsistency, the avoidance of which leaves Hursthouse with a view that is either compatible with expressivism or shares the same problems as Foot's.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 184 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 See Philippa, Foot, ‘Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 15 (1995)Google Scholar, and Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2001).

2 Throughout this article I will use ‘animals’ to mean non-human animals.

3 I think something like this can reasonably be said of e.g. the emotivism of Stevenson, C. L., ‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms’, Mind 46 (1937)Google Scholar; the prescriptivism of Hare, R. M., Freedom and Reason (New York, 1965)Google Scholar and Moral Thinking (Oxford, 1981); as well as of the expressivism defended by Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford, 1998) and Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

4 Though I cannot pursue the issue here, it should be noted that whether this is correct or not depends on what theory of truth is being assumed; see e.g. Blackburn, Ruling Passions, pp. 68–83, for further discussion.

5 This need not entail that non-cognitivists must think that motivation always follow immediately upon making a moral judgement; there are factors such as being in a state of depression, which may prevent the judgement from being motivationally efficacious.

6 This is often put in terms of directions of fit. Beliefs, the argument goes, are directed to fit the state of the world, while attitudes, like desires or preferences, have the opposite direction of fit in the sense that it is the world that is meant to fit them. Because of this, such attitudes move us to try to change the world accordingly, something which beliefs are unable to do.

7 Some cognitivists seem indeed prepared to say that the connection between moral judgements and motivation really is purely contingent; it just so happens that most people have a desire to be moral that explains how they so often are motivated accordingly. Foot is not, however, among these people and I will not have anything to say about such views in this article; cf. Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 9.

8 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 8.

9 Of course, depending on the content of my judgement, what I am asked to do may be to present facts that count against a certain action, constituting a reason not to do it.

10 Some authors refer to this sort of reasons as normative, rather than practical, reasons; see e.g. Derek, Parfit, ‘Reason and Motivation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 71 (1997)Google Scholar, and T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

11 Foot, Natural Goodness, pp. 9, 11.

12 Foot, Natural Goodness, pp. 9–10; for her earlier views, see e.g. Philippa Foot, ‘Moral Beliefs’, and ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford, 1978).

13 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 11.

14 Cf. John, Dewey, ‘Theory of Valuation’, The Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 2 (4) (Chicago, 1939)Google Scholar, pp. 6–13, for a critical discussion of what Dewey considered ‘the most extreme of the views which have been advanced’ in the theory of valuation, viz. that evaluative judgements ‘are purely ejaculatory’ (‘Theory of Valuation’, pp. 6–7).

15 Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, e.g. p. 7.

16 Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 163.

17 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 21; cf. Warren Quinn, ‘Putting Rationality in its Place’, in his Morality and Action (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 230–1, for a similar statement.

18 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 21.

19 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 22.

20 In Jonas Olson and Frans Svensson, ‘Sorting out Reasons: On Stoutland's Criticism of the Belief-Desire Model’, A Philosophical Smorgasbord: Essays on Action, Truth, and Other Things in Honour of Frederic Stoutland (Uppsala, 2003), and ‘Regimenting Reasons’, forthcoming in Theoria, I co-defend the view that strictly speaking we need to distinguish between three rather than two different sorts of reasons here. The suggestion is that besides motivating and practical (or what we refer to as normative) reasons, we should also acknowledge the existence of deliberative reasons, understood as the reasons agents take themselves to be acting for from a first-person perspective. Though I believe this is correct, I do not think it makes much difference in the present discussion.

21 Cf. Parfit, ‘Reason and Motivation’, p. 99.

22 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 21.

23 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 21; cf. John, McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 52 (1978)Google Scholar, and ‘Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following’, Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. S. Holzman and S. Leich (London, 1981).

24 As far as I can see, we are only told that it is part of her account that an understanding of practical reasons actually can explain action, which is why Foot holds that her account fulfils the practicality requirement on moral judgements (see sect. II above); see Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 18. But of course this is not really an argument at all.

25 Foot, Natural Goodness, pp. 10, 62; cf. Warren Quinn, ‘Rationality and the Human Good’, and ‘Putting Rationality in its Place’, in his Morality and Actions (Cambridge, 1993), for work to which Foot is much indebted on this point.

26 Hence, Foot tells us that she is ‘quite seriously, likening the basis of moral evaluation to that of the evaluation of behavior in animals’ (Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 16).

27 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 25.

28 Foot, Natural Goodness, pp. 25–6 (italics in original).

29 Foot, Natural Goodness, ch. 2.

30 See Michael, Thompson, ‘The Representation of Life’, Virtues and Reasons, ed. Hursthouse, R., Lawrence, G. and Quinn, W. (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; in addition, Foot also acknowledges influence from G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in her Collected Papers III (Minneapolis, 1981), and Peter, Geach, ‘Good and Evil’, Analysis 17 (1956)Google Scholar, and The Virtues (Cambridge, 1977).

