Noncognitivism in Ethics

Mark Schroeder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135149147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning.

Noncognitivism in Ethics is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard, and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the 'Frege-Geach' problem.

Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms - making Noncognitivism in Ethics essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics.

1
The Problems of Metaethics

1.1 What is metaethics?

Each year, as many as 300,000 girls undergo a procedure known as ‘infibulation’; the World Health Organization calls it ‘type III’ genital cutting.¹ Extensive tissue is removed from their genitalia and the labia are stitched together so that after the procedure, nothing remains except a small opening for urine and menstrual blood. In many cases, infibulation is performed by a village midwife, with no anesthesia. There are no known health benefits of this procedure, but it can lead to bacterial infection, open sores, recurrent bladder and urinary tract infections, and increased risk of transmission of HIV. It also substantially raises the risks involved in childbirth: a 2006 study by the WHO found that infibulation raises the risk of the death of a child in pregnancy by 55 percent, raises the risk of cesarean section by 31 percent, and is associated with a 69 percent increase in the risk of postpartum hemorrhage, compared to women who have not undergone any genital cutting procedure.² Infants also need to be resuscitated in childbirth 66 percent more often, and their birth weight is on average 9 percent lower.³

Many people – you may be one of them – believe that it would be wrong to take one’s pre-adolescent daughter to have this procedure performed, for no medical reason. Of those who think so, many believe that it is wrong to allow others to have this procedure performed on their children, and as a result of views like these, the WHO has long sought to discourage procedures like this one. But some people disagree. They believe not only that it is wrong to prevent people from having procedures like this one performed on their daughters, but that it is permissible, or even a duty, to have this procedure performed on one’s own daughter. Hundreds of thousands of parents choose to have the procedure performed on their own daughters every year, and millions more choose to have less drastic genital cutting procedures performed on their daughters.

What people disagree about, in this case, are moral questions: whether it is wrong or not to take one’s daughter for infibulation, and whether it is wrong or not to allow people to take their daughters for infibulation. We are all familiar with moral questions, and we all have views about at least some of them. Sometimes the answers to moral questions seem easy or obvious – for example, most people find it obvious that killing an innocent person in cold blood in order to steal their DVD collection is wrong. You are not likely to find someone to disagree with you about this moral question, unless she is simply being disingenuous. But other times, even when the answer to a moral question seems obvious, you discover that other people disagree with you. For example, you discover that up to 300,000 girls each year are willingly subjected by their well-meaning parents to infibulation – parents who do not believe that what they are doing is wrong. Though you may find it obvious, they apparently do not. (Perhaps you are among those who do not find it obvious that infibulation is wrong – in that case, you disagree with the many people who do!)

Moments like this one tend to provoke a kind of existential paralysis known in philosophical circles as ‘interest in metaethics’, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. A first thought that you might have is: maybe taking one’s daughter for infibulation is wrong for us, but all right for them. If you haven’t had this thought, you are bound to have encountered someone who has. This is the idea that wrongness is relative – that actions are not simply right or wrong simpliciter – that is, all by themselves – but relative to a person, or relative to a cultural group, or relative to a time and place. Maybe, this idea claims, infibulation is wrong relative to our time and place, but all right, relative to the time and place of northern Sudan, where it is estimated that over 90 percent of women have undergone some variety of genital cutting procedure or other, and infibulation is very common.⁴ The idea that wrongness is relative is a thesis about the metaphysics of morality. It is a thesis about what we are talking, thinking, or disagreeing about, when we talk, think, or disagree about a moral question – that it is something relative, rather than absolute.

If you do not conclude that wrongness is relative, then next you are likely to wonder why you are so certain that infibulation is wrong, when other people are so equally certain that it is not wrong, and even that it is a duty. What makes you so sure, after all, other than that it seems obvious to you? But the opposite answer seems obvious to people with the opposing view. So what makes you think that what is obvious to you is a better guide to the truth than what seems obvious to them? If you are particularly reflective, you may add to these considerations the observations that given your upbringing and social circumstances, you were practically determined to find it obvious that infibulation is wrong, and that you would likely have found the reverse obvious, had you grown up in northern Sudan. These observations are bound to increase your puzzlement about how you really know that it is wrong, if your thinking that it is wrong is just a product of your upbringing and social circumstances. If you have ever wondered about any of these things, then you have been thinking about the epistemology of morality – the question of whether and how we do or can know the answers to moral questions.

Philosophers classify these questions about the metaphysics and epistemology of morality as belonging to the area of ‘metaethics’, so called because many people believe that the questions of metaethics are not questions within ethics – that is, they are not themselves moral questions – but are rather questions about moral questions – so they are ‘meta’ questions. Not everyone agrees with this characterization of what metaethics is about, but we have the name, nevertheless. Along with questions about the metaphysics and epistemology of morality, metaethics is concerned with questions about moral thought and questions about moral language. Since metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind (that is, of thought), and the philosophy of language are sometimes called the ‘core areas’ of philosophy, metaethics can therefore be characterized as what happens when we ask questions from the ‘core areas’ of philosophy about the subject matter of morality.

This book falls under the heading of ‘metaethics’ because it is primarily a book about moral language. But to appreciate the reasons why philosophers have been attracted to some of the theories about moral language that we will encounter in later chapters, it is important to see these questions about moral language as situated among related questions about moral reality (moral metaphysics), moral knowledge (moral epistemology), and moral thought (the philosophy of mind). And in fact, the questions about moral reality and moral knowledge are easier to understand.

