Analytic ethics

« once substantive content has been admitted, the challenge can be pushed further.

Why say that content issecondary and expressive force primary? Noncognitivists will point to the success of their ‘internalist' account of therelation of moral judgment and motivation.

But Foot challenges this.

If a person calls their project an ethical marvelbecause it publicizes their company, we do not know what they are talking about.

But someone who says, ‘Sure, aprogressive tax on incomes would be more just, and that is fine if you care about justice for its own sake, but whatis it to people like me?', will strike us as more antipathetic than linguistically confused.

Perhaps, as Foot and WilliamFrankena have suggested, it would accord better with actual use to see the connection between moral judgmentand motivation as a matter of what is typical rather than essential.

Typically we care very much, individually andsocially, about the kinds of things morality is concerned with - such as wellbeing and even-handedness - and wetend to dislike and distrust those who show no interest in such matters.

Moreover, we tend to think they ought toshow more interest.

But we can understand this ‘ought' as signalling the unconditional character of moral norms,without seeing it as marking a special realm of rational or motivational necessity.

After all, we apply norms ofetiquette even to the obdurately rude.

Critics have also questioned some of the contrasts upon whichnoncognitivism has been based.

Some have followed Quine in challenging the logical positivist's version of theanalytic/synthetic distinction (see Quine, W.V.

§§3, 8 ).

Thomas Nagel ( 1970 ) and John McDowell ( 1985 ) have considered alternatives to the Humean thesis that cognitive states cannot suffice for action except when combinedwith desires.

McDowell and David Wiggins ( 1987 ) have challenged us to rethink the subjective/objective distinction, by exploring a possible analogy between value and secondary qualities such as colour, which seem both to involve ahuman response and to be objective (see Secondary qualities ).

Hilary Putnam ( 1981 ) has argued that philosophy of science no longer supports the fact/value contrast as traditionally drawn, since rationally optional norms suffuse theprocess of scientific ‘fact-finding'.

At the same time, various philosophers have sought to develop a positiveconception of the factual status of moral judgments.

Some have done so ‘on the cheap', by urging a minimalistconception of truth according to which a discourse is apt for truth or falsity merely if it displays the full grammarand logic of assertion, as moral discourse uncontroversially does.

Others have retained a substantive notion oftruth, but have claimed that moral statements can earn truth-evaluabilty in this more robust sense.

For example,one group of nonreductionist moral realists, including Richard Boyd and Nicholas Sturgeon, have argued that moralpredicates can meet naturalistic criteria of property-attribution by playing a role in the best explanatory theories ofempirical science.

Other philosophers who take naturalistic concerns seriously, such as Richard Brandt, GilbertHarman and David Lewis, have sought to provide reductions or reforming definitions of moral notions in terms ofidealizations of psychological properties.

Yet another group, partly inspired by a non-naturalist Kantian tradition,have argued that the objectivity of moral judgment cannot be impugned by invidious comparisons with empiricalscience.

Morality's subject matter, they argue, is a realm of practical reasons - reasons for action, not belief - andwhether this domain can be a source of truth and knowledge depends not upon vindicating an ontology of ‘moralfacts', but upon the existence of objective reasons for agents.

Kurt Baier, Thomas Nagel and John Rawls, amongothers, have attempted to show how we might understand the possibility of such reasons.

Other critics of thedialectic set in motion by noncognitivism have taken a more radically questioning stance.

Bernard Williams ( 1985 ), Alasdair MacIntyre and various feminist philosophers have in different ways asked where the demand for objective or rational validation in ethics comes from in the first place, and whether, on reflection, it has sufficient credibility orinterest to sustain the project of analytic ethics or ‘moral theory'.

3 Leading issues Although noncognitivism has been widely criticized, no cognitivist explanation of moral phenomena has yet been developed with anything like thesystematic power found in the work of Stevenson, Hare or Gibbard.

Nor have those who call for an end to ethicaltheorizing managed to show how we could do without it.

The main questions one might expect to figure incontinuing debates include: In what sense is it a substantial achievement for a discourse to be truth-evaluable, oris this the modest and inevitable outcome of an assertoric grammar? If the former, then what does thatachievement require? If the latter, then what notions, if any, of objectivity and factuality remain to distinguishamong assertoric practices, and how does ethics stand with these? Is motivation necessarily related to making orbeing subject to moral judgment? Is a noncognitivist approach to moral discourse ultimately self-destabilizing, sinceit construes normativity in non-factualist terms and yet appears to presuppose for its own purposes facts ofmeaning, arguably a normative domain? Should historicist and feminist criticism of analytic ethics be understood asoffering an alternative, or as showing how a more genuinely objective and worthwhile analysis of ethics might bepossible?. »