Stephen asked:

Critically discuss non-cognitivism/ subjectivism.

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The first thing to make clear is that non-cognitivism and subjectivism are not synonymous. They are
not the same, they say two different things.

In our lives we come across various beliefs or assertions and statements people make. We can ask
of these beliefs, 'are they truth-evaluable?', can we say whether the belief 'that X is Y' is true or false?
Non-cognitivism would say no in the case of ethical beliefs because they think that when we say for
example that 'stealing is wrong', we are not really asserting or stating anything at all. Therefore there
can be no question of whether the statement is true or false.

The non-cognitivist has two reasons for saying this, one positive and the other negative.

The basis of the negative reason is a rejection of cognitivism. This involves an account of the
workings of human psychology: Usually philosophers (following David Hume) have distinguished
between two main kinds of psychological state; beliefs and desires. Actions are produced by a
combination of the two. Roughly our beliefs tell us what the world is like and what we need to do in
order to change it into what our desires say the world should be like. So it seems to follow that when
a person has a certain belief, it is always a separate issue whether they have any desire to generate
action.

Desires have no rational content and so cannot be rationally criticised: in other words they have no
truth value. Let me give an example to show what this means. Our moral language tells us how the
world should be, it expresses our desires. And since beliefs and desires are logically separate we
have the desire independent of any belief about what the world is actually like. Therefore, our moral
judgements must be generated by desire. So when I say that stealing is wrong, I am not reporting
some fact about the world, but rather my desire that people should not steal. For non-cognitivists,
moral language does not express any fact about right and wrong, though it may express our desires
emotions or commands (depending on which version of non-cognitivism you subscribe to).

The positive argument, follows on from this. Non-cognitivists say that the reason there is no question
of truth or falsity about many of our assertions is that these assertions do not contain any kind of
predicate which could be truth evaluable. For example the (pseudo-) assertion 'stealing is wrong'
looks like it contains the predicate 'is wrong' but according to the non-cognitivist it really doesn't.
There is no such property of wrongness that states of affairs can have (the reason they say this is a
bit to detailed to go into here, but it mainly consists of a rejection of naturalism).

Non-cognitivists are often criticised on this second argument. For example, as I said earlier,
non-cognitivism holds that there are no moral facts, but they also think that we do not need moral
facts to make sense of moral language and practices, because our moral judgements simply express
our desires about what we think people should and should not be doing. Ayer says that when we
engage in ethical debate we attempt to get the other person to adopt the same moral attitude as we
do. The problem for the non-cognitivist is to explain why we should want to persuade others to
change their attitudes. Why would we do this unless we think that other people actually have the
wrong desire? But this is just to reintroduce cognitivism, the view that there is some matter of fact
about what is right or wrong.

There are other problems for the non-cognitivist. C. Wellman in an article "Emotivism and Ethical
Objectivity" lists about a dozen, but all these are concerned with hitting back against the
non-cognitivist's claims. If we can show that the non-cognitivist doesn't even have a corner to fight
from because they cannot discard cognitivism, then the rest of the objections are superfluous. If the
above objection works, then non-cognitivism never even gets of the ground.

But suppose everyone agreed that our moral beliefs are truth-evaluable. We have to ask, "Are they in
fact true?" Error theorists answer, No (e.g. J.L. Mackie in Ethics. Inventing Right and Wrong).
According to the error theorist, all our moral beliefs are false! Other philosophers would accept that
our moral beliefs are true. But now we have to ask, What is it that makes them true? Here we come at
last to subjectivism, which says that what makesthe assertion 'stealing is wrong' true is merely some
mind-dependent fact, which highlights my relation to stealing, such as my taking a certain attitude
(disagreement) to stealing.

There are many common objections to subjectivism e.g. it cannot explain why people engage in
debate, or disagree, since really there is nothing to disagree about. That it leads to intolerable
permissibility.

Then there are the objectivists who say that there are mind-independent facts and this is what makes
some thing wrong regardless of some one's opinion of the matter. However, one would first have to
give some account of these mind-independent facts. Another way to argue against subjectivism
would be to employ the strategy we used against non-cognitivism. If it can be shown that there is no
way to avoid claims of objectivity, in the same way that non-cognitivists cannot avoid ultimately
appealing to actual facts, then subjectivism is undermined. For such a line of argument see Nagel's
"The Last word".

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield