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Non-cognitivism
Non-cognitivism
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Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions (i.e., statements) and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world."[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.[1]

Non-cognitivism entails that non-cognitive attitudes underlie moral discourse and this discourse therefore consists of non-declarative speech acts, although accepting that its surface features may consistently and efficiently work as if moral discourse were cognitive. The point of interpreting moral claims as non-declarative speech acts is to explain what moral claims mean if they are neither true nor false (as philosophies such as logical positivism entail). Utterances like "Boo to killing!" and "Don't kill" are not candidates for truth or falsity, but have non-cognitive meaning.

Varieties

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Emotivism, associated with A. J. Ayer, the Vienna Circle and C. L. Stevenson, though first defended by Axel Hägerström in the early 1900s, suggests that ethical sentences are primarily emotional expressions of one's own attitudes and are intended to influence the actions of the listener. Under this view, "Killing is wrong" is translated as "Killing, boo!" or "I disapprove of killing."

A close cousin of emotivism, developed by R. M. Hare, is called universal prescriptivism. Prescriptivists interpret ethical statements as being universal imperatives, prescribing behavior for all to follow. According to prescriptivism, phrases like "Thou shalt not murder!" or "Do not steal!" are the clearest expressions of morality, while reformulations like "Killing is wrong" tend to obscure the meaning of moral sentences.

Other forms of non-cognitivism include Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism and Allan Gibbard's norm-expressivism.

Arguments in favour

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As with other anti-realist meta-ethical theories, non-cognitivism is largely supported by the argument from queerness: ethical properties, if they existed, would be different from any other thing in the universe, since they have no observable effect on the world. People generally have a negative attitude towards murder, which presumably keeps most of us from murdering. But does the actual wrongness of murder play an independent role? Is there any evidence that there is a property of wrongness that some types of acts have? Some people might think that the strong feelings we have when we see or consider a murder provide evidence of murder's wrongness. But it is not difficult to explain these feelings without saying that wrongness was their cause. Thus there is no way of discerning which, if any, ethical properties exist; by Occam's razor, the simplest assumption is that none do. The non-cognitivist then asserts that, since a proposition about an ethical property would have no referent, ethical statements must be something else.

Universal prescriptivism

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Arguments for prescriptivism focus on the function of normative statements.

Prescriptivists argue that factual statements and prescriptions are totally different, because of different expectations of change in cases of a clash between word and world. In a descriptive sentence, if one premises that "red is a number" then according to the rules of English grammar said statement would be false. Since said premise describes the objects "red" and "number", anyone with an adequate understanding of English would notice the falseness of such description and the falseness of said statement. However, if the norm "thou shalt not kill!" is uttered, and this premise is negated (by the fact of a person being murdered), the speaker is not to change his sentence upon observation of this into "kill other people!", but is to reiterate the moral outrage of the act of killing. Adjusting statements based upon objective reality and adjusting reality based upon statements are contrary uses of language; that is to say, descriptive statements are a different kind of sentence to normative statements. If truth is understood according to correspondence theory, the question of the truth or falsity of sentences not contingent upon external phenomena cannot be tested (see tautologies).

Some cognitivists argue that some expressions like "courageous" have both a factual as well as a normative component which cannot be distinguished by analysis. Prescriptivists argue that according to context, either the factual or the normative component of the meaning is dominant. The sentence "Hero A behaved courageously" is wrong, if A ran away in the face of danger. But the sentence "Be brave and fight for the glory of your country!" has no truth value and cannot be falsified by someone who does not join the army.

Prescriptivism is also supported by the actual way of speaking. Many moral statements are de facto uttered as recommendations or commands, e.g. when parents or teachers forbid children to do wrong actions. The most famous moral ideas are prescriptions: the Ten Commandments, the command of charity, the categorical imperative, and the Golden Rule command to do or not to do something rather than state that something is or is not the case.

Prescriptivism can fit the theist idea of morality as obedience towards god. It is however different from the cognitivist supernaturalism which interprets morality as subjective will of god, while prescriptivism claims that moral rules are universal and can be found by reason alone without reference to a god.

