Do we use moral language to express moral beliefs?
For those of you who are interested, a short essay I have written on the topic of moral discourse:
Moral discourse is pervasive in virtually all aspects of life – both in philosophical and day to day senses – and it is perhaps the prima facie position that our moral language expresses moral beliefs. This is the view held by moral realists and cognitivists. However, philosophers such as A.J Ayer have come to reject the claim that our moral dialect does indeed express moral beliefs, as it is arguable that our moral expressions do not contain the truth values one would assume they incorporate, thus negating the function of a moral belief. For the purpose of this essay, I shall examine the arguments that reject the view that our language expresses moral beliefs, and whether they maintain under scrutiny.
According to the moral realist and cognitivist perspectives, moral language expresses moral beliefs purporting to describe an objective moral status in the world. As cognitivists maintain that language expresses such beliefs, they hold that these beliefs are truth apt - they are either true or false. A cognitivist making the proposition “murder is wrong” is not only stating an opinion on the matter, but it is making claim that ascertains whether this statement is true or false. Non-cognitivists on the other hand, as Mark Van Roojen writes, 'are not in the business of...making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense'.1 Non-Cognitivists reject the moral realist thesis on the grounds that moral propositions are not truth apt, and instead when we do use moral language we express a non-cognitive state such as a desire, which do not hold any truth values. Therefore, a non-cognitivist reading of the statement “murder is wrong” essentially equates to “Boo! Murder!”.
Despite the radical skepticism of the non-cognitivist premise, there are potentially strong arguments in favour of such a view. Perhaps the earliest favourable argument emerges from David Hume's work A Treatise on Human Nature where he concludes that 'reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions'2 as the basis for his theory of motivation. According to Hume, whenever we are motivated to act, the motivating reason is consistent with a pre-existing desire or emotion and is not dependent on an analytic (a true-by-definition statement) or a synthetic (a statement dependent on the world) proposition alone. We are instead motivated primarily by emotive responses. For example, I may believe it is true that there is a glass of water beside me and that I am thirsty, yet the motivation for me reach out and drink from it is not the truth value of such a statement, but the desire behind it i.e my thirst. It is implausible that reason alone may motivate us to express moral attitudes therefore, as the apparent truth or falsity of propositions appears impotent in terms of motivation. A.J Ayer3 carried this concept further into the meta-ethical view of emotivism which claims that moral language does not express belief, but merely a specific emotion in accordance with the proposition at hand. As our desires are the motivation for moral discourse, and since emotional response are not truth apt beliefs, Ayer argued that moral language expresses a praise or disgust for a moral act.
Cognitivists such as Philippa Foot denied the emotivist standpoint as, according to her in Natural Goodness, if moral language merely functions to express emotional attitudes toward moral actions, then there can be no normative force behind such claims. If Ayer is correct, moral language essentially boils ethical dilemma's down to matters of opinion that have little or no “action-guidingness”4, a conclusion that has damning consequences for any system of moral judgement, (certainly in any legal sense) for one could always argue that any ethical motivation is meaningless and thus not reprehensible. Nonetheless, R.M Hare's universal prescriptivist position may rebuff such criticisms. Hare agreed with Ayer that moral language simply expresses emotional attitudes, yet he argued that our speech contains an imperative element that indeed prescribes a guiding force, rather than merely describing a moral attitude. According to Hare in The Language of Morals: 'the statement that 'Shut the door' means the same as 'Either you are going to shut the door, or X will happen', where X is understood to be something bad for the person addressed.'5 This is to say that when we use moral discourse, we do not only express an opinion toward a moral act, but prescribe an almost Kantian intuitive universality to all acts of such a kind, hence to term universal prescriptivism. This would seemingly counter Foot's position, as it ostensibly gives ethical statements normative force whilst maintaining the non-cognitive thesis of rejecting moral beliefs.
Yet, It is perhaps within the infamous Frege-Geach Problem that argues best against the the non-cognitivist assumption and gives strength to the view that our moral speech does express belief. This argument works best by example: “It is wrong to murder. If it is wrong to murder, then it is wrong for my brother to murder. Therefore, it is wrong for my brother to murder”. While the first proposition is plausible to non-cognitivists as it may be reduced to “boo! Murder!”, it is undeniable that there can be no particular emotional inference made from the unassertive statements made in the latter sections of this argument. To say “if it is wrong to murder...” does not support the conclusive statement “it is wrong for my brother to murder” according to emotivists and even prescriptivists as no emotional imperative can be discerned to give the conclusion any force. How can the precedent sentence hold moral ground while the antecedent seemingly holds none? Thus, non-cognitivism therefore has issue with explaining how moral language is used in unassertive contexts. Moral realists on the other hand are free from this issue, as the antecedent sentence is truth apt in itself and thus entails moral belief in the embedded sentence.
Does moral language express moral belief? Seemingly the response to this would be that it does not, given the apparent strength of Hume's motivational theory, along with Ayer's and Hare's plausible theories. Nonetheless, the Frege-Geach Problem offers a tall order for Non-cognitivists to overcome. Despite this, even if moral language does not express moral belief, would this be strong enough to prevent us from expressing our moral attitudes as such? As Sartre writes: 'man is condemned to be free'6 - even without security of moral beliefs, we may still use our discourse to create our own ethically normative actions to shape the world we live in, despite being condemned to a meaningless universe that lacks expressible moral beliefs.
Bibliography:
Hare, R.M, The Language of Morals (1952), Transcribed into hypertext by Andrew Chrucky, July 2005http://www.ditext.com/hare/lm.html
Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature, (1739-1740), Release Date: February 13, 2010 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm#link2H_4_0027
Roojen, Mark Van, Standford Encylopedia of Philosophy: Moral Cognitivism Vs. Non-Cognitivism (2004), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Cog
J.Sadler, Brook, Review of “Natural Goodness”: Essays in Philosophy Vol. 5 No.2 (2004), http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1166&context=eip
Shafer-Landau, Russ, Ethical Theory: An Anthology 2nd Edition (Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2007)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946),Transcribed by Andy Blunden, 1998 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm