John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part II, 1.1 (Platonism & Emotivism)

David Baggett

The first chapter of John Hare’s God’s Call is entitled “Moral Realism,” and here Hare wishes to present an account of the twentieth-century history of the debate within the Anglo-American philosophy between moral realists and moral expressivists. Moral realists emphasize the reality of value properties such as moral goodness, a reality which is in some sense independent of our attempts at evaluation. (Hare’s focus in the chapter will be on values more broadly and not moral values in particular.) Moral expressivists emphasize the role of moral (or value) judgment in expressing the will or emotion or desire. He will end up with a kind of merger of the two approaches.

Hare construes the debate as a whole in terms of a structure in which both sides have made progressive concessions until there’s a synthesis of sorts. That point of merger is Hare’s own position of “prescriptive realism,” a view that preserves, he claims, the surviving merits on both sides. He argues that we will also have a position that will help us understand God’s role in human morality.

The least concessive realist option is Platonism, so Hare begins with G. E. Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica. Intrinsic goodness is, Moore thinks, a real property of things, even though it does not exist in time and is not the object of sense perceptions. Moore aligns himself with Plato. Goodness is objective, in the sense that it is there independently of us (though not in space and time).

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy

By Hare, John E.

Moore thinks his predecessors have all committed the “naturalistic fallacy” of trying to define this value property by identifying it with a non-evaluative property. But whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that property is in fact good—whether the property in question is natural or supernatural. If the questions are different (one open, one closed), then the two properties can’t be the same. Intrinsic goodness, Moore says, is a simple non-natural property and indefinable. To say that it is non-natural is to distinguish it both from natural properties (like producing pleasure) and supernatural ones (like being commanded by God).

How can humans have access to non-natural properties? Moore thinks we can know what is good by a special form of cognition, which he calls “intuition.” Access is not based on an inference or argument, but it is self-evident (though we can still get it wrong, just as with sense perception). Moore thinks that the way to determine what things have positive value intrinsically is to consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good. He thought the most valuable things are certain states of consciousness like the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.

Moore thinks that usually our wills join together organically the cognition or intuition of goodness and something non-cognitive like a desire. Besides the cognition and emotion, there’s also the judgment of taste—that something deserves to cause the emotion.

The least concessive expressivist position is that of A. J. Ayer’s 1936 Language, Truth, and Logic. Ayer starts from a logical positivist criterion for meaningful statements, which entails that ethical statements are not meaningful, a view Hare obviously rejects. To get at what he thinks we are doing in making ethical judgments, Ayer focuses on the non-cognitive ingredient in evaluation that Moore identified. Ethical judgments merely serve to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. The function of the ethical words is merely “emotive,” meaning that they are used to express feeling about certain objects, not to make any assertion about them.

Ayer says this account is a kind of subjectivism. It is not the kind of subjectivist view that sees moral judgments are reports of our feelings, but as expressions of our feelings. Ayer departs from Moore in having to admit that we don’t really disagree about questions of value. On Ayer’s view of moral judgment, “Eating people is bad” and “Eating people is good” do not express propositions at all, and therefore can’t express inconsistent propositions. The most Ayer can say is that when we think we are disputing questions of value, we are actually disputing about the non-evaluative facts of the case that lie behind our attitudes.

Part 1

Part 3

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction to Naturalism

The next major move in ethics has been based on naturalism, which roughly is the view that there is only the natural; there is nothing supernatural. Usually this means all that exists is physical or dependent upon the physical. There are no essential natures or universal properties, like Plato thought. Already, we have seen many shifts in this direction, with materialist, nominalist, and empiricist moves. Plus, the Scientific Revolution gave rise to the view that the universe is a causally closed machine. When Darwin’s Origin was published, there was no longer a need to appeal to God as Creator. Naturalism became the dominant worldview in the west.

Naturalistic Ethics

To be consistent, ethics needed to be adapted to a naturalistic framework. Historically, this has taken many forms. In this and the following essays on naturalistic ethics, I will focus on one or more such proposals. In this essay, I will look at naturalistic moral views that are noncognitivist. This will include A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism.

Noncognitivism

Moral noncognitivism includes the views that 1) intrinsically moral properties don’t exist, and 2) moral judgments are neither true nor false. While there is some debate about what moral judgments are, noncognitivism denies a place for beliefs. Since knowledge involves justified true beliefs, there is no moral knowledge on this view.

Ayer (d. 1989) was one of the logical positivists. Fitting with naturalism, meanings had to be something physical and empirically knowable. For them, a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. Ayer denied that moral sentences are meaningful; they do not have cognitive content and cannot be true or false. Sentences like “murder is wrong” is code language that just expresses emotions; e.g., “ugh, murder!” Similarly, “justice is good” translates to “hooray, justice!” His is a kind of emotivism. (Similarly, another noncognitivist option is prescriptivism: moral sentences just express commands; e.g., “don’t murder!” They too are not true or false.)

Simon Blackburn (b. 1944) is a noncognitivist who endorses quasi-realism. He too denies the reality of intrinsically moral properties since we live in a naturalistic, “disenchanted” world. He focuses on our ways of talking morally. His project attempts to give moral discourse the right to engage in talk as though morals exist (realism), and moral claims are true or false. Based on the surface grammar of a moral sentence, we can treat them as such. But, like Ayer, there really are no morals, and moral claims are not true or false. In both Ayer’s and Blackburn’s cases, the focus is on the way we talk morally and the denial of intrinsically moral properties.

Assessment

What should we make of these noncognitivist views? First, by reducing away any cognitive content from moral sentences, they end up being merely descriptive. But, morality deeply seems to be about what is normative, or prescriptive. If people protest against a miscarriage of justice (e.g., an unarmed African-American man who was walking down a street, but was murdered by white men), they are not merely emoting. Instead, they deeply believe there was an injustice done, which is why they are upset.

Second, moral judgments are not identical with feelings or commands, for the former can occur without the latter. We do not need to have any feelings when we state, “Murder is wrong.” And, we can have feelings without moral judgments.

Third, there is no room for any moral education or training on these views, since there is no cognitive content to learn and therefore no real moral disagreement. But, this result undermines any training in moral virtue, such as in why we should address examples of injustices in society. It also does not do justice to the fact that many of us do disagree morally. This is plain to see when we look at the many social and moral issues we deliberate and debate.

These noncognitivist views undermine our four core morals, but there are more naturalistic options yet to be considered.

For Further Reading

A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic

Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 5

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.