Michael Lacewing enquiries@alevelphilosophy.co.uk

• What are we doing when we make moral judgments?
• Cognitivism: moral judgments, e.g. ‘Murder is wrong’
– Aim to describe how the world is
– Can be true or false
– Express beliefs that the claim is true
• Non-cognitivism: moral judgments
– Do not aim to describe the world
– Cannot be true or false
– Express attitudes towards the world

• Moral judgements assert or report approval or disapproval
– E.g. ‘X is wrong’ means ‘Most people disapprove of X’
– This is a cognitivist theory
• Obj: racism is wrong, even though, historically, most people have approved of it

• ‘X is wrong’ means ‘I disapprove of X’
– Again, cognitivism
• Obj: (if we know what we think) we cannot make moral mistakes
– Why deliberate?
• Emotivism: Moral judgments cannot be true or false
– ‘X is wrong’ expresses disapproval of X

• Moral judgements can motivate actions.
– Assumed
• Reason cannot motivate action.
• Therefore, moral judgements are not judgements of reason.
• (Cognitivism claims that moral judgements express beliefs, and reason is the faculty for forming beliefs.)

• Why think reason can’t motivate?
• Judgments of reason are either relations of ideas or matters of fact, and either true or false
• We are motivated by emotions and desires, which are not true or false
– Judgments of reason and motivating states have opposite ‘directions of fit’

• Moral judgments do not motivate us
– We must want to be morally good, too
– Therefore, moral judgments could be judgments of reason

• There are only two types of judgements of reason, relations of ideas and matters of fact.
• Moral judgements are not relations of ideas.
• Moral judgements are not matters of fact.
• Therefore, moral judgements are not judgements of reason.

• If Hume is right about the scope of reason, then empiricism is true.
• Why think moral judgments are not relations of ideas?
– Any relation that describes moral or immoral actions also applies to physical objects, but these aren’t moral or immoral. Murder vs. a plant killing a plant
– Wilful killing: same relation, different cause

• Why think moral judgments aren’t matters of fact?
– Which fact?
– Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact … which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object.

• Judgments of what ought to be are not judgments of what is
• ‘[T]his ought … expresses some new relation [of which it] seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it’

• Judgments of reason are not restricted to relations of ideas and matters of fact
– Kant: moral judgments indicate whether a maxim can be universalized (relation of ideas?)
– Moral judgments are judgments about what reasons we have – non-natural, normative facts

• Hume is right that judgments of ‘is’
(natural facts) are distinct from judgments of ‘ought’
– He is also right that we can’t deduce ought from is
– Instead, we must weigh up the reasons that natural facts give us (e.g. hurting someone is a reason not to do it)

• Moral judgments express our feelings of approval or disapproval
– when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that … you have a feeling … of blame from the contemplation of it
• Moral ‘properties’ are like secondary qualities – they exist in our minds, not in their objects
– Colour is not wavelengths of light, but a subjective experience caused by light

• Secondary qualities are not subjective
– Colour is conceptually dependent on vision, but not any individual’s vision
– Colours are real, but relational, properties
• Likewise, moral judgments are conceptually dependent on people finding things valuable and being rational
– But they are true or false depending on whether something is good for us/rational or not