Introduction to Value Prescriptivism
James Coley (jc@unc.edu) © July 2014
This is a short introduction to a theoretical account of the semantics of English moral sentences:
those sentences that include moral predicates like good, bad, right and wrong. I will use wrong
throughout as my example, but it ought to be easy to see how the account applies to other moral
predicates. I call the theory “value prescriptivism” because it is very much like the universal
prescriptivism of R. M. Hare i, except that, speaking loosely, it is values, rather than behaviors,
that are prescribed. While standard prescriptivism likens “Lying is wrong” to “Don’t lie!” value
prescriptivism likens it instead to “Have a value system that lying violates!” In this introduction,
I will explain the theory and show how it meets certain conditions of adequacy for a theory of
moral language. These are related to the Frege-Geach problem, and to moral disagreement.
A more precise explanation of value prescriptivism requires development of the idea of
the characteristic schemata of moral predicates and moral sentences, and of the idea of a value
system satisfying a characteristic schema. The motivation behind these ideas is that, on this
account, a moral sentence prescribes to everyone (in a relevant class, such as all moral agents)
that they have a value system that has a certain property or characteristic: that it meets a
condition determined by the semantic content of the sentence, and represented by the
characteristic schema of that sentence. (I use the term “value system” broadly to apply to
systematic psychological dispositions to have certain attitudes of approval or disapproval about
something given particular beliefs about it. So, for example, if honesty is part of one’s value
system, one is disposed to approve of something given that one believes it is an instance of
honesty, and to disapprove of something given that one believes it is an instance of dishonesty.)
To explain the characteristic schema of the moral predicate wrong we look at a sentence
where it is in a “stand-alone” context, serving as the predicate of the whole sentence. If we stick
with the example “Lying is wrong,” the characteristic schema would be an open sentence,
“Lying violates V.” The variable V ranges over all value systems. The characteristic schema of a
moral sentence S is the sentence S open in V that results from uniformly replacing each instance
of any moral predicate in S with the characteristic schema of that predicate. A particular value
system Vi satisfies a characteristic schema S just in case uniformly replacing V in S with Vi
yields a true sentence. (This will be a descriptive sentence about Vi, not a normative sentence.)
So the more precise explanation of the theory is as follows. A moral sentence prescribes
(to everyone) acceptance of any value system that satisfies the characteristic schema of the
sentence. In other words, a moral sentence S prescribes acceptance of any Vi that satisfies S.
The Frege-Geach problem may be thought of as the difficulty expressivism and other
noncognitivist theories have meeting three natural adequacy conditions for a theory of moral
language. These are (I) that the theory should account for moral predicates in embedded as well
as stand-alone contexts, (II) that these accounts should be the same, and (III) that it should
account for the validity of arguments comprising moral sentences, such as the following example
drawn from Geach’s paper inspired by Frege ii. (If (II) is not met, such arguments would suffer
the fallacy of equivocation, as “Lying is wrong” in (2) would not mean the same thing as (1).)
(1) Lying is wrong.
(2) If lying is wrong, getting little brother to lie is wrong.
Therefore, (3) Getting little brother to lie is wrong.
According to value prescriptivism, premise (1) prescribes acceptance of any value system
that satisfies (1), premise (2) prescribes acceptance of any value system that satisfies (2), and
the conclusion (3) prescribes acceptance of any value system that satisfies (3).
(1) Lying violates V.
(2) If lying violates V, getting little brother to lie violates V.
(3) Getting little brother to lie violates V.
Clearly adequacy conditions (I) and (II) are met by value prescriptivism, as it accounts for
stand-alone context examples like (1) and embedded context examples like “Lying is wrong” in
(2), and in exactly the same way. Like Gibbard’s iii view, the theory applies its account to whole
sentences, obviating any problems related to embedded contexts or semantic compositionality.
And the prospects seem good for value prescriptivism giving an account of validity for moral
arguments, showing that it meets condition (III) as well. This is because, as Hare himself
emphasized, imperatives and other prescriptions, while they may not have truth values, still make
use of the descriptive conditions prescribed, which are truth-apt. This, he thought, provided the
resources needed to explain logical properties, including validity, in moral arguments.
