Meta-ethics: Moore`s Intuitionism And Emotivist Responses

G.E. Moore: You just know the meaning of good

Moore is a representative of intuitionism.

Intuitionists are committed to the idea that we have intuitive knowledge of good.

You cannot fail to recognise good when you encounter it, it is something that you directly intuit. You just know it when you see it.

How? You just do!

When talking about good, Moore is talking about intrinsic good, that which is good in itself and for its own sake. The good of a good friend is intrinsically good the good of a good watch is instrumental good (good as a means to an end, good for keeping time).

There are, for Moore, objective moral truths.

Good names a simple, unanalysable property.

Moore calls it a non-natural property (basically, it cannot be accounted for by science or discovered through the senses) because (he claims) it cannot be identified with any natural property (anything that is found in nature, as discoverable by science).

Moore is a cognitivist: good is a property of things that we apprehend with our minds (cognise).

It is simple because it is not a complex of (made up of) constituent parts.

This is why it is unanalysable it cannot be broken down (analysed) into smaller pieces.

This is why Moore says that good cannot be defined.

Critical point: Moore is working with a very idiosyncratic notion of definition, where to define means to break up a complex whole into its constituent parts we might want to say definition entails something other than this, in which case we might then be able to define good in another way.

Good is like yellow.

You just know something is yellow when you see yellow (you intuitively know yellow).

You cannot define yellow you just know what yellow is (yellow is simple and unanalysable).

Yellow is just its own thing. Likewise, good is just its own thing.

But can t yellow be scientifically analysed as a certain wavelength of light? It can, but a certain wavelength of light is not what yellow means. Yellow just means yellow. To say that yellow is a certain wavelength of light is not to define it in Moore s sense of definition

[Aside: for an interesting thought experiment concerning colour and our intuitions about the world, see Mary s Room.]

Similarly, good just means good, and cannot be defined in terms of any natural property.

Moore s argument for the non-naturalness of good is called the Open Question argument.

Say I think that good means pleasant (pleasure being a natural property). When I experience something pleasant, it is the case that I can ask the genuinely open question, Is this good?

But if good means pleasant, then it shouldn t make sense for me to ask such a question (because I would be asking, Is this pleasant thing pleasant? , which is a tautology).

And yet it does still make sense for me to ask the question, Is this pleasant thing good? This must mean (Moore says) that good must be some other, distinct property.

And we can repeat this question whenever good is identified with any natural property, or any property in general. If we take good to mean commanded by God, we can still genuinely ask, Is this thing that is commanded by God good?

Therefore, Moore concludes, good must be a non-natural property that is not identical to any other property.

Moore calls it the naturalist fallacy to identify good with any natural property.

This is closely related to Hume s claim that you cannot logically derive an ought from an is.

A major objection: the standard of our intuitions.

It only makes sense to use the name of a simple property if we are already acquainted with a standard example of the property in question. It is by reference to our acquaintance with the standard that we can recognise whether that property is present or not in new cases.

To be able to recognise that this book is yellow, I must already be familiar with the standard of yellow (e.g., what I was taught to call yellow as a child).

As such, if it is to make sense, Moore s account must be supplemented by an account of how the meaning of good is learned, how we are made familiar with the standard case, and how we learn to apply our knowledge of good in new cases.

Another major objection: the spookiness of good.

If we agree that good is a non-natural property, then we are committed to a spooky a world, a world in which there are moral properties that exist over and above what is discoverable within the natural sciences.

We must then have an account of how non-natural properties fit into the natural world.

Good is ahistorical on this view, it exists in a fixed and unchanging way (in the realm of non-natural properties). This would seem to conflict with the evidence that what is called good changes throughout history and varies across cultures and societies.

A potential answer to these objections can be found by turning to Plato.

Plato has an account of how we first learn of good: through our prior familiarity with the Form of the Good in the world of Forms.

We would intuitively know good in this world because we would be remembering it from the world of the Forms (knowledge as recollection).

And he has an account of how non-natural properties fit into the natural world: the relationship between the world of Forms and the material world.

In Plato we could find strong philosophical grounding for these ideas.

But we could always say that Plato s picture of things still commits us to a spooky world, and that s just too much of a metaphysical and epistemological burden (there s too much you have to account for in terms of how it exists and how we know it exists with this kind of picture, and we don t want to abandon science)!

Is there a way around these problems without appealing to a spooky world?

Conscience?

Difficulties aside, a benefit of Moore s account is that it captures what many people take to be true about morality.

To describe something as good, right, or virtuous, seems to involve doing something that is more than or different from just saying that it has x, y, z natural properties.

It is not clear that there can be a science of good. No amount of empirical investigation by itself is ever enough to settle moral questions.

Objectivity and intuition: What is good is not up to us, it is out there, and we know it when we see it.

