## 1. A More Detailed General Description


### 1.1 Two Negative Constitutive Non-cognitivist Claims



Two negative theses comprise the central common non-cognitivist
claims, although current theories often endorse them only in qualified
form. One thesis might be called *semantic nonfactualism*.
Simply put this thesis denies that predicative moral sentences express
propositions or have substantial truth conditions. Thus semantic
nonfactualism suggests that their contents are not apt for robust
truth or falsity. (The terms 'substantial' and
'robust' are inserted here to make room for minimalist
theories which offer deflationary accounts of truth, truth-aptness and
propositions. Such theories will be discussed in more detail in
section 4.1 below.) Moral predicates do not denote or express
properties and predicative moral sentences do not therefore predicate
properties of their subjects. The second negative thesis can be called
*psychological non-cognitivism*. This thesis denies that the
states of mind conventionally expressed by moral utterances are
beliefs or mental states which fall on the cognitive side of the
cognitive/non-cognitive divide. Typically non-cognitivists accept both
negative theses, though there are views which accept one and not the
other.



Some non-cognitivists have accepted these theses in their strongest
form - moral sentences in no way predicate properties, are apt
for truth or falsity, or express beliefs. But most current
non-cognitivists accept these negative claims only in a somewhat
weakened form. For example many non-cognitivists hold that moral
judgments' *primary* function is not to express beliefs,
though they may express them in a *secondary* way. Others deny
that their contents are true or false in any *robust* sense but
not that they can be true or false in a *deflationary* sense
according to which there is no substantial property separating true
and false sentences.



Non-cognitivists deny neither that moral sentences are meaningful nor
that they are generally used by speakers in meaningful ways. Thus
different sorts of non-cognitivist couple their negative theses with
various positive claims about the meanings of moral sentences and
about the states of mind that they express. It is the diversity of
positive proposals that generates the different varieties of
non-cognitivism. Emotivists suggest that moral sentences express or
evoke non-cognitive attitudes towards various objects without
asserting that the speaker has those attitudes. Norm-expressivists
suggest (roughly) that the states of mind expressed by moral sentences
are attitudes of acceptance of various norms or rules governing
conduct and emotion, perhaps coupled with a judgment that the objects
or action under discussion comports with those norms. Prescriptivists
suggest that these sentences are a species of prescription or command,
and may or may not offer an account of the state of mind such
judgments express.



While non-cognitivism was first developed as a theory about moral
judgments (Ogden & Richards 1923, 125. Barnes 1933) many of the
arguments for the position apply equally well to other sorts of
evaluative language. Thus most non-cognitivists today extend the
treatment to normative or evaluative judgments generally, and the
discussion below will often speak of normative or evaluative judgments
and terms - a category which includes as paradigms moral
judgments, judgments of rationality, and judgments of value.


### 1.2 Cognitivism



Cognitivism is perhaps best defined as the denial of non-cognitivism.
Cognitivists think that moral sentences are apt for truth or falsity,
and that the state of mind of accepting a moral judgment is typically
one of belief. They think that typical utterances of indicative
sentences containing moral predicates express beliefs in the same way
that other sentences with ordinary descriptive predicates typically
do. (There is some reason to be careful here since cognitivists may
not need to employ the sense of 'express' that
expressivists need to get their theory off the ground. See Schroeder
2008a.) Different species of cognitivist disagree about the contents
of moral sentences and beliefs, about their truth conditions, and
about their truth. To discuss all the varieties would require a
complete taxonomy of possible metaethical positions. What they have in
common, however, is that they all deny that an adequate account of
moral judgments can be given consistent with the two negative
non-cognitivist theses.


### 1.3 Contrast with Cognitivist Subjectivism



It is useful to contrast non-cognitivism with one particular variety
of cognitivism in order to more clearly present what the
non-cognitivist is claiming. Various versions of cognitivist
subjectivism equate moral properties such as rightness with the
property of being approved of by some person or group. To be right is
to be approved of by the speaker, or the speaker and her friends, or
the members of the speaker's society, or everybody. On many such
views, when a speaker says something is right she is in fact saying
that she approves, or that she and those like her approve. In one very
good sense she would then have expressed her approval - she said
that she approved or that she and her friends did. And, if approval is
a conative rather than a cognitive attitude, we might say that she
expressed a non-cognitive attitude. But this by itself is not
sufficient to make the position non-cognitivist. This variety of
subjectivism agrees with one of the positive non-cognitivist theses
(that moral utterances conventionally express non-cognitive
attitudes), but it does not agree with either of the essential
negative non-cognitivist claims (that the judgments don't
express beliefs and/or that they are not truth-apt). According to this
subjectivist theory, the moral utterance expresses the speaker's
belief that she approves of the action and this has truth conditions
which are also the truth conditions of the sentence uttered. When a
non-cognitivist says that a sentence conventionally expresses an
attitude, she means to contrast the mode of expression with saying
that one has the attitude. A simple example gets the idea across. One
can express dislike of something by saying that one dislikes it. This
is the way that a cognitivist subjectivist thinks we express moral
attitudes. But one can also express dislike of something by booing or
hissing. This is much like the way some non-cognitivists think we
express moral attitudes. The latter way of expressing an attitude is
different from the way cognitivist subjectivists think we express
moral attitudes because it expresses the attitude without saying that
we have the attitude (Barnes 1933; Carnap 1937, 28-29.) There is
further discussion of this point in section
 4.3
 below.


## 2. Principal Varieties in More Detail



The principal varieties of non-cognitivism can be distinguished by
focusing on the positive claims they make in explicating the semantic
function of moral expressions and the nature of the mental states
typically expressed by those who utter them in simple predicative
statements.


