QUESTION ONE: WHAT ARE MORAL JUDGMENTS AND WHAT ARE WE DOING WHEN WE EXPRESS THEM (THAT IS, WHEN WE MAKE MORAL STATEMENTS)?

COGNITIVISM

Moral Statements: Cognitivism claims that moral statements express beliefs.

Two Apparent Implications of Cognitivism:

1. Moral statements can be true or false because beliefs can be true or false. This means that if people make contradictory moral statements, they are expressing contradictory moral beliefs. Thus genuine moral disagreement is possible. Because it makes sense to use reason to change people's beliefs, rational moral persuasion and moral argument are possible, and these will be just like persuasion and argument in any other area (e.g., science). Moreover, moral reasoning can occur, and it is just like reasoning about the truth of any other beliefs.

2. Moral judgments cannot (on the "standard view") motivate, since beliefs do not by themselves motivate. This apparently means that one could judge that X is the right thing to do while having absolutely no motivation to do X (and no regret about that lack of motivation). This thesis is often called (motivational) externalism, since motivation is external to moral judgement.

NON-COGNITIVISM

Moral Statements: Non-cognitivism claims that moral statements express desires, tastes, emotions, or other non-cognitive entities.

The Two Main Forms of Non-Cognitivism:

Prescriptivism claims that moral statements make commands. Though the view is generally defined as a theory about moral statements, it seems to go most naturally with the version of non-cognitivism that claims that moral judgements are desires.

Emotivism claims that moral statements express emotions or tastes. Like prescriptivism, emotivism is generally defined as a theory about moral statements; however, it fits naturally with the version of non-cognitivism that claims that moral judgements are tastes or emotions.

Two (Apparent) Implications of Non-cognitivism

1. Moral statements cannot be true or false, since they express desires, emotions, or tastes and since, (on the "standard view") these things cannot be true or false. Moral disagreement is merely a matter of people having different tastes, emotions, and desires. It is not genuine disagreement about what is the case morally. It is unclear what moral reasoning or rational moral persuasion would be, since it is unclear to what extent reason affects desires, emotions, and tastes.

2. Moral judgments motivate, since (on the standard view) desires, emotions, and tastes all motivate. Thus it would be impossible to judge that x is good without being motivated toward x. This thesis is sometimes called (motivational) internalism, since motivation is internal to moral judgement.

It appears that moral discourse has two features. First, it seems to be about objective moral facts, and we seem to have genuine disagreements about those facts. Second, moral judgments seem to have a motivational component. That is, it seems odd to say that someone sincerely judges that x is good but yet does not have any motivation to try to achieve x. The dilemma is that the first feature makes cognitivism seem true and non-cognitivism seem false, whereas the second feature makes non-cognitivism seem true but cognitivism seem false.

QUESTION TWO: ARE THERE (OBJECTIVE) MORAL FACTS AND (REAL) MORAL PROPERTIES?

MORAL OBJECTIVISM

Moral objectivism (also called moral realism) claims (approximately) that there are (objective) moral facts and real moral properties. In other words, it claims that actions or situations have real moral properties like goodness or badness or rightness or wrongness, and that these properties are not mere projections of our attitudes onto the world. Whether or not a given action or situation has a moral property is supposed to be a matter of fact not directly dependent on our attitudes toward the situation or action. Thus moral properties are supposed to be genuine, real, mind-independent properties of the actions or situations themselves. That is, moral properties like goodness or badness are objective features of actions or situations in something like the same way that roundness is an objective feature of the earth or coldness is an objective property of snow. Moral facts, then, are supposed to be facts about what situations or what actions have which moral properties. This means that there is an objective truth about what is moral, for there is an objective fact of the matter as to which actions or situations have which moral properties.

MORAL SUBJECTIVISM

Moral subjectivism (also called moral anti-realism or irrealism) claims that there are no objective moral facts and no real, mind-independent moral properties. Subjectivism/anti-realism claims that a moral property is in fact not a "real" property at all, but rather a property that we project onto the world. That is, moral properties exist only in the minds of humans; they are merely products of our attitudes toward situations or actions. Thus moral subjectivism/anti-realism denies that goodness or badness or rightness or wrongness are real mind-independent features of actions or situations and claims that they are merely features we project onto them; they do not exist without us, because they exist only in our minds.

HOW THE POSITIONS TYPICALLY FIT TOGETHER

The position one takes about whether there are objective moral facts and real moral properties will normally affect one's position on the nature of moral judgments and moral statements. The two most typical combinations are these (they are not the only possibilities):

Objectivism + Cognitivism

This is the most commonsense combination of positions. If you are a moral objectivist, then you would probably want to also be a cognitivist. For as a moral objectivist, you claim that there are objective moral facts and real, mind-independent moral properties. If you say that, then it is quite natural to say that moral judgements are beliefs about what the moral facts are (that is, beliefs about which actions and situations possess which moral properties) and that moral statements report these beliefs and thus make claims about what the moral facts are.

Subjectivism + Non-Cognitivism

If you are a subjectivist, then you deny the existence of objective moral facts and real, mind-independent moral properties. If you do that, then you might well want to take a non-cognitivist position on moral judgment and moral language. That way, you will be saying essentially: "There are no objective moral facts or real, mind-independent moral properties, but that's OK, since moral judgments are not beliefs about what the moral facts are, and moral statements do not attempt to state what moral facts there are." In other words, you will be denying that there are moral facts, but also saying that moral judgments do not attempt to report moral facts. On this view moral discourse and moral judgment is not about what objective moral properties certain acts or situations have, but rather about how we feel about certain acts or situations.

THE "PROBLEM WITH ETHICS"

Ethical discourse appears to be about moral facts and (objective) moral properties, yet it is difficult to understand what a moral fact or (objective) moral property could be. It is nothing we can observe directly, nor is it anything we can measure with scientific instruments, nor is it anything that seems to make any detectable empirical difference to the world. If there moral facts and objective moral properties, they seem to be of a very different kind from ordinary facts. So we think and talk of morality as though there are moral facts; yet it is not clear that these things really exist, or what it would even mean to claim that such facts "really" exist.