emotivism a noncognitivist metaethical view opposed to cognitivism, which holds that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions, persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments (or the propositions that they express) can be true or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral judgments express. Noncognitivism denies these claims; it holds that moral judgments do not make assertions or express propositions. If moral judgments do not express propositions, the former can be neither true nor false, and moral belief and moral knowledge are not possible. The emotivist is a noncognitivist who claims that moral judgments, in their primary sense, express the appraiser’s attitudes – approval or disapproval – toward the object of evaluation, rather than make assertions about the properties of that object. Because emotivism treats moral judgments as the expressions of the appraiser’s pro and con attitudes, it is sometimes referred to as the boohurrah theory of ethics. Emotivists distinguish their thesis that moral judgments express the appraiser’s attitudes from the subjectivist claim that they state or report the appraiser’s attitudes (the latter view is a form of cognitivism). Some versions of emotivism distinguish between this primary, emotive meaning of moral judgments and a secondary, descriptive meaning. In its primary, emotive meaning, a moral judgment expresses the appraiser’s attitudes toward the object of evaluation rather than ascribing properties to that object. But secondarily, moral judgments refer to those non-moral properties of the object of evaluation in virtue of which the appraiser has and expresses her attitudes. So if I judge that your act of torture is wrong, my judgment has two components. Its primary, emotive sense is to express my disapproval of your act. Its secondary, descriptive sense is to denote those non-moral properties of your act upon which I base my disapproval. These are presumably the very properties that make it an act of torture – roughly, a causing of intense pain in order to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.
By making emotive meaning primary, emotivists claim to preserve the univocity of moral language between speakers who employ different criteria of application for their moral terms. Also, by stressing the intimate connection between moral judgment and the agent’s non-cognitive attitudes, emotivists claim to capture the motivational properties of moral judgment. Some emotivists have also attempted to account for ascriptions of truth to moral judgments by accepting the redundancy account of ascriptions of truth as expressions of agreement with the original judgment. The emotivist must think that such ascriptions of truth to moral judgments merely reflect the ascriber’s agreement in noncognitive attitude with the attitude expressed by the original judgment.
Critics of emotivism challenge these alleged virtues. They claim that moral agreement need not track agreement in attitude; there can be moral disagreement without disagreement in attitude (between moralists with different moral views), and disagreement in attitude without moral disagreement (between moralists and immoralists). By distinguishing between the meaning of moral terms and speakers’ beliefs about the extension of those terms, critics claim that we can account for the univocity of moral terms in spite of moral disagreement without introducing a primary emotive sense for moral terms. Critics also allege that the emotivist analysis of moral judgments as the expression of the appraiser’s attitudes precludes recognizing the possibility of moral judgments that do not engage or reflect the attitudes of the appraiser. For instance, it is not clear how emotivism can accommodate the amoralist – one who recognizes moral requirements but is indifferent to them. Critics also charge emotivism with failure to capture the cognitive aspects of moral discourse. Because emotivism is a theory about moral judgment or assertion, it is difficult for the emotivist to give a semantic analysis of moral predicates in unasserted contexts, such as in the antecedents of conditional moral judgments (e.g., ‘If he did wrong, then he ought to be punished’). Finally, one might want to recognize the truth of some moral judgments, perhaps in order to make room for the possibility of moral mistakes. If so, then one may not be satisfied with the emotivist’s appeal to redundancy or disquotational accounts of the ascription of truth. Emotivism was introduced by Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic (2d ed., 1946) and refined by C. L. Stevenson in Facts and Values (1963) and Ethics and Language (1944). See also COGNITIVISM , ETHICAL OBJECTIV- ISM , METAETHICS , MORAL SKEPTICISM , NIHIL – ISM , NONCOGNITIVISM , PRESCRIPTIVIS. D.O.B.