1.2 The core questions (i): metaphysics and epistemology

We have already encountered one question about moral metaphysics, when you first entered your state of existential paralysis: it was our question as to whether wrongness is relative or absolute. But there are other, and more central, questions about moral metaphysics. The biggest is: what are moral questions about? The answer, of course, is that they are about morality – about what is right or wrong. But what kind of thing is that? Compare: if the question that we are interested in is whether sugar is soluble in water, there is more that we can say about what this is. For sugar to be soluble in water, after all, is for it to have the property that, very roughly, if you put some of it in water, then, other things being equal, it will dissolve. Now, that is not a very exciting answer to what questions about solubility are about, but it is an answer nonetheless. Metaethicists – people who spend their time thinking about metaethics – disagree a great deal over whether any answer at all can be given to the question, ‘what are moral questions about?’ other than the trivial one, ‘they are about what is right or wrong’, and if so, what kind of answer can be given.

One major concern that many people have had about the answer to this question is that they have noticed that morality is not a very scientific topic. Physicists and psychologists and biologists and chemists do not have very much to tell us about what is right and wrong – at least, not in virtue of the experiments or theories specific to their disciplines. Moreover, it is hard to see what sorts of experiments would be able to tell us the answers to our most important moral questions. People who believe that science is our best guide to what is true about the world therefore worry that we have a choice: either moral questions are really, ultimately about something that science can help to shed light on, or they are at best only about something spooky or unscientific.

The problem, however, is that it is hard to see how moral questions could possibly be about something that science can help to shed light on. Scientific investigation might reveal that babies do not, after all, die if they touch the clitoris during childbirth, as is reportedly believed by some in Burkina Faso.⁵ Consequently, scientific investigation might help us to settle the question of whether it is wrong to not surgically remove a woman’s clitoris before she is ready to give birth. But this kind of scientific investigation helps only if we know in advance that if a child will die if it touches the clitoris and if there is a high risk, if a woman with an intact clitoris gives birth, that the infant touches it, then it must be wrong to not surgically remove a woman’s clitoris before she gives birth. Since that is moral knowledge that we have to have before we do the scientific investigation, similar reasoning shows that not all moral knowledge can come from science – some of it has to come from somewhere else. And that, in turn, makes it seem to many people that moral questions can’t really be about something that science can ultimately shed light on, and hence that if they are about anything at all, it is something spooky. Many metaethicists disagree with this conclusion, of course, but many also worry about it, to at least some degree or another.

We have also already encountered one of the main questions from moral epistemology: how do we know what we know about morality? It is important not to confuse this question, ‘how do I know?’ with the question, ‘do I know?’ Just as you can see that when you press the button on a drinking fountain water comes out the spout, and be fully confident that it works while still wondering how it works, you can see that you know some things about what is right and wrong while still wondering how you know those things. The question of how we know what is right and wrong is the central question in moral epistemology.

Still, even though the questions, ‘how do I know?’ and ‘do I know?’ are different questions, and we can ask the former while being confident that the answer to the latter is a robust ‘yes’, many philosophers have believed that the question of how we know what is right and wrong is particularly hard. And some people who are particularly impressed with how difficult this question is to answer have found themselves wondering ‘do I know?’ after all.

To see why this question can seem to be particularly difficult, compare it to the question of how you know that there is a book in front of you. The sciences of optics, anatomy, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology have all contributed to helping us to understand how you could know such a thing. First, some light bounces off of the book and into your eyes. Then, it bounces off of your retina, where it encounters the photoreceptors that we know as rods and cones. From there, a signal passes through your optic nerve which corresponds to the pattern of stimulation of your rods and cones by different wavelengths and intensities of light, which is resolved by your visual cortex into a book-like shape. This is just part of the story, and a very sketchy part at that, but these and related sciences help to fill it in, so it turns out that scientists in fact know quite a lot about how you know that there is a book in front of you.

The problem is that there does not seem to be any similar such story that we can tell about how you know that it is wrong to take one’s eight-year-old daughter for infibulation. Unlike the book-like shape of the book in front of you, and the book-like pattern of inked text on its pages, the wrongness of taking one’s eight-year-old daughter for infibulation is not, at least on the face of it, something that we can see. For that matter, it does not seem to be something that we can hear, or something that we can taste, touch, or smell, either. So how, exactly, do we find out about it? Recent research in anthropology, evolutionary biology, primatology, social psychology, brain imaging studies, and other fields adds to this worry, by telling us what does lead us, in general, to have the moral views that we do. Much of this research lends itself to the conclusion that we are evolutionarily destined to have certain views, that the reasons for which we think we hold them are really simply post hoc rationalizations, and that our moral thoughts are driven by our emotions, much more than by any kind of reasoning or reflective thought.⁶

When science gives us this kind of picture of where our moral views come from, it appears, at least initially, to contrast sharply with what science tells us about where your belief that there is a book in front of you comes from. And this is what makes it look hard to understand how, by processes like these, we ever manage to find out about anything – let alone about what is right or wrong. And that, in turn, leads some people who start with the question of how we know, to end up with the question of whether we know, after all.

1.3 The core questions (ii): mind and language

So far we have encountered one major question from moral metaphysics, and one major question from moral epistemology. We also need to introduce an important question from each of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. These problems are somewhat more theory-laden than the problems we’ve just discussed from moral metaphysics and moral epistemology, so you may not have encountered them before. But they are questions that philosophers have become deeply puzzled about, and so it is important to at least see what they are. Fortunately, they...