According to Hare, prescriptivists cannot argue that amoralists are logically wrong or contradictory. Everyone can choose to follow moral commands or not. This is the human condition according to the Christian reinterpretation of the Choice of Heracles. According to prescriptivism, morality is not about knowledge (of moral facts), but about character (to choose to do the right thing). Actors cannot externalize their responsibility and freedom of will towards some moral truth in the world, virtuous people do not need to wait for some cognition to choose what's right.

Prescriptivism is also supported by imperative logic, in which there are no truth values for imperatives, and by the idea of the naturalistic fallacy: even if someone could prove the existence of an ethical property and express it in a factual statement, he could never derive any command from this statement, so the search for ethical properties is pointless.

Emotivism

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Arguments for emotivism focus on what normative statements express when uttered by a speaker. A person who says that killing is wrong certainly expresses her disapproval of killing. Emotivists claim that this is all she does, that the statement "killing is wrong" is not a truth-apt declaration, and that the burden of evidence is on the cognitivists who want to show that in addition to expressing disapproval, the claim "killing is wrong" is also true. Emotivists ask whether there really is evidence that killing is wrong. We have evidence that Jupiter has a magnetic field and that birds are oviparous, but as yet, we do not seem to have found evidence of moral properties, such as "goodness". Emotivists ask why, without such evidence, we should think there is such a property. Ethical intuitionists think the evidence comes not from science or reason but from our own feelings: good deeds make us feel a certain way and bad deeds make us feel very differently. But is this enough to show that there are genuinely good and bad deeds? Emotivists think not, claiming that we do not need to postulate the existence of moral "badness" or "wrongness" to explain why considering certain deeds makes us feel disapproval; that all we really observe when we introspect are feelings of disapproval. Thus the emotivist asks why not adopt the simple explanation and say that this is all there is, rather than insist that some intrinsic "badness" (of murder, for example) must be causing feelings when a simpler explanation is available.

Arguments against

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One argument against non-cognitivism is that it ignores the external causes of emotional and prescriptive reactions. If someone says, "John is a good person," something about John must have inspired that reaction. If John gives to the poor, takes care of his sick grandmother, and is friendly to others, and these are what inspire the speaker to think well of him, it is plausible to say, "John is a good person because he gives to the poor, takes care of his sick grandmother, and is friendly to others". If, in turn, the speaker responds positively to the idea of giving to the poor, then some aspect of that idea must have inspired a positive response; one could argue that that aspect is also the basis of its goodness.

Another argument is the "embedding problem" in which ethical sentences are embedded into more complex sentences. Consider the following examples:

  • Eating meat is not wrong.
  • Is eating meat wrong?
  • I think that eating meat is wrong.
  • Mike doesn't think that eating meat is wrong.
  • I once thought that eating meat was wrong.
  • She does not realize that eating meat is wrong.

Attempts to translate these sentences in an emotivist framework seem to fail (e.g. "She does not realize 'Boo to eating meat!'"). Prescriptivist translations fare only slightly better ("She does not realize that she is not to eat meat"). Even the act of forming such a construction indicates some sort of cognition in the process.

According to some non-cognitivist points of view, these sentences simply assume the false premise that ethical statements are either true or false. They might be literally translated as:

  • "Eating meat is wrong" is a false statement.
  • Is "eating meat is wrong" a true statement?
  • I think that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
  • Mike doesn't think that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.
  • I once thought that "eating meat is wrong" was a true statement.
  • She does not realize that "eating meat is wrong" is a true statement.

These translations, however, seem divorced from the way people actually use language. A non-cognitivist would have to disagree with someone saying, "'Eating meat is wrong' is a false statement" (since "Eating meat is wrong" is not truth-apt at all), but may be tempted to agree with a person saying, "Eating meat is not wrong."

One might more constructively interpret these statements to describe the underlying emotional statement that they express, i.e.: I disapprove/do not disapprove of eating meat, I used to, he doesn't, I do and she doesn't, etc.; however, this interpretation is closer to ethical subjectivism than to non-cognitivism proper.

A similar argument against non-cognitivism is that of ethical argument. A common argument might be, "If killing an innocent human is always wrong, and all fetuses are innocent humans, then killing a fetus is always wrong." Most people would consider such an utterance to represent an analytic proposition which is true a priori. However, if ethical statements do not represent cognitions, it seems odd to use them as premises in an argument, and even odder to assume they follow the same rules of syllogism as true propositions. However, R.M. Hare, proponent of universal prescriptivism, has argued that the rules of logic are independent of grammatical mood, and thus the same logical relations may hold between imperatives as hold between indicatives.

Many objections to non-cognitivism based on the linguistic characteristics of what purport to be moral judgments were originally raised by Peter Glassen in "The Cognitivity of Moral Judgments", published in Mind in January 1959, and in Glassen's follow-up article in the January 1963 issue of the same journal.[2]

See also

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References

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Non-cognitivism

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Non-cognitivism is a meta-ethical theory asserting that moral judgments and statements do not express beliefs or propositions capable of being true or false, but rather convey non-cognitive attitudes such as , desires, prescriptions, or plans. This view contrasts with cognitivism, which treats ethical claims as representations of facts, and it emphasizes that moral language functions primarily to guide action or express speaker endorsement rather than to describe reality. Key variants include , which interprets moral utterances as exclamations of feeling; prescriptivism, which sees them as imperatives or recommendations; and more recent forms like quasi-realism and norm-expressivism, which aim to accommodate realist-seeming features of discourse without committing to moral facts. The theory traces its roots to David Hume's distinction between descriptive "is" statements and normative "ought" claims, highlighting the motivational gap that non-cognitivism seeks to bridge by linking morality directly to non-rational attitudes. In the early , it gained prominence through the logical positivist tradition, with A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) proposing as a way to classify ethical statements as neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, thus meaningless in a cognitive sense but expressive of emotion. This was expanded by C. L. Stevenson in Ethics and Language (1944), who viewed discourse as a tool for persuasion and attitude influence rather than truth-seeking. Post-World War II, developed prescriptivism in works like The Language of Morals (1952), arguing that terms function as universalizable imperatives to action. Contemporary non-cognitivism has evolved to address embedding problems, such as the Frege-Geach problem, where moral terms appear in non-assertoric contexts like conditionals without straightforward attitudinal expression. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism, outlined in Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993), defends an expressivist semantics that simulates realist commitments—such as moral truth and justification—through projective attitudes, without positing objective moral properties. Similarly, Allan Gibbard's norm-expressivism in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990) identifies the content of normative judgments with sets of "normative worlds" governed by plans and decisions, treating them as non-cognitive yet rationally structured states that incorporate both belief-like and desire-like features. These developments enrich Humean psychology by positing hybrid mental states for normative thought, explaining why moral judgments motivate without requiring separate beliefs and desires. Non-cognitivism faces ongoing challenges, including issues and the need to account for moral reasoning's apparent logic, but it remains influential for its naturalistic approach to and compatibility with empirical . It also intersects with debates in action theory, where intentions are similarly analyzed as non-cognitive commitments with mixed functional roles. Proponents argue it avoids metaphysical commitments to while preserving the practical force of .

Definition and Core Concepts

Defining Non-Cognitivism

Non-cognitivism is a metaethical asserting that moral utterances, such as "Stealing is wrong," do not express propositions that can be true or false but instead convey non-cognitive attitudes, including , commands, or expressions of . This view rejects the idea that statements function descriptively to report facts about the world, positioning them instead as tools for influencing attitudes or guiding behavior. In , cognitive states refer to mental attitudes like , which aim to represent and are thus apt for truth-valuation; for instance, the "The sky is blue" can be assessed as true or false based on . Non-cognitive states, by contrast, encompass attitudes that do not assert facts but motivate action or express subjective responses, such as desires, approvals, or exclamations, without requiring verification against the world. Under non-cognitivism, moral judgments fall into this latter category, emphasizing their role in practical reasoning over theoretical description. A paradigmatic example is the moral condemnation "Murder is wrong," which non-cognitivists interpret not as a factual claim about 's properties but as an emotive outburst equivalent to "Boo to !"—an expression of disapproval intended to evoke similar sentiments in others. This approach highlights how operates more like interjections or imperatives than declarative sentences. The term "non-cognitivism" emerged in early 20th-century discussions of ethical language, with foundational developments in C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards's (1923) and W.H.F. Barnes's 1933 paper, but it was prominently advanced by in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, where he described ethical statements as "expressions of emotion" lacking cognitive content.

