“I went up to Cambridge at Michelmas 1902, and Moore’s Principia Ethica came out at the end of my first year … it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth.” Thus did John Maynard Keynes write about Moore’s work, and so too did Lytton Strachey and Desmond McCarthy, who would go on to make up what was later called the Bloomsbury Group. They comprised the intellectual elite of Cambridge. Well-educated, bright, ambitious, they sought to liberate themselves from nothing less than the entire moral heritage of the Western world. Everything which had come before them they now sought to rid themselves of, whether it be the teachings of St. Paul or the recent utilitarianism of Sidgwick.
We have already discussed the first of Moore’s claims, that the term ‘good’ denotes nothing more than a non-natural property that cannot be defined. The refutation of the argument I offered then I still consider valid, and it is then with the other portion of Moore’s work that I will concern myself. It is the last chapter of Principia that I would like to examine. Here, Moore, argues, “personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine.” The greatest truth of moral philosophy includes nothing more than this: the thing that the non-natural term good denotes is simply approval or disapproval, like or dislike, aesthetic attraction or repulsion.
The philosophical attitude I have described is called emotivism. Though one can trace it in inchoate form as far back as Hume, it is specifically a phenomenon of the early twentieth century and beyond. Thus it was in Cambridge, 1903, that this group of young men were freed from the morality of the past, toward “the opening of a new heaven on earth.” With the basic description I have offered of the moral philosophy they held, it is not difficult to imagine hot emotivism affected their behavior — the limit to what I should do is based on what I prefer; hence, I ought to do whatever I prefer. As the term ‘good’ cannot be applied to any natural object, mere preference is the sole basis for morality; my describing something as good is to do nothing more than to signal my approval for it. Morality loses any pretense to objectivity, as there is no reason I can offer for choosing one thing over another other than citing my preference for it.
I would, however, argue that there are very few good reasons for accepting emotivism and at least two very good reasons for rejecting it. First, emotivism has difficulty establishing its basis as an ethical theory in any clear-cut fashion. For if I were to ask what a moral judgment represented, an emotivist would likely respond that a moral judgment represents feelings or attitudes. Feelings or attitudes of what, I might ask? Feelings or attitudes of approval. What type of approval? As Alasdair Macintyre notes, it is here that most emotivists are wisely silent. For the only real answer they might provide involves them in a vicious circularity which does little to establish the coherence of their position. For if pushed to this point, “moral approval” is how they will answer; and it is the only answer available to them.
The second reason is that emotivism, as a theory of language, is supposed to inform us on the function of language. But the expression of an attitude or preference is not comprehensive enough to provide an exhaustive account of how moral language is used, but only how it is used in a few particular instances. Alastair MacIntyre uses an example of an angry schoolteacher to illustrate this point: “7 times 7 is 49″, no matter in what way it is shouted, does not express an attitude or a preference in any clear manner.
These illustrations should, I hope, demonstrate that emotivism is not a coherent theory for ethics or of the meaning of language. Yet, if this point is not difficult to demonstrate, why should anyone pay attention to it as a problem? My answer to this question is that emotivism, as a theory of moral behavior, is a particular problem in the West, in particular the most developed industrial countries which comprise it. That is, developed nations in general tend to conceive of moral judgments, whenever they conceive of them at all, as at bottom nothing more than personal preferences. Now what I am not suggesting is that emotivism is held as ‘the’ position on ethics in the developed nations. Rather, I argue, people behave in a manner as ‘if’ emotivism were true, even if they deny all its premises or contend that it is false as theory.
In contemporary moral discourse, especially in politics, emotivist premises are taken for granted. For regardless of one’s personal stance on an issue, such as abortion, or just war theory, or property rights, one person’s preference is not taken as more correct than that of anyone else. This point is made with greater force by Alasdair MacIntyre in his book “After Virtue.” Thus I will cite a passage from there to explain the meaning of this argument:
“Every one of the [arguments on abortion, property distribution, and just war I discussed on the previous page] is logically valid or can be easily expanded as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against the other. For each premises employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds … It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable. From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate.”
Thus, on any number of moral issues, we would be best served by barking at the moon than by sitting down to have a serious conversation with our topical adversaries. The absolute standard by which moral claims might be measured in our culture are lacking, and hence so too is lacking any claim to objectivity we might strive for.