### 2.1 Emotivism



Emotivists think moral terms in grammatically assertive utterances
function primarily to express emotion and perhaps also to elicit
similar emotions in others (Barnes 1933; Stevenson 1946; Ayer 1952,
Chapter 6). They can be read as suggesting that the right way to
explain the meanings of such terms is to point out that they are
conventional devices for performing a certain sort of speech act, one
which if sincere requires that the speaker have a certain attitude.
Sentences employing general predicates of positive moral evaluation
such as 'right', 'good',
'virtuous', and so on signal a non-cognitive pro-attitude
such as approval or preference. Sentences employing general predicates
of negative evaluation such as 'wrong', 'bad',
and 'vicious' signal negative non-cognitive attitudes.
Thus to call a person virtuous is to express an attitude of approval
and the speech act of doing so is analogous to the speech act
performed when we cheer for that person. The account can be extended
beyond general moral terms. Simple predicative utterances employing
the so-called thick moral terms such as 'brave' and
'honest' can then be thought of as performing this same
speech act while at the same time predicating the natural property
(say fearlessness in the case of bravery) which common usage of the
term seems to track. Thus thick moral terms can be thought of as
having both descriptive and emotive meaning.



Some theorists who view themselves as emotivists suggest that even the
most general terms of moral evaluation have a descriptive meaning
rather than just an emotive or non-cognitive meaning (Stevenson 1944,
22; Hare 1952, suggests the same sort of idea within a prescriptivist
theory at 118). One such approach analyzes judgments applying a moral
predicate to a particular object or action as expressing approval or
disapproval of some property while at the same time predicating that
property of the object or item in question. This idea has been taken
over by contemporary hybrid expressivists (Jackson 1999; Barker 2000;
Ridge 2006, Ridge 2014). According to these theorists, a sentence such
as 'Lying is wrong' both predicates a property of the act
type lying and expresses the speaker's disapproval of that
property. Theories of this sort will be discussed in more detail in
the section on hybrid theories below. They are mentioned here only to
note two points: (1) The hybrid idea was already present in the
writings of early noncognitivists. And (2) these more complicated
views are often adopted by theorists who begin from simpler theories
which are paradigm cases of non-cognitivism.


### 2.2 Prescriptivism and Universal Prescriptivism



Prescriptivists suggest that moral judgments are a species of
prescriptive judgement and that moral sentences in the indicative mood
are semantically more akin to imperatives than indicatives. One way to
think of the idea is that moral terms function as force indicators on
analogy with mood. Early prescriptivists thought that this had radical
implications for moral reasoning and argument. Carnap suggested that
moral judgments are equivalent to relatively simple imperatives. The
statement 'Killing is evil' means the same thing as
'Do not kill.' On that basis he claimed that there could
be no moral knowledge or error (Carnap 1937; 23-24 &
29).



By contrast current versions of prescriptivism, most developed in the
works of R. M. Hare, have attempted to vindicate moral thinking as a
rational enterprise. The main idea here is that while moral sentences
do in fact express a species of prescription much as ordinary
imperatives do, they express prescriptions of a special universal
sort. And it is largely because they are prescriptions of this sort
that they are subject to various consistency constraints, so that
accepting one moral judgment carries with it a requirement that one
accept other judgments in some respects like it. While Hare denies
that moral judgments are exactly equivalent to prescriptions
expressible in any other form of words, he does tell us a lot about
what they mean. Moral imperatives are universal in a number of ways.
They are to apply not just to the agent about whom they are made (if
they are made with respect to a particular agent) but also to any
agent who is similarly situated. And they apply to any action or
object which is relevantly similar to the actions or objects about
which the judgment is made. They apply to all relevantly similar cases
at any time and any place. Thus, very roughly, when one calls an
action right one is not only prescribing the action in question, but
also any relevantly similar action wherever and whenever it occurs.
And the prescription is addressed not only to the agent whose action
is up for assessment but also to every other person, including the
speaker and listeners. In this way, Hare believes, calling an action
wrong commits the speaker to judging wrong any relevantly similar
action done at any time and any place by any person.



With ordinary prescriptions, it isn't obvious that there is a
state of mind that someone must be in if they utter or obey a command
and which we ought to characterize as accepting an imperative. Hare,
himself at one point argues that there is no substantive way of
characterizing the attitude a person must have if she expresses or
accepts a prescription or moral judgment (Hare 1952, 9-11). Even
so, prescriptivists have some reason for wanting to offer an account
of accepting a moral judgment if they want to explain moral practice.
Ordinarily we attribute moral judgments to people, even people who are
silent. So the prescriptivist will want to say something about our
basis for these attributions. An account of the attitude that
constitutes accepting a moral judgment will allow them to ground such
attributions. One suggestion is that the attitude of accepting a moral
judgment involves an intention to do what the judgments recommend.
Sincerely accepting a command directed at oneself involves doing it if
one is in circumstances where it applies and one is able and otherwise
intending to do it should one find oneself in those circumstances
(Hare 1952, 20). Since moral commands are universal according to the
theory, they will be directed at everyone. Thus anyone who sincerely
accepts a moral judgment will be disposed to do what they believe
right in circumstances where they can. Less sincere judgments may lack
this connection (Hare 1952, 169). The issue of which attitude, if any,
are involved in accepting a prescription is relevant to some of the
arguments over internalism that we will consider below.


### 2.3 Quasi-realism



Since non-cognitivism is a species of irrealism about ethics, it
should be unsurprising that many of its main motivations overlap with
those for other versions of ethical irrealism, especially with those
for error theories. Early non-cognitivists seem most concerned to
defend metaphysical and epistemic commitments incompatible with a
realist interpretation of moral claims. For example, moral judgments
seem to be empirically under-determined (Ayer 1952, 106; Mackie 1977,
39). Hence they fail tests for meaningful discourse proposed by
logical positivists. If moral language is meaningful, it would be a
counter-example to the view. Thus early versions of non-cognitivism
were proposed by these theorists, not so much because they were
interested in moral philosophy but rather to render innocuous a
seeming counter-example to their own theories (Carnap 1937,
24-27; Ayer 1952, 107-109).



More contemporary non-cognitivists have also been motivated by similar
underlying metaphysical and epistemic commitments. But they have been
as concerned with vindicating the legitimacy of moral practice and
argument as with anything else. As a result, they have put more time
and energy into explaining, and in a certain sense justifying, the
realist-seeming features of moral discourse in the absence of a
commitment to realism (Hare 1952; Blackburn 1984, 1998; Gibbard
1990).



'Quasi-Realism' is Simon Blackburn's name for this
sort of non-cognitivism, and especially his own version of
expressivism. Yet other sophisticated non-cognitivists, notably Allan
Gibbard, have been happy to work under the quasi-realist banner
(Gibbard 2003, 18-19). What especially distinguishes the
quasi-realist project is an emphasis on explaining why we are entitled
to act as if moral judgments are genuinely truth-apt even while
strictly speaking they are neither true nor false in any robust sense.
Thus it is a commitment of a quasi-realist that normative judgments
are in an important way different from most (other) paradigm
descriptive judgments - enough so to render problematic their
status as either true or false - and yet that a justification is
nonetheless available for our practices of treating them as if they
were in fact so. What exactly this comes to is hard to say without
discussing some of the special problems for non-cognitivism in
general, since it is precisely in offering solutions to those problems
that the quasi-realist carries out his program. Thus we will revisit
the position later on in the context of these problems.


### 2.4 Expressivism



Expressivists of all sorts think that moral sentences are conventional
devices for expressing pro and/or con attitudes towards their objects.
In this broad sense emotivists are expressivists; they agree that
moral language functions to express non-cognitive attitudes of various
sorts. The claim that moral terms function much like 'boo'
and 'hurrah' qualifies as expressivist in a broad sense.
In recent years, however, the term 'expressivist' has come
to be used in a narrower way, to refer to views which attempt to
construct a systematic semantics for moral sentences by pairing them
with the states of mind that the sentences are said to express. Such
expressivists hold that the meanings of all sentences containing moral
terms are determined by the mental states that they serve to
express.



For this to work, the sense in which moral sentences express the
attitudes which determine their semantic values must be fairly strict
and particular. For in one sense perfectly ordinary indicative
sentences can express non-cognitive attitudes as when, 'It is
ten o'clock already,' can express impatience. And,
'Lying sucks!' and 'I disapprove of lying,'
can each express disapproval of lying. Even so, we should not want to
assimilate the semantics of these sentences to one another. Thus
expressivists of the narrower sort must identify a kind of expression
which allows them to distinguish the way in which "Lying is
wrong," expresses the attitude that generates its semantic
value, from the way in which "I disapprove of lying," or
even "I think that lying is wrong" might express the very
same attitude (Schroeder 2008a, 2008c).



Those who have taken up this expressivist program have provided a
number of candidates for the attitudes expressed by sentences
containing normative terminology. Simon Blackburn, whose quasi-realist
project was briefly described above, has contributed various ideas not
only for the states expressed by indicative sentences but also for
complex embeddings of moral claims. Hybrid theories that put the
expressive function of normative language into the semantics
(discussed below) also involve work of this sort. But the proponent
who has developed the program in the most systematic way is Allan
Gibbard. In two influential books Gibbard has proposed two
structurally similar accounts each of which employs a different base
noncognitive attitude. In Gibbard (1990) the attitude was
norm-acceptance, whereas in Gibbard (2003) it was a planning attitude
akin to intending. In each case he develops a strategy for combining
the relevant noncognitive attitude with belief to generate complex
attitudes that can serve as the semantic values of more complex
sentences. For more recent developments see Mark Schroeder's
(2008c) bifurcated attitude semantics and Silk (2015) developing
Dreier's (2006) use of preference to impose structure.


### 2.5 Norm-expressivism and Plan-expressivism



Gibbard's *Wise Choices, Apt Feelings* (1990) proposes an
analysis of judgments regarding rationality according to which they
express a non-cognitive attitude of acceptance towards rules or norms.
From there he proceeds to reduce other normative judgments into
various more particular kinds of judgments of rationality, so that all
moral judgments are covered by the proposed analysis. Gibbard suggests
that normative judgments express the acceptance of systems of norms
- rules dividing actions under naturalistic descriptions into
those which are forbidden, permitted and required. To call an action
rational is, to a first approximation, to express one's
acceptance of a system of norms which allows it. To call an action
irrational is to express one's acceptance of a system of norms
which forbids it. And so on (Gibbard 1990, 46). This is only
Gibbard's idea to a first approximation, since a speaker may not
have a determinate system of norms in mind when he or she makes such a
judgment. So Gibbard suggests we would do better to think of judgments
to the effect that an action would be irrational as expressing
rejection of any set of norms which does not forbid it. More
precisely, a normative judgment predicating a normative term of a
particular action rules out combinations of descriptive judgments
concerning the action with norms that either permit, forbid, or
require (as appropriate) actions falling under those descriptions.
More complex judgments are captured using the sets of norm-world pairs
which those judgments "rule out" to represent the states
of mind inconsistent with the judgments in question. The basic idea
can be illustrated with an example. A judgment that action *A*
is permissible is incompatible with a pair the first member of which
represents *A* as a lie, and the second member of which is a
norm that rules out lying. And it is inconsistent with many more such
combinations besides. Given this, we can capture the content of the
judgment that action *A* is permissible by specifying the set
of world-norm pairs with which it is incompatible. (A more detailed
exposition of Gibbard's technical apparatus can be found within
the discussion of the Embedding Problem below and in the supplementary
document
 Embedding Problem Response Strategies.)



Gibbard develops his analysis to cover moral judgments by analyzing
such judgments in terms of judgments of rationality. An action is
wrong if and only if it fails to meet standards of action the
intentional or negligent violation of which in a normal state of mind
would be sufficient for finding the agent prima facie blameworthy. And
an action is blameworthy if it would be rational for the agent to feel
guilty and for others to resent the agent for doing the action
(Gibbard 1990, 45). Since the rationality of guilt or resentment
receives a non-cognitive analysis, the approach generates a
non-cognitive analysis of moral judgments themselves.



