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A Theological Summary (and Condemnation) of Emotivism

July 3, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

This video by "Theologica37," part of a "failure of secular ethics" series, makes a decent stab at tracing emotivist tendencies through Hume through Ayer (verificationism, like Carnap) and Stevenson.

Watch on YouTube.

The version of emotivism described up front may well reflect Ayer's position, as I've not read that recently and just don't know, but it doesn't convey the nuances of Stevenson and Hume (as we went into on those episodes). In neither of those cases is morality an entirely subjective matter: Hume's "moral sense" is actually pretty close to Moore's intuitionism, in that the "sense" is supposed to be grasping something that any non-damaged individual is supposed to be able to grasp: it's an objective matter. Stevenson focuses instead on the objectivity of the linguistic: it's the connotation of the terms in public consciousness that conveys the punch of an ethical claim, not the speaker's private feelings. Likewise, the narrator here states that moral sense theory is incompatible with naturalism, whereas our listeners should be well aware after our Churchland interview especially, but also our Flanagan one, that naturalism in the broad sense that Hume was committed to is compatible with talking about levels of organization besides those studied by chemistry and physics: naturalists need not be behaviorists or reductive materialists.

So the video has set up some straw men, and then uses some of the same objections we saw in Moore and in MacIntyre to knock them down: for instance, Moore's objections to the naturalistic fallacy ("I approve of X" doesn't logically imply "you should do X") and MacIntyre's claim that the emotivism can't do justice to specifically ethical talk (he actually quotes MacIntyre around 10 minutes in). The narrator has obviously done his homework, and it would take more time than I'm willing to give to decode all of his claims; his comments on Russell, for instance (whom I've not read in this context), don't at all make me feel well informed about Russell, and I get the impression that in general the narrator is not seriously trying to engage, i.e. explain the issues to, the reader, but rather to throw out selective pieces of jargon so that the listener will instead take his word for it that he knows what he's talking about and so admit that the thinkers he's discussing are crap. Here's a quote from the video: "The issue here is deeply internal to the emotivistic mind game, and it occurs even granting all of the as shown to be rather problematic and contradictory premises and assumptions." This is the point I keep making about the virtues of analytic philosophy: slow down, and don't try to sound smart. Stop and analyze the terms you're using. Consider the apparent difficulties in the way you've formulated your position and say why those really aren't difficulties. Your model should be more like a teacher than a lawyer, even if you're aiming to talk to people that already know a lot of philosophy.

For instance, towards the end he talks about emotivist moral arguments being "objectively invalid" because they have "no objective truth content." These particular phrases are faux technical: validity has to do with premises leading unerringly to a conclusion within an argument, and there's no question of "objective" or "subjective" validity. Likewise, talking about "objective truth" (and hence "subjective truth") is a barbarous colloquialism at best. "Truth" applies to sentences, or propositions, such that a sentence either is true or it's not, and the adjective "objective" is either redundant or misleading. (And though I get the point of throwing in the word "content" there, it's particularly superfluous.)

Objectivity is an epistemic matter; you can talk about "objective knowledge," meaning knowledge that comes from a certain kind of source, or which is verifiable in certain ways; how you define it depends on what your epistemology is. So the narrator here is trying to sound precise and technical as a matter of rhetoric, but in this and many other areas isn't really getting the technical (i.e. as established in actual philosophy classes) down. Much better, then, to adopt a more colloquial style (which is not incompatible with speaking carefully) and bring the listener around with gentle persuasion rather than a debater's hammer.

So, yes, there are problems with the various kinds of emotivism, and some of the things said in this video are right, but overall, he's oversimplifying the issue in just the way that theistic ethicists so often tend to do when trying to brush away the whole of secular philosophy. "I'm having trouble elaborating this theory of how morality can exist in a natural world... so it must be God! That's the only alternative to my half-assed attempt to spell this out!"

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Filed Under: Things to Watch Tagged With: A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, C.L. Stevenson, David Hume, emotivism, Ethics, philosophy blog

Comments

  1. David Buchanan says

    July 3, 2012 at 11:28 am

    In Zen and the Art, Robert Pirsig says:
    “In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by re-assimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.”

    William James expresses the same sort of view, except he’s engaged in a more specific polemic with Hegelian Absolutists like Bradley and Royce:

    “Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. .., the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?”

    Insofar as ethical and moral statements are taken as philosophically meaningless, more recent Positivists and analytic philosophers are continuing a very long tradition of “vicious intellectualism”, as James called it. And it seems to me that recent science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant贸nio_Dam谩sio) supports the idea that the affective domain of consciousness is a central and necessary part of the overall cognitive process. It’s more or less literally true that we can’t think right without feelings.

    Reply
  2. Bruce Adam says

    July 3, 2012 at 4:22 pm

    Thanks Mark, for your autopsy of the video. Nice to see an argument dismembered so neatly.
    When I think of Hume’s moral sense or Moore’s intuitionism ,I find it easy to equate with our natural grasp of harmony.
    As individuals we can detect harmony without prior instruction and as a species we used and applied it before we had a theoretical understanding of it. There is a strict correspondence between the subjective and objective experience of harmony which is universal across our species.
    I wouldn’t want to stretch this too far, but I think it helps our understanding of moral instincts.

    Reply
  3. Ms. Qudaparcs says

    February 17, 2013 at 11:41 am

    Gahhhhhh! That’s hard to sit through. Too obvious, too soon, the mission. Can’t listen to the end; just can’t. The whole effort hangs on the word ‘objective’ as a pure form.

    Rather a manipulative way of not-saying so too.

    A second yay to David’s comment 馃檪

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Gregory Sadler on Emotivism | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 9, 2012 at 12:44 pm

    […] Last post showed a piece of theological propaganda that distorted what emotivism is. This introductory ethics lecture by Gregory Sadler of Marist College uses a more academically respectable approach, to make essentially the same point, which is that emotivism and relativsm are essentially the same thing as subjectivism, which amounts to giving up on ethics altogether. Watch on YouTube. […]

    Reply

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