Distinction from Cognitivism

Cognitivism in holds that statements express propositions capable of being true or false, thereby representing beliefs about the world. This view encompasses a range of positions, including error theory, which posits that all statements are false due to the absence of facts, and non-naturalism, which asserts the of facts as non-natural independent of empirical reality. Under cognitivism, discourse functions semantically like factual assertions, allowing for evaluation in terms of objective truth conditions. In contrast, non-cognitivism denies that moral statements possess such semantic truth conditions, instead interpreting them as expressions of non-cognitive attitudes, such as imperatives, commands, or emotive responses like approval or disapproval. Whereas cognitivism affirms that judgments aim to describe and can succeed or fail in doing so, non-cognitivism treats them as performative utterances that guide action or convey speaker attitudes without asserting propositions. This fundamental divergence means that, for non-cognitivists, moral language lacks the descriptive content required for literal truth or falsity, positioning it closer to exclamations or prescriptions than to empirical claims. The implications of this distinction are profound for understanding moral discourse and truth. Non-cognitivism sidesteps ontological commitments to the of moral facts, avoiding the need to posit mysterious entities or properties in the world, but it raises challenges for logical inference in ethical reasoning, such as how moral terms behave in embedded contexts like conditionals or negations. Cognitivism, by contrast, preserves the applicability of standard logical tools to moral arguments, treating them as capable of validity and soundness, though at the potential cost of metaphysical baggage. Cognitivism itself divides into moral realism, which maintains that moral facts genuinely exist and ground the truth of moral statements, and anti-realism, which rejects such facts but allows moral statements to be true through alternative means, such as speaker-relative standards or pragmatic considerations. This typology highlights how cognitivist positions vary in their explanatory commitments while uniformly upholding the cognitive nature of moral judgments.

Historical Development

Precursors in the 19th Century

The roots of non-cognitivism in moral philosophy trace back to David Hume's 18th-century empiricism, which profoundly shaped 19th-century thought by emphasizing that judgments arise from sentiments rather than rational cognition. In his (1739–1740), Hume argues in Book 3, Part 1, Section 1, that distinctions are not derived from reason, which he views as inert and incapable of motivating action or discerning from ; instead, morality stems from passions and a sense that produces sentiments of approval or disapproval. This perspective laid foundational groundwork for non-cognitivist views by positing that ethical evaluations express emotional responses rather than assert factual truths. Hume's famous dictum, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions," from Book 2, Part 3, Section 3, underscores this non-cognitive approach to motivation, suggesting that reason serves desires and sentiments rather than independently guiding ethical conduct. Building on such sentimentalist traditions, Arthur Schopenhauer's ethics in the 19th century further advanced non-cognitive elements by grounding morality in the irrational will rather than intellectual apprehension. In On the Basis of Morality (1840), Schopenhauer contends that moral actions originate from compassion, an intuitive expression of the underlying "will to live" that transcends rational cognition and metaphysical speculation; ethical judgments, for him, manifest as immediate, non-propositional urges rather than truth-apt beliefs. This will-based framework portrays morals as manifestations of blind, non-rational forces, challenging cognitive theories and aligning with later non-cognitivist emphases on expressive rather than descriptive functions of ethical language. Schopenhauer's rejection of Kantian rationalism in favor of volitional and affective bases for ethics thus provided a continental precursor to Anglo-American non-cognitivism. The broader 19th-century intellectual climate, marked by the rise of , reinforced these precursors through a systematic dismissal of metaphysics and unverifiable claims, paving the way for non-cognitivist treatments of . Pioneered by in works like (1830–1842), positivism advocated limiting knowledge to empirical observation and scientific laws, explicitly rejecting metaphysical inquiries—including those in moral philosophy—as meaningless speculation beyond sensory verification. This anti-metaphysical stance influenced subsequent thinkers, setting the stage for 20th-century logical positivists who applied verification criteria to deem ethical statements non-cognitive, thereby echoing Humean and Schopenhauerian suspicions of reason's dominion over morals.