Gibbard's more recent work (Gibbard 2003) retains many of the
main features of his norm-expressivist theory but it revises to some
extent the account of the non-cognitive attitudes involved in
accepting a normative judgment. On the current view, such judgments
express the acceptance of plans, or perhaps better they express a
state of mind that we might think of as planning to act in this way or
that depending on the naturalistic circumstances one finds oneself in.
More complex judgments embedding normative terms express combinations
of such attitudes with further attitudes, including ordinary beliefs.
Whereas in the earlier work Gibbard used sets of world-norm pairs to
formally capture the contents of judgments, in the later work he
relies on what he calls "fact-prac worlds". Formally they
function in much the same way as the world-norm pairs did in the
earlier theory. But with the fact-prac worlds apparatus contingency
plans take the place of norms as members of the pairs. Once again,
judgements will rule out other judgements represented by a set of
pairs. The judgment that action *A* is permissible will be
inconsistent with various combinations of factual beliefs with plans.
Each of these combinations can be captured by a world representing a
way the world might be together with a second component consisting of
a plan, representing a commitment to act that the thinker might have.
For example the judgment that action *A* is permissible will be
incompatible with any pair the fact-representing member of which
represents action *A* as a lie, paired with a plan that rules
out lying. And just as a similar idea allowed Gibbard to use sets of
norm-world pairs to capture the content of normative judgments, he now
can capture the content of a normative judgment by specifying the set
of fact-prac worlds with which it is incompatible. When the apparatus
is fully developed, the fact representing members of the pairs can
once again be thought of as possible worlds insofar as they specify
every detail of the world, and the plans are hyper-plans insofar as
they have an answer for what to do in every circumstance. Gibbard
often calls these fully determinate fact-prac worlds "fact-plan
worlds", just as you might expect given what they are composed
of. The resulting theory might now be called
'plan-expressivism' rather than
'norm-expressivism' though most of its important
structural features are very similar to those of his earlier norm
expressivist view.



Further developments come in the form of Gibbard's arguments for
the resulting theory: Gibbard suggests that people need to plan and
need ways to think about and represent their plans. He argues that
they would also need to think about what to do from the perspectives
of various other people and to formulate plans for arbitrary
situations they might find themselves in. If these claims are right, a
language might naturally develop in order to make such thinking
easier. A planning language modeled by the sets of world-plan pairs
would serve very well. And in actual use it would operate much as our
actual normative language does. It is therefore reasonable to conclude
that our actual normative language is of this sort. Furthermore
conceiving of these attitudes as involving contingency plans for
descriptively specifiable circumstances would allow us to explain the
supervenience of the moral on the descriptive. The thoughts
represented by the fact-prac world apparatus represent such
contingency plans. So the supervenience of the normative on the
descriptive falls naturally out of the resulting story (Gibbard
2003).



Some theorists are unsatisfied with Gibbard's treatment of third
personal judgements, partly because they find the psychology of
forming a contingency plan for being in another person's shoes
implausible. Ayers (2022) suggests that this aspect of Gibbard's
view can be replaced with a third-personal decision that the agent who
should act in a particular way act in precisely that way. The view
takes on board a commitment to the view that one can decide for others
in the relevant way. Ayers argues that idea makes sense if one takes
up certain ideas from the literature on group agency.


### 2.6 Borderline Cases and Hybrid Theories



Often philosophical positions are introduced in rather pure and stark
versions, only to be modified in light of arguments and objections so
as to become more like competing theories over time. It should not be
too surprising that this is the case in metaethics and that present
day non-cognitivist theories are less distinguishable from cognitivist
alternatives than earlier versions. It can even be a controversial
matter whether theories developed within the non-cognitivist tradition
but modified to handle objections still deserve the label. The
varieties of emotivism which postulate both descriptive meaning and
emotive meaning have sometimes aroused such suspicions and the more
developed hybrids discussed at the end of this section are in that
tradition. Furthermore, while paradigm non-cognitivists accept each of
the two negative theses outlined above, there are views which accept
only one of the two without the other. These positions constitute two
metaethical theories which we might think of as borderline cases lying
just outside the non-cognitivist region of logical space.



Hermeneutic moral fictionalists are not semantic non-factualists.
Moral sentences are regarded as genuinely truth-apt. Such sentences do
have truth conditions and an assertive sentence using a moral
predicate does predicate a property. Yet, in normal use these
sentences are not strictly speaking true. Thus far the hermeneutic
fictionalist agrees with error theorists. But while error theorists
think that the falsity of moral sentences implies that ordinary moral
talk is massively in error, fictionalists disagree. According to the
hermeneutic fictionalist a speaker uttering a false moral sentence is
typically not expressing a belief in the content expressed by the
sentence. Rather such speakers are using it fictively, and this use
involves no error. Thus, fictionalists are psychological
non-cognitivists. Use of a moral sentence does not communicate that
the speaker believes the proposition expressed by that sentence.
Rather speakers use such sentences to express other, non-cognitive
states of mind. Just as with standard versions of non-cognitivism,
fictionalists will generally offer a story about the nature of the
non-cognitive attitude expressed. For example, they may suggest that
the state of mind is an intention to act as if the moral judgment
expressing the intention is true (Kalderon 2005b). At the same time,
because they are not pursuing the expressivist semantic program the
expression relation need not be exactly what ordinary expressivists
take it to be. Since they need not require a one-to-one
mapping of moral sentences onto states of mind that express them to
support their semantic theory, fictionalists can allow for more
variation in the states of mind such sentences (loosely) express.
Hermeneutic fictionalism is often contrasted with revolutionary
fictionalism. Revolutionary moral fictionalists think we should reform
our current cognitively committed use of normative language to work
roughly as the hermeneutic fictionalist thinks we already do (Joyce
2001, 2005). They are thus not committed to non-cognitivism about
actual current use of moral terms in the way that hermeneutic
fictionalists seem to be. Revolutionary fictionalists could be read as
proposing that we convert to using moral language to express something
other than belief with our indicative moral sentences, but
revolutionary fictionalists have not usually presented their reforms
in that way. That should not be too surprising. Fictionalist rejection
of semantic nonfactualism leads most taxonomists to omit fictionalism
from the non-cognitivist genus. Still at least one prominent
hermeneutic fictionalist has presented his view as a version of
non-cognitivism (Kalderon 2005b) drawing on some comments in MacIntyre
(1981, 15-18). (See also Beddor, 2023)



For more detail on fictionalism see the entry on
 fictionalism.