But this also conflicts with everyday experience. Moral ambiguity is a fact. You don t always know what the right thing to do is, you don t always know what would be good. How could that be so if we have intuitive knowledge of the good?

Emotivist Responses: Good only expresses emotion

Emotivists are also going to say that good is unanalysable, but their reasoning will be different: Good is unanalysable not because it is a simple property, but because, like all ethical concepts, it is a pseudo-concept.

This is a non-cognitivist position: Good is not a property of things at all, it is not something out there that is apprehended by the mind.

According to emotivism, good, along with all ethical concepts, are merely expressions of emotion, in one way or another.

A.J. Ayer: Ethical judgements have no validity

For Ayer, there are three classes of judgement: logical, factual, and emotive.

We can make analytic statements (where things are true by definition) as in maths and logic (e.g., the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees) we can make synthetic statements (where things are true by fact) as in the sciences and everyday knowledge (e.g., someone says it s raining, so you look outside to see if it s true or not) but then there are statements that are neither analytic nor synthetic (neither true by definition nor verifiable as true by checking the facts). Statements of ethical judgement belong to this class.

Critical point: As well as ethics, Ayer also puts theology in this third class. But it is not clear that theological statements and ethical statements belong together within the same class. This should make us somewhat suspicious of Ayer s classification (the third class just seems to be for whatever is left over).

We can still uncontroversially maintain a distinction between factual and emotive statements, however.

Because ethical judgements are neither definitional nor factual, they can never be verified as objectively true or false. They have no validity.

According to Ayer, our moral language does not add anything to the factual content of the things we say.

To say, It s bad that you stole that thing does not involve any more factual content than saying You stole that thing .

All that our moral language is doing, says Ayer, is that it expresses our emotions.

When we say something is good, we are simply expressing positive feelings towards when we say something is bad, negative feelings. Boo/Hurrah theory.

Moral language is thus objectively meaningless (good does not refer to any property that could be attributed to a thing) while it has subjective meaning (good means whatever we feel when we say something is good).

For Ayer, ethical philosophy s only job is to show that ethical concepts are pseudo-concepts and therefore unanalysable. It is the job of psychology to describe the feelings that ethical concepts are used to express and the reactions they customarily provoke.

C.L. Stevenson: Moral language is for changing attitudes

Stevenson emphasises how we use moral words like good and right to influence others the function of moral language is to change the attitudes of others.

Moral language has this function precisely because it s emotive. Moral language produces emotional responses.

For Stevenson, moral language is not only an expression of emotion, but results from our own attitudes and the beliefs about the world that they are based on.

When we say something is good, we are saying that we approve of it and want it to part of the world, because of how we believe it fits in with everything else.

The meaning of moral words is directly tied to approving, disapproving, caring, etc.

A major objection from Moore: no arguing over good.

Moore pointed out that if ethical judgements are just expressions of feeling, then it would be impossible for anyone to truly argue about morality.

On the emotivist picture, if I say This thing is good , and you say No, that thing is bad , then we are not actually disputing anything, because neither of us are making factual statements beyond saying There is a thing . We are each just expressing our own emotions, and there is no possible truth of the matter.

There can also be no logical reasoning behind our ethical positions. In ethical discussion, words like because and therefore can only be psychological reinforcements.

Everyday experience, however, would suggest that we often do dispute ethical matters, and we might want to commit to these disputes being more than just taking turns to express feelings. At the end of the day, we might want to say that there is a right thing to do, that means more than just hurrah, and that is supported by reasons.

Ayer just bites the bullet and says we never dispute moral matters (because it is impossible to dispute things that have no validity). Specifically, Ayer claims that we cannot dispute questions of value, but we can dispute matters of fact. And he claims that precisely what we re doing when arguing about morality, in all cases.

When I say a thing is good and you say it s bad and we argue, what we re arguing about, says Ayer, is how to see the facts, because we re hoping that once the other just sees the same facts that we do, they ll feel the same way.

A major objection against Stevenson: an incoherent and nasty world.

If the primary function of moral language is to influence others, then it is not clear how we could ever come to our own ethical positions

We can only seek to convert others to our moral views if we have moral views in the first place. But if moral language principally has a second-person function, then we lack the resources to form our own views.

Potentially we can never morally improve in a significant sense either, because we cannot improve our views through reasoning (because of the non-logical character of moral language. If we follow Ayer, moral improvement doesn t seem to be much more than feeling differently one day compared to another.

Again, Ayer would probably just bite the bullet on this one.

The picture of the world that Stevenson paints for us is a nasty one in which everyone is just trying to manipulate everyone else, in which no genuine ethical discussion is possible.

This would not seem to be the world we live in, but perhaps it only a question of optimism and cynicism.