20th Century Formulations

Non-cognitivism emerged as a prominent metaethical position in the 20th century, particularly within the framework of logical positivism, which emphasized empirical verifiability as the criterion for meaningful statements. In 1936, A.J. Ayer articulated an emotive theory of ethics in his book Language, Truth and Logic, arguing that ethical statements are neither true nor false but serve to express emotions or attitudes, rendering them unverifiable and thus nonsensical in a cognitive sense. This formulation drew from the Vienna Circle's verification principle and positioned non-cognitivism as a response to traditional moral realism and intuitionism. Following , C.L. Stevenson expanded on these ideas, developing a more nuanced account of ethical language's persuasive function. In his 1937 paper "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" and subsequent book Ethics and Language (1944), Stevenson distinguished between descriptive and emotive meanings, positing that ethical terms primarily convey attitudes to influence others through rather than assertion of facts. This work shifted emphasis from outright dismissal of ethical discourse to its role in dynamic interpersonal influence, bridging early positivist skepticism with practical linguistic analysis. In the 1950s, advanced non-cognitivism through , treating moral judgments as imperatives rather than descriptive claims. In his 1952 book The Language of Morals, Hare argued that moral language functions to prescribe actions universally, committing speakers to consistent application of rules across similar situations, akin to commands that demand adherence without invoking truth values. This approach integrated insights from , emphasizing the in ethical discourse. Later in the century, refinements addressed challenges to non-cognitivism's ability to mimic realist discourse. introduced quasi-realism in his 1984 book Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language, proposing that non-cognitive attitudes could project a structure simulating cognitive commitments to truth and objectivity without endorsing metaphysical realism. Quasi-realism thus allowed non-cognitivists to accommodate complex ethical reasoning, such as embedding moral claims in conditionals, while preserving the core denial of moral facts. The rise of non-cognitivism coincided with broader shifts in , including the decline of —which had posited self-evident moral truths—and the ascendancy of ordinary language analysis in the mid-20th century. Logical positivism's influence waned post-1940s, but its legacy in scrutinizing ethical language persisted through figures like and , fostering a focus on use over metaphysics in moral philosophy.

Major Varieties

Emotivism

is a form of non-cognitivism that interprets judgments as expressions of the speaker's emotional attitudes rather than assertions of fact. According to this view, statements like " is wrong" do not describe objective properties or states of affairs but instead convey approval or disapproval, akin to exclamations such as "Boo to !" or "Hooray for anti- attitudes!" This approach denies that moral language has cognitive content, treating it instead as a tool for evincing feelings and influencing others' emotions. The theory was prominently advanced by in his 1936 work Language, Truth and Logic, where he argued that ethical statements lack verifiability and thus meaningfulness in a propositional sense, serving primarily as emotive outbursts without . Ayer distinguished from simple by emphasizing that moral judgments do not assert the existence of the speaker's feelings but merely express them, much like a cry of pain. C.L. Stevenson further developed in his 1937 paper "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" and his 1944 book Ethics and Language, introducing a distinction between the descriptive meaning of ethical terms (which conveys factual information) and their dynamic or emotive meaning (which expresses attitudes and aims to modify interests). For Stevenson, terms like "good" carry an affective component that invites agreement in attitude, making moral discourse persuasive rather than truth-apt. A key feature of emotivism is its subjectivist foundation in individual , yet it allows for through shared or culturally influenced feelings, enabling moral language to foster collective attitudes. disagreements, under this theory, arise not from conflicting beliefs about facts but from clashing attitudes or interests, resolvable through that alters emotions rather than rational demonstration. For instance, one person's endorsement of "kindness is good" clashes with another's indifference, prompting emotive to sway the latter. While emotivism provided a framework for understanding as non-propositional within the logical positivist , it gained prominence from the 1930s to the before facing critiques for inadequately handling the logical structure of moral arguments.

Prescriptivism

Prescriptivism is a variety of non-cognitivism that interprets statements as imperatives or prescriptions intended to guide action, rather than as descriptive claims capable of being true or false. For instance, the judgment "Do not steal" functions as a directive to be followed in relevant situations, prescribing behavior without asserting a fact about the world. This approach denies that language conveys propositional content subject to truth evaluation, positioning it instead as action-guiding in nature. The theory was systematically formulated by the British philosopher R. M. Hare in his 1952 work The Language of Morals, where he distinguished prescriptive meaning—characteristic of moral utterances—from descriptive meaning found in factual statements. Hare argued that moral terms like "ought" operate prescriptively, akin to commands that recommend courses of action. He expanded this into universal prescriptivism in his 1963 book Freedom and Reason, insisting that genuine moral prescriptions must be universalizable to ensure consistency and rationality in ethical reasoning. According to Hare, a prescription qualifies as moral only if it can be applied impartially across all similar circumstances, requiring the speaker to accept it for themselves and others without exception. A key feature of Hare's prescriptivism is the universalizability test, which demands that moral agents prescribe rules they would willingly endorse in any situation involving relevantly similar facts, promoting . This test serves to differentiate true moral agents, who reason consistently and fanatically, from those who issue inconsistent or self-exempting directives; fanatics, for Hare, fail the test by refusing to universalize their prescriptions logically. By enforcing such consistency, aims to resolve conflicts through rational dialogue rather than mere assertion. In terms of logical structure, prescriptivism aligns moral discourse with , which governs concepts of , permission, and prohibition, as opposed to propositional logic applicable to truth-apt statements. maintained that imperatives do not participate in standard inferences based on truth preservation but follow rules suited to directive force, such as those preserving prescriptive consistency. This framework underscores the non-cognitive status of moral language while providing a basis for ethical argumentation.

Expressivism and Quasi-Realism

Expressivism constitutes a prominent variety of non-cognitivism, positing that moral utterances function primarily to express the speaker's non-cognitive attitudes of endorsement or rejection toward certain actions, states, or norms, rather than to describe objective facts about the world. This approach emphasizes the motivational role of moral language in guiding behavior and coordinating social attitudes, treating discourse as a tool for practical commitment rather than theoretical assertion. Allan Gibbard advanced a refined version of in his 1990 book Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment, where he analyzes normative judgments—including ones—as expressions of acceptance toward systems of norms that render specific feelings and plans of action rational or appropriate. According to Gibbard's norm-, to judge that an action is right is to endorse a normative framework under which that action aligns with coordinated emotional responses and procedures, thereby avoiding the need for facts while explaining the normative force of such judgments. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism, developed during the 1970s and 1980s and prominently featured in his 1984 book Spreading the Word: Groundings in the and his 1993 collection Essays in Quasi-Realism, builds on expressivist foundations to address the intuitive appeal of without endorsing ontological commitments to independent moral properties. Quasi-realism enables non-cognitivists to affirm like "torture is wrong" as true and to engage in with inferences that parallel those in cognitive domains, by interpreting such discourse through a minimalist conception of truth as "spreading the word" about shared attitudes rather than correspondence to reality. A central feature of quasi-realism is its strategy for managing complex linguistic embeddings, such as conditionals or negations in moral contexts (e.g., "If helping others is good, then we ought to donate"), by recasting them as ascriptions of higher-order attitudes—like conditional approvals—rather than evaluations of truth-bearing propositions, thus preserving the logic of moral arguments within an expressivist semantics. This approach responds to the cognitive appearances of moral talk by allowing expressivists to mimic realist commitments, such as claims of or disagreement, through projective mechanisms that extend attitudes across without invoking realism's metaphysical baggage. Since the , quasi-realist expressivism has solidified as the leading contemporary form of non-cognitivism, offering a flexible framework that accommodates realist intuitions while maintaining antirealist metaphysics, and it has significantly influenced hybrid theories in that integrate expressive attitudes with cognitive representational elements to resolve ongoing debates.