31 It has been suggested in writings of other prominent neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists as well. See, especially, Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, (Oxford, 1999), chs. 9–10, which I will discuss in sect. VI below. Cf. also Nussbaum, Martha C., ‘Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics’, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, ed. Altham, J. E. J. and Harrison, R. (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar. For a critique of Nussbaum, see Antony, Louise M., ‘Natures and Norms’, Ethics 111 (2000)Google Scholar. (I am indebted to Mark Timmons for drawing my attention to Antony's article.)

32 A more radical approach may be to argue that, post-Darwin, we know that there is no teleology in nature, no matter how appealing it is to think so. Evaluative judgements relying on a teleological conception of the world should therefore be thought of as embodying some sort of error in trying to pick out facts that simply are not there. This is an alternative considered in James Lenman, ‘Against Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism’ (unpublished). Of course, even if this were to be true, we still have to consider the possibility that Foot is right in thinking that the conceptual structure of moral judgements really is similar to what she has argued is the case regarding evaluation of plants and animals. If she is, and the latter kind of judgements embodies an error, then it seems we would have to conceive of morality in the same way, and that would be bad news for expressivism.

33 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 9.

34 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 16.

35 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 39.

36 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 15; cf. Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘On Promising and its Justice’, in her Collected Papers III (Minneapolis, 1981)Google Scholar.

37 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 43.

38 There is indeed much interesting work within recent virtue ethics devoted to showing that it is a much too strong requirement on ethical theory to demand that it must be able to come up with standards of rightness that any normal adult is capable of applying in each case. It may take much experience and wisdom to be able to see what is required of us in a certain situation. Therefore, it may be said, it is not necessarily a fault in Foot's view that it does not attempt to specify all details. We know enough to say that loyalty and fairness, for example, are virtues, even if we cannot be expected to come up with complete criteria for their application. See Julia, Annas, ‘Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2004)Google Scholar; Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics; John, McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, Virtue Ethics, ed. Crisp, R. and Slote, M. (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar; and David Solomon, ‘Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics’, Virtue Ethics, ed. D. Statman (Edinburgh, 1997), for arguments along this line. However, even if there is something to this, it does not quite settle the issue of whether there is any objectively true content to what the virtues demand, which is there to be known by virtuous people irrespective of cultural or historical setting. The content of the virtues, and at least in some cases even the virtues themselves, may well differ between different cultural, historical or social contexts, even if these contents cannot be fully spelled out within a given context.

39 Cf. Lenman, ‘Against Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism’, and John, McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, Virtues and Reasons, ed. Hursthouse, R., Lawrence, G. and Quinn, W. (Oxford, 1995), pp. 151–5Google Scholar.

40 This is a picture of the structure of morality vigorously outlined, though without explicitly endorsing it, by Gary Watson, ‘On the Primacy of Character’, Virtue Ethics, ed. D. Statman (Edinburgh, 1997).

41 Foot, Natural Goodness, pp. 62–4.

42 Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, pp. 195–7.

43 Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, pp. 197–8.

44 Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, pp. 198–202.

45 See David Copp and David Sobel, ‘Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics’, Ethics 114 (2004), pp. 534–6, for some doubts about this.

46 Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, pp. 220–1.

47 Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, p. 222.

48 Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, p. 224.

49 There is a complication here in that Hursthouse thinks that her naturalism only holds for questions about what character traits can reasonably be thought of as virtues and not for how we should act. The latter, she argues, is determined by facts about what a virtuous agent would do in our circumstances. I find this a bit hard to understand (why should we be prepared to accept an appeal to nature with respect to the virtues but not in the case of actions?), but since it does not, as far as I can see, affect my argument above, I will not pursue this issue here.

50 Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, pp. 224–6, actually considers a possible example of this kind of case, concerning whether completely impersonal benevolence, free from species boundaries and special bonds to family and friends, could be regarded as a virtue on her account. Hursthouse's (explicitly very tentative) conclusion is sceptical, just because such benevolence may clash with the fostering of our natural ends of continuance of the species and the well-functioning of the social group. But this raises precisely the question of what such appeals to nature are supposed to achieve. It seems conceivable that someone may grant these facts but all the same argue that we should rise above them.

51 Earlier versions of this essay have been presented at the University of Arizona (Tucson), Uppsala University, and to an audience of graduate students at UC Berkeley. I wish to thank the participants at these occasions for helpful comments and discussions. Among these people, however, I am particularly indebted to Julia Annas, John Eriksson, Jonas Olson and Fred Stoutland. In addition, discussions with Rosalind Hursthouse and Howard Sobel, as well as the comments from anonymous referees of Utilitas and of another journal, were exceedingly valuable. I am also grateful to James Lenman for permission to refer to unpublished material. Work on this article was partly made possible by a generous grant from STINT (The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education).