In contrast, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have propounded a view
which they call Nondescriptivist Cognitivism. As the label suggests,
they do not regard their view as a species of non-cognitivism, but
like fictionalism the view does accept one of non-cognitivism's
two constitutive negative theses while rejecting the other. However,
with respect to each thesis Horgan and Timmons's choices
contrast with those made by fictionalism. Nondescriptivist cognitivism
spurns psychological non-cognitivism, but embraces semantic
nonfactualism, at least insofar as it rejects the claim that moral
sentences describe the world or predicate genuine properties (Horgan
& Timmons 2000; Timmons 1999). The precise content of the view can
be difficult to pin down. Horgan and Timmons challenge a standard
Humean division of the mind into a domain of cognitive states which
represent the world as being some way and a separate domain of
noncognitive states that do not represent the world. Rather they think
there is an important division *within the cognitive domain*
between beliefs that represent the world and beliefs that do not do
this but which have non-descriptive but cognitive content.
Nondescriptive Cognitivism then holds that moral judgments express
such nondescriptive but cognitive states. Indicative sentences apt for
expressing these mental states (in one sense of 'express')
also *semantically express* the contents of these
nondescriptive states just as on a more standard picture indicative
sentences semantically express the propositions that are the contents
of sentences that (in a different sense of 'express')
express beliefs. Whether this is in fact a distinctive cognitivist
position will depend on the best way of dividing up different sorts of
mental states. Some will think that Horgan and Timmons have stipulated
a new use for old terms, but they respond by defending
phenomenological criteria for dividing cognitive from non-cognitive
mental states that justify counting nonrepresentational states among
the cognitive.



However that debate comes out, it is nevertheless worth noting the
view as one which makes trouble for the standard division between
cognitivist and non-cognitivist views. Together with fictionalism it
illustrates a position which accepts only one of the two negative
theses constitutive of standard non-cognitivism. If such views are
coherent this would suggest the two negative theses are logically
independent.



Hybrid-expressivist theories can be thought of as another sort of
borderline case but for a different reason. These theorists combine
the positive claims of expressivism - that moral sentences are
conventional devices for the expression of pro-attitudes and that
moral attitudes are (partly) non-cognitive with features of
cognitivism - that moral sentences predicate properties and that
moral attitudes are (partly) cognitive. There are a variety of ways of
combining these ideas and various extant theories adopt many of the
options.



We've already noted a tendency for emotivists and
prescriptivists to allow a kind of secondary descriptive meaning for
moral terms over and above their expressive meaning in order to
capture the way that moral statements can be used to convey
descriptive information. If I know that you are a utilitarian you
might convey the information that an action maximizes utility by
telling me that it is right. In such cases, what the speaker
successfully conveys depends on the audience's knowledge of the
speaker's moral views. One sort of hybrid theorist incorporates
this idea into the semantics of moral expressions. Such theorists
suggest that moral utterances as a matter of their semantics predicate
a property, one which is determined by the speaker's moral
attitudes, while at the same time expressing a non-cognitive attitude
towards that property. Proponents hope that the view will have
advantage in explaining the communication of factual information with
moral terms and with handling the embedding problem (explained below),
while also explaining the motivational efficacy of moral judgements.
One implementation of this view equates the main semantic content of a
moral predicate with the property it picks out (via a function from
the speaker's attitudes to the relevant properties), while use
of the predicate conventionally implicates the presence of a pro or
con attitude (Barker 2000). A different implementation of the strategy
incorporates both components into the semantic values of moral terms,
even while the descriptive content is a function of the non-cognitive
attitude expressed. More specifically on this way of developing the
idea, moral sentences to the effect that something is right
semantically express both a proposition - that the action has a
particular property - and a particular positive attitude toward
that particular property. The particular property picked out itself
depends on the non-cognitive attitudes of the speaker, insofar as the
property predicated is the most general property towards which the
speaker holds the non-cognitive attitudes expressed by the very same
judgement(Ridge, 2006a, 2006b, 2014). One upshot is that the
descriptive content of a speaker's judgements can vary over time
as the object of her attitudes change. John Eriksson(2009) suggests
that R. M. Hare was an early adopter of this kind of hybrid
theory.



A contrasting sort of hybrid theory holds the descriptive content of
moral predicates constant. Such views are often modeled on slurs or
epithets, as explicated in a certain way. It is plausible and perhaps
even standard to think of slurs as semantically expressing a certain
descriptive property (being a member of such and such a group, say)
while also conventionally expressing a negative attitude towards those
with the property. Copp (2001, 2009) and Boisvert (2008) suggest that
moral terms could function in the same way. Here again there are
various ways to work out the details. Advocates of the approach can
note that it has advantages over the previous kind of hybrid theory in
explaining communication insofar as the descriptive content remains
fixed from speaker to speaker (Schroeder 2009). And they claim that
the view does so without undermining the standard hybrid explanation
of the motivational efficacy of moral judgements. Other theorists
suggest that pejoratives like 'idiot' present a better
model than slurs (Hay 2013).



As the literature develops hybrid views get more complicated and
subtle. Close relatives of these theories claim to elude objections
directed at each of the above variants and yet the resulting theories
are probably best understood as developments of these simpler variants
(Schroeder 2013;Toppinen 2013).



Perhaps hardest to characterize as a species of non-cognitivism are
the claims of several recent theorists who suggest that
non-cognitivism is best understood as a metasemantic theory. The claim
seems to be that non-cognitivism is a theory not about the meaning of
moral sentences or about the contents of moral thoughts, but rather a
story at a different level about how sentences and thoughts come to
have these meanings or contents (Charlow 2015; Chrisman 2012, 2016;
Perez Carballo 2014; Ridge 2014; Silk 2014 at 217). One
motivation for the view seems to be that it allows noncognitivists to
take advantage of ordinary semantic theories and hence avoid the
embedding problem. There isn't yet a lot of literature disputing
the idea, but Alwood (2016) expresses some skepticism about the
advantages of the approach. It is at least worth thinking about which
of the standard motivations for non-cognitivism in ethics support the
view when it is construed as a metasemantic theory. It is also worth
thinking about exactly how the view contrasts with cognitivist views
on which attitudes can play a role in determining the content of
certain expressions, either generally or in particular occurrences.
Chances are the literature will take up such questions in the near
future and subsequent versions of this entry will say more about the
developments to come.


