Philosophy of Law
4/17/14
Waldron
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Emotivism
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Says a moral judgment is the expression of a specific desire, affective state, or emotion
 Ex: “Keeping promises is good” doesn’t mean keeping promises has the quality of goodness, but expresses the speaker’s pro attitude toward keeping promises.
 Notice that emotivism in NOT the view that “Keeping promises is good” DESCRIBES the speaker’s pro attitude toward keeping promises
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If that were true, another person saying “Breaking promises is good” wouldn’t actually conflict with the first, since they’re basically just two different people talking about their personal desires.
 Can’t be right, because we want to be able to say there is some type of disagreement between the two people.
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Semantics of moral judgments is veiled – looks one way (descriptive), acts another
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Emotivist needs to explain moral inferences – this is a challenge for the position
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People make inference such as
1) One ought to keep his promises
2) Joe made a promise
3) Therefore Joe ought to keep his promise
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1) and 3) are expressive for the emotivist, and therefore do not have truth values
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2) is descriptive and therefore has a truth value
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How is it possible, therefore, that one can infer 3) from 1) and 2)?
 With respect to the idea that “Keeping promises is good” is a truth, the emotivist argument is that the word “true,” when predicated of a sentence means nothing more than repeating the sense. You could get rid of the word “truth,” because it’s essentially redundant.
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Big criticism: quasi-realist argument against relativism
 it would appear to follow from Emotivism that we should accept the following sentence
 “if we wanted to break our promises, breaking promises would be good”
 Since if we wanted to break our promises we would say “breaking promises is good”
 But in fact “if we wanted to break our promises, breaking promises would be good” is the expression of a desire no one has – it is not a sentence we need to assent to.
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We have a pro attitude toward keeping promises. We have a pro attitude toward every imagined world in which we keep our promises, whether or not we want to keep our promises in that world. If we imagine a world in which we want to break a promises, but are forced to keep them anyway, we will have a pro attitude toward that world. Thus, we will say “keeping our promises is good even if we want to break them ”
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In contrast, there are cases where we have a pro attitude only toward imagined worlds in which we do something and want to do it in that world. For example, my pro attitude

toward coffee is only toward imagined worlds in which I drink coffee and want to do so.
I do not have a pro attitude toward worlds in which I don’t like coffee but I’m forced to drink it anyway.
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Things that sound realist are compatible with a view that there is no such thing as morality—that moral judgments are expressions of a specific kind of desire
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For emotivists, sentences that sound like they are committed to to the existence of moral qualities that are independent from our desires are actually the expression of a particular type of desire
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Meaning of life
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For emotivists, it would appear that a meaningful or valuable life is doing what you want.
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Imagine Sisyphus, rolling stones up a hill endlessly. If Sisyphus want it to do what he was doing, he would say that what he was doing was valuable.
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This seems contrary with what most would say is a “good life.” The values in the light of which we have a good or bad life are independent of our desires.
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Concern is that we think there are things that are good and bad on a broader scale and that a good life comes from doing things that are meaningful.
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But the emotivist does not have to accept that Sisyphus’s life is meaningful.
 Statements about the meaningfulness of Sisyphus’s life will be the expression of one’s desires
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And, once again, our desires are not such that we say things are valuable whenever we desire them
 Expressing our current desires, we can say Sisyphus’s life lacks meaning even if he desires to do what he is doing
 Don’t have to say that a person has a good life because talking about someone else’s life is an expression of one’s own desires and not the other person’s.
Waldron argues that the question of the objectivity of morality is irrelevant to whether judges ought to take moral considerations into account in adjudicating cases
His argument has two parts
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He makes use of quasi realism to show that Emotivism is not as bad a position as one might think – someone who denies the existence of objective morality can still continue making the same moral claims he did a four’
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Conversely, he argues that moral realism is not as good a position as one might think – belief in the existence of moral reality does not change the fact that we have no good story about our access to this reality
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Concerns about moral realism
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Just because we know that objective morals exist, that does not mean that we know which ones they are or what moral reality is.
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We have no causal story about the relationship between moral reality and our beliefs about moral reality
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Contrast this with physical reality, where scientists agreed on the relationship between physical reality in our beliefs about it. This theory can explain how we can

arrive and methods to answer our disagreements about physical reality.
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Perhaps Waldron is being too hard on the moral realist?
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Maybe it is wrong to demand of the moral realist a theory of moral perception that is like the perception of the physical world?
 Isn’t there some agreement about the methodology of resolving moral disagreement?
 For example, doesn’t everybody agree that one is more likely to arrive at correct moral judgments if one is unbiased?
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Even if realism is true, we still operate on the basis of desires in relation to morals, not on the basis of the morals themselves
 The absence of realism doesn’t increase the unpredictability of judges’ moral statements
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Existence of objective morals does increases rationality, since judges still reason on the basis of their subjective beliefs about morality, not morality itself
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Democratic legitimacy is the same with or without moral realism
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Realism has no good story about how we come to know moral reality, so it seems to be on about the same level as emotivism
Exam:
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Short questions – select from 2 pairs. A or B, C or D, E or F.
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Going to have to answer something about exclusive/inclusive positivism or authority.
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Will also put together different concepts from across the course.