Arguments in Favor

Alignment with Moral Motivation

Non-cognitivism aligns closely with motivational internalism, the thesis that moral judgments necessarily motivate action in the agent who holds them. According to this view, non-cognitive attitudes such as emotions or prescriptions inherently provide the motivational force, so that sincerely judging an action as wrong intrinsically motivates the agent to avoid it. This internal connection explains why moral commitments reliably spur behavior without requiring additional desires, as the judgment itself embodies the motivating state. In contrast, cognitivist theories treat moral judgments as beliefs about objective facts, which alone cannot bridge the motivational gap to action. famously highlighted this "is-ought" problem, arguing that descriptive statements about what is the case cannot logically entail prescriptive conclusions about what ought to be done, necessitating separate desires to generate . Non-cognitivism resolves this by denying that moral judgments express truth-apt beliefs, instead positing them as non-descriptive expressions that directly incorporate motivational elements. Charles Stevenson's emotive theory exemplifies this alignment, positing that ethical terms like "wrong" not only describe but primarily function to express attitudes and persuade others, thereby evoking shared emotional responses that drive action. Similarly, R. M. Hare's prescriptivism views moral judgments as universal prescriptions that guide conduct, ensuring that endorsing a commits the agent to acting accordingly in relevant situations. For instance, while a factual like "Taxes are high" may inform but rarely motivates change on its own, a moral judgment such as "Taxes are unjust" typically arouses and prompts efforts to reform, reflecting the inherent motivational pull of non-cognitive moral attitudes. This framework finds empirical support in moral psychology, where research shows that moral judgments often arise from rapid emotional intuitions rather than deliberate reasoning, aligning with non-cognitivist emphasis on affective drivers of ethical motivation.

Resolution of Ethical Disagreements

Non-cognitivism addresses ethical disagreements by treating them as conflicts of non-cognitive attitudes—such as emotions, approvals, or prescriptions—rather than disputes over objective facts that could be verified or falsified. In this view, moral statements do not assert propositions about the world but express the speaker's stance, so disagreements lack a factual basis and cannot be resolved through evidence or logical proof of moral truths. Instead, resolution occurs via persuasion, emotional convergence, or mutual accommodation to align attitudes, often drawing on shared interests or rhetorical techniques. This framework finds support in key varieties of non-cognitivism. , as articulated by C. L. Stevenson, conceives moral judgments as expressions of favorable or unfavorable attitudes, with disagreements arising when attitudes clash despite agreement on descriptive beliefs; resolution involves non-rational persuasion to evoke similar emotions or coordinate interests, such as through redefining terms emotively to shift perspectives. Prescriptivism, developed by , interprets moral judgments as universal prescriptions intended to guide action, enabling resolution by applying the principle of : conflicting prescriptions are tested for consistency across similar situations, revealing common ground or inconsistencies that prompt revision toward impartial principles. These mechanisms emphasize practical adjustment over abstract truth-seeking. Compared to , non-cognitivism offers advantages by avoiding interminable debates over unverifiable moral facts, which realism posits as existing independently but inaccessible to empirical confirmation, thus adhering to principles like Ockham's razor in eschewing unnecessary ontological commitments. It also accommodates observed cultural differences in moral practices as variations in collective attitudes, facilitating cross-cultural dialogue without requiring agreement on a singular moral reality. This aligns with motivational internalism, as the attitudinal nature of moral judgments inherently connects them to the motivation for action without invoking belief in objective properties. For example, debates over are seen not as errors about factual moral status but as clashes between attitudes of approval toward reproductive choice and disapproval rooted in concerns for fetal life, resolvable through persuasive efforts to foster convergent prescriptions or emotional alignments rather than factual adjudication.

