Follow up on Class Discussion from Week 1

Phil 311

Follow up on class discussion from week 1

The issue: whether morality is a matter of sentiment or fact.

Positions

Moral absolutism/realism: says that some moral statements are “objectively” true. Proponents include Plato and Kant. (We will discuss this position later.)

Subjectivism is the idea that our moral opinions are based on reported feelings and not fact- based. When someone says X is wrong they are merely reporting their feelings about X, nothing more. No objective right are wrong. Actions are bad if I disapprove of them.

Emotivism (Ayer’s view): moral statements are not fact-based (a shared feature with subjectivism), but they have purposes (1) to influence others to act (a command), (2) expressing/venting one’s feelings about X.

Ayer: discussion questions

●Ayer grounds his argument on this principle: “a synthetic proposition [a proposition that asserts or denies something about the real world] is significant only if it is empirically verifiable.” Do you agree?

●What’s the difference between subjectivism and emotivism?

Answer Consider the moral statement: “Capital punishment is immoral.”

For the subjectivist I am merely reporting my feelings about capital punishment. I disapprove of it. Basically, when I say, “Capital punishment is immoral” the subjectivist understands it as, “I hold the attitude that capital punishment is wrong.”

For the emotivist, like Ayer, I am merely venting a feeling or putting forth a command. So when

I say, “Capital punishment is immoral” the emotivist understands it as, “Capital punishment, yuck!”

Similar to a cry of joy or pain or at football cheer, we are only expressing a feeling, not a factual statement about the world. There’s no fact (truth claim) in the statement “Go, team, go!”

Mackie: discussion questions

●Would you consider the argument from relativity or the argument from queerness to be sufficient in defending the view that there are no objective values? [From Ben Miller]

Projecting desires onto moral objects:

●What does Mackie mean by this, “We get the notion of something’s being objectively good, or having intrinsic value, by reversing the direction of dependence here, by making the desire depend upon the goodness, instead of the goodness on the desire” (P. 30).

Reflection

●Please think about possible objections to subjectivism and Ayer’s emotivism.