Hi, I just want to express my gratitude to you for making this video. I was reading Miller's Contemporary Intro to Metaethics and it was honestly quite technical at times. Thanks for simplifying the core of the arguments and various objections. Appreciate it, keep making videos!
Nice explanation. Concerning the Frege-Geach Problem, I think moral statements can be similar to statements about game rules. For example, you can say: "In chess, you cannot win by taking the king," what this really means is that the rules you use to play chess and the rules you suppose most people use to play chess imply that you cannot win by taking the king. Of course, some people may use other rules and they can disagree with you. Hence, it is not an absolute truth, it is just a social convention you happen to agree with. That doesn't mean it is not important.
Dear Kane B, and how do you find Gibbard's (1998) take on the validity of moral inferences? He resorted to those possible worlds being a combination of facts and norms and tried to propose a sort of semantics that would account for the apparent validity of inferences. Are you aware of that? I vaguely remember that was a rather obscure theory and I DO remember Sinnott-Armstrong purportedly demolished it in his "Moral Skepticism". Best of luck!
Thanks for the video! Very informative. Didn't get the «If emotivism is correct, then the meaning of moral statements changes in unasserted contexts» part though. Why is that? I don't get why we can't paraphrase the aforementioned argument: P1) If I boo murder, then I boo paying somebody for murder. P2) I boo murder C)I boo paying somebody for murder Thanks in advance to anyone who replies
Thanks for putting this video together. It really helped me out. Although I only came to your channel because of your latest dating video - I'm just kidding, sorry... ...Although actually I first ecountered the dilemma of the Frege-Geach Problem discussed in this video in relation to issues with transgender people at the moment - so I don't know whether this is relevant to your dating quest? Cheers.
thank you for the video, I have a question. can we apply the Jorgenson's Dilemma to other emotions? P1: I kick the baby if I am angry P2: I am angry C: I kick the baby in this example, we have no problem of whether anger is an emotion: it clearly is. and since emotion can't be true and false, this argument expresses nothing. (really? I think in this example, being in a mental state of anger can be true or false) Yet, we don't conclude that anger is not an emotion. so why does this Dilemma damage emotivism?
18:00 It's rather like this: 1. I am disgusted. 2. I ask myself: Why am I disgusted ? 3. Then reason comes in. Not before that. Now disgust is an emotion that comes about when I am worried about my hygiene. Is this a reasonable reaction in this context ? Of course not. Why would I be worried about their hygiene ? I would maybe worry about their soul if I were to be a christian. But being disgusted is thus not right. It's better to pitty them. This makes it more likely to save his soul because it generates helping behaviour.
I don’t really understand the Frege-Geach problem. I think you could just substitute “murder is wrong” in each of those examples with “licorice tastes bad” and you could make the exact same argument, even though it’s obvious that that proposition is expressing an attitude.
Cognitivists aren't necessarily saying that moral judgements don't express an attitude about something they're simply saying that moral judgements express both an attitude AND a belief about something. For the moral emotivist moral judgements never convey a propositional meaning hence the Freche-Geache problem.
This was really helpful. one question related to Jorgenson's dilemma. is it true that an argument can't be VALID if it's propositions aren't truth apt or is it simply that it can never be sound?
It's not clear that responding to someone playing free jazz as being wrong is bizarre given ostriziazatiton is an implicit null operator placement for the exclamatory explicit utterance 'you're wrong'. This can be of no problem if a person chooses another interest group but it would be buzzer if that person stayed in the group advocating dislike for free jazz and the get what other members claim is justified forms of exclusionary behaviour like the credulous stare which could be quantified statistically through political community penalise through proximity of member to member operations within a cohort of participants in the game which in this case is like free jazz or not like free jazz. So emotivism accounts for a broad range of disagreement as push-back through self evaluation operations within in- group dynamics (new groups are ideal like cancer groups) that go under the radar of speech acts. Moral emotions count as a non moral emotion as it (whatever the emotional like to dislike binary) operates in a group to excite a leader who equivocates into making a speech act that is an expression of group sentiment as in all in favour say moo (group think conjures invalid statements through leader but is a sound argument as it expresses true sentiments of the group at a point in time) and that is a non moral emotion which is democracy. The principle of deference to a leader gets rid of the moral burden on members as an internal contradiction.
Hi, thank you for your videos, they're really helpful and informative. I wanted to ask an embarrassingly basic question: I don't feel there are any moral facts in the world (so I guess I'm an anti-realist); however, I still believe that murder is wrong, I just don't think it's a fact that it's wrong. I'm not sure I'm merely saying "boo murder" because it's a belief I hold, but it's not a factual belief. Am I contradicting myself here? I don't think it can be true or false as it's a matter of opinion, but more than an emotion. Thanks!
+Joanna Mildren You could hold some sort of subjectivism, which I discuss in one of the later videos in this series. However, as an emotivist myself, I'd encourage to rethink your position. You say that your view that murder is wrong is "more than an emotion." But emotions are extremely powerful. They're among the most powerful things we ever experience. Indeed, one of the reason why I'm tempted to treat moral claims as essentially expressions of emotion, rather than expressions of belief, is that beliefs in themselves don't move us in any way. It seems to me that emotion is basically the only thing in the world that accounts for the kind of force that moral judgements seem to have.