So one strategy we might pursue is to develop a general theory of validity for arguments
comprising imperatives, and then use this as the basis of a theory of validity for moral
arguments, given the identification value prescriptivism makes between moral sentences and
prescriptions, and the close connections between imperatives and prescriptions in general.
However, there are serious difficulties in developing a theory of validity for imperatives, in
part because of problems such as the one called “Ross’s paradox.” It may seem that, for
imperative arguments, all we have to do is to adopt the criterion that such an argument is valid
just in case it is impossible for the conditions of the premises to be complied with while the
condition of the conclusion is not complied with. Validity for imperative arguments, in other
words, simply mirrors validity for descriptive arguments using the conditions prescribed. But, as
Ross pointed out, if I say “Mail this letter!” this criterion would suggest that I should also be
willing to say “Mail this letter or burn it!” as this mirrors the validity of descriptive arguments of
the form “P, therefore: P or Q.” I would not be willing to say that, however, because then you
could comply with the second imperative by burning the letter that I wanted you to mail for me.
Luckily, we do not have to develop a general theory of imperative validity to give an account
of validity for moral arguments. All we have to do is account for a proper class of arguments
comprising prescriptions of the sort called for in our theory, all of which are of the form “Have a
value system V satisfying S.” In the case of our example, all we need establish is that any value
system that satisfies (1) and (2) must satisfy (3) as well. In general, for any moral argument
1,2,…nㅏ, we say that the argument is valid just in case it is impossible for any value system
to satisfy the characteristic schemata 1,2,…n but not satisfy the characteristic schema .
Besides the three conditions of adequacy related to the Frege-Geach problem, there is one
more condition to look at here, and it is related to indexicalism and moral disagreement. As an
example of disagreement, consider my own humanistic value system Vh in contrast to Sarah
Palin’s bibliolatrous value system Vb. On an indexical account, (4) would mean (5) when Sarah
says it while, if I were – for some reason – to say (4), I would not mean (5), but (6) instead.
(4) Gay marriage is wrong.
(5) Gay marriage violates Vb.
(6) Gay marriage violates Vh.
Note that (5) and (6) are examples of the kind of descriptive statements referred to in the
definition of satisfaction for characteristic schemata. While (6) is false, it should also be noted
that (5) is a true statement. That is to say, Vb satisfies (4) whereas Vh does not satisfy (4).
The obvious problem with this is that (5) and (6) are about different things, Vb and Vh
respectively, and so when I say (4) I do not mean the same thing Sarah means when she says (4).
This, in turn, means that she and I do not really disagree about (4) in a way in which it certainly
seems we do disagree. Problems of this sort have been extensively discussed in the literature iv.
They suggest the following additional condition of adequacy for a theory of moral language.
(IV) It should account for shared semantic content in moral disagreement.
For Sarah and me to genuinely disagree, in a way that it seems we do, we have to share
the same semantic content in saying (4), so that we are disagreeing about the same thing. But
indexicalism gives us no “neutral” account of the meaning of (4), and provides only (5) and (6),
so that instead of disagreeing about the same thing, we are saying different things. It appears that
the necessary semantic content shared by Sarah and me is simply missing in an indexical theory.
Value prescriptivism, however, does seem to easily satisfy (IV). For both Sarah and me,
saying (4) means exactly the same thing: prescribing any value system that gay marriage
violates. Since gay marriage does not violate my value system, I am not inclined to make such a
prescription. But since it does violate her value system, she is inclined to make the prescription.
Obviously, (I) – (IV) do not exhaust the conditions of adequacy for a theory of moral
language. A full evaluation of value prescriptivism would require consideration of other
conditions, and philosophers will disagree about what conditions should apply for such theories.
However, this introduction to value prescriptivism shows that it does meet adequacy conditions
(I) – (IV), something other theories, including expressivism and indexicalism, seem unable to do.
i
Hare, R. M. (1952) The Language of Morals (Oxford)
Geach, P. T. (1965) “Assertion” (Philosophical Review 74 (4) pp. 449-65)
iii
Gibbard, A. (2003) Thinking How to Live (Harvard)
ii
e.g., Dreier, James (2009) “Relativism (and Expressivism) and the Problem of Disagreement”
(Philosophical Perspectives 23, ed. by John Hawhtorne)
iv