## 3. Motivations for Non-cognitivism



Non-cognitivism is motivated by a number of considerations, most
rooted in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind or epistemology.


### 3.1 The Open Question Argument



At the beginning of the 20th Century, G. E. Moore's open
question argument convinced many philosophers that moral statements
were not equivalent to statements made using non-moral or descriptive
terms. For any non-moral description of an action or object it seemed
that competent speakers could without confusion doubt that the action
or object was appropriately characterized using a moral term such as
'good' or 'right'. The question of whether the
action or object so described was good or right was always open, even
to competent speakers. Furthermore, in the absence of any systematic
theory to explain the possibility of synthetic as opposed to analytic
identity claims, many were convinced that this showed that moral
properties could not be identified with any natural (or supernatural)
properties. Thus Moore and others concluded that moral properties such
as goodness were irreducible sui generis properties, not identical to
natural properties (Moore 1903, 15).



The non-naturalists, however, had neglected another option consistent
with the thought underlying the open question argument. Perhaps moral
predicates did not refer to properties at all, and perhaps their
meaning was not analyzable in non-moral descriptive terms not because
they referred to irreducibly moral properties but because, despite
appearances, they were not referring expressions at all. In other
words, semantic nonfactualism about moral terms entails that questions
of the sort highlighted by Moore could not be closed by any amount of
competence with the expressions used to ask them because the
expressions in question are not in fact equivalent. Thus
non-cognitivists could argue that moral expressions used in such open
questions did not function to represent anything or to predicate any
property and as such were not equivalent to any descriptive or
referring expressions. Rather they merely served to convey emotion
(Ogden and Richards 1923, 125). Speakers to whom such questions seemed
open were tacitly aware of this difference in function and hence not
in a position to equate moral expressions with descriptive
expressions.



Contemporary philosophers recognize the possibility that sentences
that express identities might be synthetic as opposed to analytic or
true by definition. We can discover that water is the same stuff as
H2O without being able to infer it from the meanings of the
terms involved (Kripke 1972; Putnam 1975a). And descriptive
naturalists about morality have pointed out that the openness of
Moore's question to competent speakers does not rule out the
possibility of securing the identity of a moral property with a
naturalistic property through empirical discoveries that do not rely
on the expressions in question having the same meaning (Boyd 1988).
Yet many contemporary defenders of non-cognitivism suggest that the
open question argument still provides ammunition for their claims.
Even if we cannot infer from the openness of a question that the
referents of two terms used to ask that question are distinct, we
might still have reason to think that the two expressions do not mean
the same thing. Thus non-cognitivists have used the open question
argument to suggest that moral terms contain a normative element
completely lacking in descriptive terms and which should be cashed out
along the lines that the non-cognitivists favor.



The open question argument can be seen as providing independent
support for what is sometimes called Hume's Law - the
claim that one can never validly deduce an 'ought' from an
'is' (Hume 1888, 469). According to Hume's Law, no
set of premises consisting entirely of non-moral descriptive
statements is sufficient to entail a moral or normative conclusion.
The non-cognitivist is in a position to explain this, insofar as her
positive proposal for the functioning of moral terms will suggest they
do more than merely describe the world. She will say that moral terms
essentially express a positive attitude, or function to commend.
Purely descriptive terms do not. Nothing can be the conclusion of a
valid argument which is not already implicit in the premises. Thus
descriptive claims cannot entail the extra expressive or imperatival
component that according to the non-cognitivist is part of the meaning
of moral terms (Hare 1952, 32-49).



There are of course many ways to resist these arguments. Perhaps moral
expressions are analytically equivalent to naturalistic expressions,
but these analyticities are themselves not obvious even to competent
speakers (Lewis 1989, 129). This may be because no analyticities are
obvious, or it may be because moral analyses in particular are
especially complex. One moral that could be drawn from the history of
Twentieth Century analytic philosophy is that if there are any
analyticities, competent speakers can question them. This is the
paradox of analysis. If any definition can be questioned by a
competent speaker, and we think there are at least some definitions
sufficient to underwrite analytic truths, then the mere fact that a
speaker can doubt a candidate analysis may not tell against that
analysis. An equivalence could be analytic because competent speakers
tacitly respect it, for the most part acting as if the equivalence is
true (Lewis 1989, 130). It has been suggested that moral concepts are
role concepts analogous to the concepts of various mental states as
conceived by functionalists. The idea is that commonsense morality
embodies a theory of morality which specifies the ways in which
various moral properties (rightness, wrongness, goodness, badness,
fairness, etc.) are related to each other and to other properties.
When we put all of the claims of the commonsense theory together it
specifies a role that each property must play in terms of the other
properties it relates to. The role concept so-specified for each term
might then be the concept of the referent of that term (Jackson and
Pettit 1995). If so we should expect such concepts to be quite
complex. And their complexity might make it hard to recognize the
adequacy of any analysis, even for speakers who tacitly respect the
equivalence so defined.



Relatedly, some theorists have wanted to resist Hume's Law,
arguing that one can in fact validly draw normative or moral
conclusions from purely descriptive premises (Foot 1958-9;
Searle 1964). It is actually quite difficult to find an adequate
formulation that is immune to counter-example, although many theorists
suspect there is nonetheless something right about Hume's claim
(Humberstone 1996).



There may be a problem for those more sophisticated forms of
non-cognitivism according to which moral terms have both descriptive
and prescriptive or expressive meaning when these are coupled with
reliance on the Open Question Argument. Suppose that the postulated
extra expressive or prescriptive component in moral terms explains why
competent speakers would not equate moral terms with descriptive
analyses of them and that it also explains why we cannot validly infer
a moral conclusion from non-moral premises. If moral terms have
descriptive meaning in addition to their non-cognitive element one
should be able to validly argue in the other direction. The problem is
that competent speakers are just as likely to wonder about the
validity of such inferences as they are to wonder about those going
from descriptive premises to normative conclusions. If the openness of
such questions to competent speakers is sufficient to refute claims of
meaning equivalence, it should here refute theories which include
descriptive meanings in an otherwise non-cognitive analysis. If the
arguments that lead non-cognitivists to postulate descriptive meaning
are sufficiently compelling it seems they should not rely on the open
question argument to support their views. Woods (2015) presses a
related worry against even non-hybrid non-cognitivist theories. If the
conventional function of moral terms is to express attitudes, it
should seem Moore-paradoxical (that is pragmatically incoherent) to
deny that one approves of the things one believes good or right. But
many such claims don't seem pragmatically incoherent.


### 3.2 Naturalism



Naturalism in metaphysics has been on the ascendancy for some time,
though it is often somewhat difficult to ascertain exactly what the
position amounts to. Metaphysical naturalists claim that there are
only natural properties, in some good sense of the term
'natural'. Usually naturalism is taken to rule out at
least the existence of supernatural entities or properties. And one
standard way that naturalists have defended their position has been to
reduce seemingly mysterious properties or objects which might appear
to be non-natural to more familiar purportedly natural properties.
That is, they have tried to show that these objects or entities are
nothing over and above some set of natural properties or objects
appropriately arranged. One strategy is to identify seemingly suspect
properties with natural properties, either via connecting definitions
or through synthetic identities. In this way the seemingly suspect
properties can be allowed into the naturalist's ontology without
undermining the commitment to naturalism. Many naturalists have taken
this approach to moral properties (Firth 1952; Railton 1986; Boyd
1988).



Non-cognitivism is *not* a form of *reductive*
naturalism about the contents of moral judgments, beliefs and
sentences. It does not equate the property seemingly predicated in
such judgments with any natural property, precisely because it denies
that the (primary) function of such expressions is to predicate
properties. But in another good sense non-cognitivists are
naturalists. They offer a reduction of the attitude of accepting a
moral judgment to a perfectly naturalistic sort of attitude such as
the attitude of approval or disapproval. And they do not postulate any
properties which cannot be reduced to natural properties. Thus another
motivation for accepting non-cognitivism has been naturalism. If
someone doubts the prospects for reducing moral properties to natural
properties (perhaps under the influence of the open question
argument), they need not concede that there are any extra-natural or
supernatural properties. One can simply reinterpret even the moral
judgments one accepts as predicating no properties at all. Or, as with
the more sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism, one can allow them
to predicate natural properties and argue that the appearance that
they do something other than this is due to the additional expressive
component in their meaning. One's naturalism will then not
commit one to giving up moral judgments or reducing moral properties
to natural properties (Ayer 1952, 106-7).


### 3.3 Motivational Internalism and the Action-guiding Character of Moral Judgments



Many non-cognitivists have argued for their theories based on
motivational internalist premises. Motivational internalists believe
that there is some sort of conceptual or necessary connection between
moral judgments on the one hand and motivations to act on the other.
The nature of the connection is a matter of some dispute and theorists
have suggested and refuted a variety of candidates (Hare 1952, 20;
Brink 1989, 37ff.; Smith 1994, 60ff; Darwall 1997). Non-cognitivists
have often supported their theory by arguing from versions of judgment
internalism, which postulate a necessary connection between accepting
a moral judgment on the one hand and being motivated to act on it on
the other (Stevenson 1937; Hare 1952; Blackburn 1998; Gibbard 1990).
This sort of internalism is controversial, so that leading
non-cognitivists have had both to defend judgment internalism and to
argue that their favored theory should be accepted as the best
explanation of the sort of internalism they attempt to vindicate.



You can find defenses of various versions of judgment internalism
which support somewhat different but still necessary connections
between accepting or uttering a moral judgment on the one hand and
being motivated on the other. One version makes the connection very
tight - if one accepts a judgment one is motivated to do what it
says we ought to do. Others are looser, requiring motivation only in
rational persons (Korsgaard 1986; Smith 1994, 61) or perhaps in normal
members of a community (Dreier 1990; Horgan & Timmons 1992;
164-5). Depending on which version a theorist defends, different
versions of non-cognitivism can explain the necessity of the
connection, although not all versions can be easily explained using
non-cognitivist resources. The tightest connection which requires
motivation in anyone who accepts the judgment that some action is
right is rather well explained by a very simple version of emotivism
on which a judgment that some action is right conventionally expresses
one's approval of that action. One can only sincerely use that
expression when one has the attitude just as one can only sincerely
cheer for some team or person if one has a positive attitude towards
them. Sincere utterance requires motivation, that's part and
parcel of this sort of emotivist theory.



On the other hand, this easy explanation of the strong internalist
thesis has liabilities. Such strong internalism may be too strong to
be credible insofar as it rules out amoralists - those who
accept moral judgments without being at all motivated to do what they
recommend. Such people may be possible and even actual (Brink 1989,
46; Svavarsdottir 1999). If so, simple emotivism of the sort
described is refuted because the sincerity conditions for making the
judgment require the motivation not present in the amoralist. Examples
such as the amoralist have led internalists to posit more moderate,
defeasible, but still necessary connections between moral judgments
and motivation (Korsgaard 1986; Dreier 1990; Smith 1994). More complex
versions of non-cognitivism can make the connection with actual
motivation looser and thereby withstand the amoralist challenge. But
not every more moderate internalist principle will be easily explained
by a corresponding non-cognitivist theory. Some versions of moderate
internalism require that rational people will be motivated in
accordance with their own moral judgments (Smith 1994, 61). It
isn't clear what version of non-cognitivism can take advantage
of this sort of defeasible connection. On any theory where the
acceptance of a moral judgment is constituted by the acceptance of a
non-cognitive attitude, it should be the case that those who genuinely
hold the judgment have the attitude. This should apply to the
irrational as well as the rational.