Interesting and instructive video, thank you for making it and posting. I do have an issue to raise wrt the embedding problem - why is cognitivism to be opposed at all costs by the emotivists? In other words we can consider the following argument If I feel elated I jump on the spot; I feel elated; therefore I am jumping on the spot. Now there is little doubt that there the second premise has an emotive meaning that is lacking in the conditional (or any other composite proposition incorporating it); however in addition to expressing an emotion that proposition also describes the fact that I have an emotion. In that way it can be used consistently in arguments. In fact, any we can construct a declarative statement out of a statement of any modality and use that to suit our purposes. I believe all this is similar to objection 3 in the video; but it seems that the most serious objections to emotivism can be resolved by watering down the commitment to non-cognitivism, but without abandoning the idea that a the most distinctive aspect of ethical terms is their emotive nature. I also do not see how claiming that ethical claims function simultaneously as expressions of attitudes and beliefs about attitudes contradicts the verification principle; for one may simply witness one's own emotions by simple introspection and so might have knowledge of whether they arise or not in particular situations.
We can interpret moral statements in the way you suggest - so for example "abortion is wrong" means "I disapprove of abortion" or something along those lines. That's a form subjectivism, and I'll look at it in a later video. There are also "hybrid theories" that try to combine emotivism with cognitivism - so that moral statements express both emotional attitudes and beliefs. As you suggest, I think that this helps solves a lot of the most serious problems with emotivism. Again, I plan to look at this in more detail in a later video, but see: www.iep.utm.edu/eth-expr/#SH5b Re verificationism, perhaps I wasn't clear in the video, but verificationism doesn't entail emotivism. A verificationist doesn't have to be an emotivist. Indeed, many people who accepted the verification principle held some other theory of ethics, such as subjectivism. If we accept subectivism, then of course moral statements are empirically verifiable: if "abortion is wrong" just means "I disapprove of abortion", then you can empirically verify whether abortion is wrong (you verify it for yourself by just checking your own mental states; you verify it for others by asking them whether or not they think that abortion is wrong). Ayer's argument against subjectivism was simply: if "abortion is wrong" means nothing more than "I disapprove of abortion", then somebody who says "abortion is wrong but I don't disapprove of it" is contradicting himself. But Ayer thinks that there is no contradiction here. It might be an odd thing to say, but it isn't contradictory. I didn't discuss this argument in this video, because it's a special case of an argument given by G.E.Moore (the "open question argument") that I'm going to examine later.
Kane B The last point is quite interesting - but it does seem to appear that the early non-cognitivist is committed in believing that any person who claims "I believe x is good" is merely confusing non-cognitive mental states (expressed in the utterance 'x is good') for cognitive states (beliefs). Furthermore this position also seems to imply that no moral beliefs exist, which is not the form that I would expect a very useful theory in ethics to take. I do see however that the resolution I suggest to the embedding problem is one belonging in that class of hybrid expressivist metaethics. Did Ayers or Stevenson ever anticipate the expressivist ideas in their writings? Also how does the emotivist analysis of moral claims fair as a broader semantic theory? Is it consistent to say that the sentence 'x is good' expresses solely non-cognitive mental states and is not a proposition but the statement 'I feel happy' is a proposition?
Jason93609 Yes, for the noncognitivist claims like "I believe that x is good" are false, since "x is good" doesn't express a belief. And yes, the position definitely implies that there are no moral beliefs. Well, there are beliefs about morality - for example "John feels that abortion is immoral" is a belief. But "abortion is immoral" itself isn't a belief. I think Stevenson did anticipate hybrid theories in a way, since he suggested several ways of analysing moral statements; see: plato.stanford.edu/entries/stevenson/#EthLanMet Stevenson's analyses include expressions of emotions, commands, and beliefs. "I feel happy" is descriptive. It's true or false that you're happy. With "x is good", although it can be true or false that *you feel* that x is good, it can't, according to the emotivist, be true or false that x is good. I don't think there's any inconsistency here. Emotivists don't claim that it's impossible for people to describe their mental states. They just claim that moral statements - statements of the form "x is good", "x is bad", "x is worse than y" etc - are not descriptions of one's mental states.
Maybe " x is wrong " , is not a literal statement but rather a metaphor meaning " the agent that utters 'murder is wrong' feels impelled to avoid committing murder" . Then non-cognitivists are taking moral statements as literal while cognitivists , perhaps unconsciously, consider moral statements as metaphor.
As an emotivist i would bite the bullet and just accept that "we had to discuss whether murder is wrong" is meaningless. If you think it is meaningful, it's because you are inserting meaning into that phrase based on your previous bias.
but "murder" means "wrong killing" (as opposed to "elimination", aka "good killing"). so, when you say "murder is wrong" you are explaining the mening of words, and most philosophy seems to do it. and when philosophers assume they are studying something more grandiose (e.g. the world itself) -- they become pretencious smarties
I dont agree with emotivism, but I think the example you give can be perfectly explained under emotivism, and maybe, even better explained than by an objectivist account. If its true morality is determined by emotions, we should consider a certain fact: We dont wanna get shot. Also, if its true morality is determined by emotions, then our sense of conviction for any moral claim should be directly proportional to how strongly we feel about the issue. So, we need to consider another a fact: We REALLY dont wanna get shot. Since we place so much value on our lives, and have such a strong desire to keep them for as long as possible, the strong sense of conviction in a claim like "It is wrong for you to kill me" could easily come from strong emotions, and not objective moral laws.
I dont agree with emotivism, but I think the example you give can be perfectly explained under emotivism, and maybe, even better explained than by an objectivist account. If its true morality is determined by emotions, we should consider a certain fact: We dont wanna get shot. Also, if its true morality is determined by emotions, then our sense of conviction for any moral claim should be directly proportional to how strongly we feel about the issue. So, we need to consider another a fact: We REALLY dont wanna get shot. Since we place so much value on our lives, and have such a strong desire to keep them for as long as possible, the strong sense of conviction in a claim like "It is wrong for you to kill me" could easily come from strong emotions, and not objective moral laws.
