Objectivity

1. Non-cognitivism and subjectivism

Intuitively, an ethical claim such as ‘It is right to help those in distress’ is less objective than a claim such as ‘The table is square’. What does this intuition amount to? Non-cognitivists, such as Ayer (1936), Blackburn (1984) and Gibbard (1990), focus on the semantic function of the two claims. ‘The table is square’ has the function of asserting that a fact obtains in the world. If that fact obtains – if the table is square – then the claim is true; if not, it is false. Thus ‘The table is square’ is apt to be true or false: it is truth-apt. On the other hand, the non-cognitivist views ‘It is right to help those in distress’ as having a different semantic function: despite appearances, its function does not consist in asserting that a fact obtains in the world. It is not truth-apt; rather, it expresses an inclination, desire, or some other non-cognitive attitude of the speaker, in the same way that ‘Hurrah!’ or ‘Boo!’ merely expresses a favourable or unfavourable attitude. This is why some versions of non-cognitivism are called ‘expressivism’. Ethical claims are less objective than claims like ‘The table is square’ since the latter are genuine truth-apt assertions, whereas the former are not. Non-cognitivists have viewed ethical claims as not objective in this sense for various reasons: because of widespread disagreement over moral matters, because moral facts seem ‘queer’ or ‘odd’, and because of the normative character of moral discourse.

There are problems with this way of capturing differences in objective status. Consider the inference:

According to non-cognitivism, ‘Lying is wrong’ and ‘Getting little brother to lie is wrong’ are not truth-apt. But the inference is intuitively valid. And to say that an inference is valid is to say that the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. How can non-cognitivism explain the validity of the inference, given that it denies that (2) and (3) are even apt to be true? Relatedly, the non-cognitivist has a difficulty with (1). What sense can be made of a conditional whose antecedent and consequent are not truth-apt? Non-cognitivism has had difficulty in finding satisfactory answers to these questions (Hale 1993).

Subjectivists take a different tack. They admit that ‘It is right to help those in distress’ is truth-apt, that its sincere utterance makes a genuine assertion. They thus avoid the sort of difficulty outlined above. But if an ethical claim genuinely asserts that a fact obtains, what sort of fact is it? According to the subjectivist, it is simply a fact about the person making the claim: when I say ‘It is right to help those in distress’ I am asserting that I desire to help them. Ethical claims are truth-apt, but the facts they assert to exist are facts about us, our desires, inclinations or subjective states. When I say ‘It is right to help those in distress’ I literally mean ‘I desire to help those in distress’. This contrasts with claims like ‘The table is square’ which, though truth-apt, are not analysable in terms of facts about human subjectivity. In this sense, ‘The table is square’ is the more objective.

Subjectivism has difficulty in accounting for moral disagreement. If Jones says ‘It is right to help those in distress’ and Smith says ‘It is wrong to help those in distress’, they are disagreeing with each other, indeed contradicting one another. But if Jones means ‘I (Jones) desire to help the unfortunate’, whereas Smith means ‘I (Smith) do not desire to help the unfortunate’, there is no contradiction. So in what sense do they disagree?

Subjectivism may try to deal with this by focusing on a wider range of desires than those possessed by the individual who utters the statement. ‘It is right to help those in distress’ literally means ‘Most people desire to help the unfortunate’, so that its content is spelled out in terms of intersubjective agreement in desires. But this also faces problems. If it were true, it would be a contradiction to say that helping the unfortunate is right even though most people do not desire to do it. But it is not a contradiction, so even this wider subjectivist analysis must be flawed.