Criticisms and Challenges

Frege-Geach Embedding Problem

The Frege-Geach problem, a significant challenge to non-cognitivist theories in metaethics, was first articulated by Peter Geach in his 1960 paper "Ascriptivism," where he critiqued ascriptivist accounts of action descriptions, and further developed in his 1965 essay "Assertion." Drawing inspiration from Gottlob Frege's distinction between the assertoric force and the propositional content of sentences, Geach argued that non-cognitive expressions—such as those conveying moral attitudes like disapproval—fail to maintain their semantic role when embedded in non-assertoric contexts, such as the antecedent of a conditional. For instance, the sentence "Stealing is wrong" might express disapproval when asserted standalone, but in "If stealing is wrong, then we ought not to encourage it," the embedded clause appears to function propositionally without the same attitudinal force, leading to a loss of expressive consistency. This embedding issue has profound implications for non-cognitivism, as it threatens the theory's ability to account for everyday , which frequently involves hypotheticals, negations, questions, and . Without truth-conditional content, non-cognitive attitudes struggle to compose logically in complex sentences, potentially rendering arguments invalid or equivocal; for example, negating "Stealing is wrong" as "Stealing is not wrong" would not straightforwardly express approval if the original lacks descriptive meaning, undermining the to conclusions like "We may encourage stealing." Such difficulties suggest that non-cognitivism cannot adequately explain the inferential structure of discourse, which behaves as if governed by . Non-cognitivists have offered various responses to address these concerns. , in his prescriptivist framework, proposed a dual-structure semantics distinguishing between the "phrastic" (the propositional-like content) and the "neustic" (the prescriptive force), allowing moral terms to project consistently across embeddings via rules analogous to imperative logic. This approach, elaborated in Hare's 1970 paper "Meaning and Speech Acts," treats complex moral sentences as coordinating prescriptions rather than asserting truths, thereby preserving inferential validity without conceding cognitivism. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realist expressivism provides another influential reply, asserting that non-cognitive attitudes can be "projected" into embedded contexts through higher-order commitments, enabling moral sentences to mimic the logical behavior of factual ones without requiring genuine truth conditions. In works like Spreading the Word (1984), Blackburn argues for a minimal semantics where inferences are justified pragmatically, as denying them would lead to incoherence in moral practice, thus earning the right to realist-style . The debate remains active, with contemporary expressivists often employing strategies like antilogicism—rejecting strict adherence to in favor of attitude-based or inferentialist frameworks—to sidestep challenges while maintaining non-cognitivist commitments.

Accusations of Relativism

One prominent criticism of non-cognitivism is that it is often accused of implying or by treating moral judgments as expressions of subjective attitudes rather than assertions of objective facts, potentially rendering moral perspectives difficult to decisively rank and challenging the condemnation of profoundly immoral ideologies, such as . This charge, though common, is contested, as non-cognitivism denies the truth-aptness of moral statements altogether, distinguishing it from , which posits relative moral truths within a cognitivist framework. Critics argue that without objective standards, non-cognitivists struggle to maintain principled distinctions between moral views, potentially leading to undue tolerance of abhorrent attitudes. In response, R.M. Hare's counters this by insisting that moral prescriptions must be universalizable, meaning agents cannot consistently endorse prescriptions that they would reject if applied to themselves in reversed circumstances, thus excluding inconsistent or fanatical views like those supporting . Similarly, Allan Gibbard's norm-expressivism, as developed in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990), allows for normative pressure and social coordination through shared systems of norms without relying on objective facts, enabling criticism of deviant attitudes while avoiding the equation of all views as equally legitimate. Further concerns arise from the perceived loss of moral progress under non-cognitivism; for instance, the abolition of would be recast merely as a shift in collective attitudes rather than an advancement toward objective truth, undermining claims of ethical improvement over time. Additionally, the subjectivist implications of non-cognitivism are accused of eroding the authoritative force of , as moral directives become mere expressions of personal or cultural preferences without binding rational weight. Contemporary defenses, particularly Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism, attempt to mitigate these issues by demonstrating how non-cognitive attitudes can project a that mimics objective , preserving the appearance of universal standards without committing to actual facts. Recent developments, such as ecumenical , further address these worries by integrating cognitive and non-cognitive elements to account for disagreement and . However, critics like David Enoch argue that such maneuvers fail to deliver the robust, irreducibly normative required for morality, ultimately risking a form of that cannot justify condemnation of immoral actions beyond contingent attitudes.

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