Other responses to the amoralist are available consistent with
non-cognitivism. One such response is not to accept a defeasible
version of internalism, but rather to claim that amoralists do not
have genuine moral beliefs. What an amoralist expresses when she makes
a moral claim that she is disinclined to honor involves using the
moral predicate in an "inverted commas sense" - a
sense which alludes to the value judgments of others without itself
expressing such a judgment (Hare 1952, 145-6). Many cognitivists
have not found this a persuasive characterization of all amoralists
(Brink 1989, 46-7). Alternatively, non-cognitivists can point
out that a sentence can conventionally express an attitude even when
uttered by people who don't have the requisite attitude. For
example, one can apologize without feeling sorry or actually caring
about what is at issue (Joyce 2002). But it is not so easy to see how
to carry this over to the treatment of accepting a moral judgment in
the absence of uttering a moral sentence. We would like there to be
grounds to attribute the belief or acceptance of a moral judgment to
those who are silent on some grounds, and it isn't clear exactly
what resources are available to a non-cognitivist if it doesn't
involve being in some attitudinal state. Even if one can sincerely
apologize without having any special feeling or attitude as one does
so, it seems we would not say of a person that they were sorry unless
they had such an attitude. Thus the analogy with apology only takes us
so far.



Hare's most famous argument for the action-guiding character of
moral judgments is the Missionaries and the Cannibals Argument. He
suggests an example in which our translation practices seem to
indicate that when we use moral words from our home language to
translate words and concepts from another language, what is most
important to us is that native users of the language or concepts
generally use them to guide choice and action (Hare 1952,
148-9). If this is right, it establishes a connection of the
following form: Necessarily the acceptance of a moral judgment will
normally incline society members to do what is recommended by that
judgment. This version will require an intention to act or something
similar in most people much of the time, but it will not require such
an intention from everybody all of the time. The argument thus
supports a version of moderate internalism. And, according to Hare,
people who utter general commands that are directed at themselves will
normally but not invariably act in accordance with those commands
(Hare 1952, 169). So this much of prescriptivism fits with the sort of
internalism that Hare's arguments support. But, insofar as Hare
also suggests that accepting a command directed at oneself requires an
intention to act accordingly (Hare 1952, 20), he seems committed to a
closer connection between moral judgment and motivating states than
the Missionaries and Cannibals Argument vindicates.



Thus far we have been considering internalism as a reason to accept
non-cognitivism based on a sort of inference to the best explanation.
Insofar as non-cognitivism can explain the connection between
normative or moral judgments and motivation we have some reason to
accept it. But the explanations so far have relied on the positive
part of non-cognitivism - the part that connects the meanings of
moral terms to commendation or the expression of attitudes. The denial
of cognitivism so far has played no role. Since the expressivist or
prescriptivist component of non-cognitivist theories does not by
itself entail the denial of cognitivism, a cognitivist could take them
on board and explain a species of internalism just as non-cognitivists
do (Copp 2001).



There is, however, a popular non-cognitivist strategy for arguing that
they are uniquely placed to explain judgment internalism. This
strategy proceeds from the Humean idea that belief alone is incapable
of motivating action. The Humean Theory of Motivation, as it has come
to be known, postulates that motives must always be composed of
desires for some end, possibly along with some relevant means-ends
belief (Hume 1888, 413; Smith 1987). The theory is supposed to rule
out any state of mind which both qualifies as a cognitive state and
which would be sufficient to motivate action by itself without
supplementation from some independent desire. If moral judgments
necessarily motivate, even in the absence of further desires, the
theory seems to entail that they cannot be genuine beliefs. They must
be conative rather than cognitive states, or at the very least be
composites to which the non-cognitive component is essential. Even if
beliefs are also constituents of the judgment, those beliefs will not
be identical to it, since they can persist in the absence of
motivation while the moral judgments necessitate motives (Blackburn
1998, 97-100).



This argument too can be resisted by cognitivists. It presupposes a
particularly strong version of internalism. If the nature of the
necessary connection between moral judgments and motives is of a
defeasible kind, it will be possible for someone to accept the
judgment while remaining unmotivated (Korsgaard 1986; Dreier 1990;
Smith 1994). And even a stronger version of judgment internalism might
be consistent with various subjectivist cognitivist theories,
especially those which relativize the truth of moral judgments to
individual agents. Such theories can make the truth conditions for the
judgments include the presence of certain attitudes in the speaker and
claim that speakers are highly accurate in tracking that part of their
truth conditions (Harman 1978; Dreier 1990.). Furthermore, despite its
lofty pedigree, the Humean Theory of Motivation is itself subject to
dispute (Bromwich 2010; Dancy 1996; Darwall 1983; Nagel 1970; McDowell
1981; Swartzer 2013, 2018; van Roojen 1995, 2002).


### 3.4 Supervenience



It is relatively common ground among moral theorists that moral
properties supervene on non-moral properties. Two items cannot differ
in their moral properties without differing in some non-moral property
as well. Or to put the point in terms more suited to the
non-cognitivist, virtually all agree that it is inappropriate to treat
two items as morally distinguishable without believing that they are
also distinguishable in some other way. If two actions are otherwise
indistinguishable, labeling one as good thereby commits one to
labeling the other as good. Often this thesis is put as the claim that
moral properties supervene on natural properties, and this has the
advantage of leaving open the possibility of the moral properties
turning out to be among the natural properties.



Some non-cognitivists have argued that this seemingly uncontroversial
datum supports their theories against rival alternatives. Hare seems
to have introduced the term 'supervenience' to the
philosophical literature (Hare 1952, 145) and he suggested that his
own theory, universal prescriptivism, was uniquely placed to explain
it. Insofar as moral prescriptions were by their nature universal they
would prescribe or proscribe any action which was sufficiently similar
to the action up for evaluation. Thus Hare included supervenience as
one of the phenomena that any adequate metaethical theory should
explain and he counted it as a point in favor of his theory that it
did so. But the feature of his theory that did the explanatory work
was not its non-cognitivism - rather it was that it required the
judgments to be universal in the ways he specified. In fact, Hare
himself suggested that the supervenience of moral judgments on
descriptive features was part and parcel of these judgments having a
secondary descriptive meaning (Hare 1963, 7-22).



Other contemporary expressivist theories can use a similar approach to
explaining supervenience. Take a version of expressivism which says
that a moral judgment that such and such an action is wrong predicates
a nonmoral property of that action and at the same time expresses
disapproval of that property. This too will explain supervenience,
insofar as the speaker will be committed by that moral judgment to
disapproving of anything else with that property. Gibbard's
(1990) world-norm pair apparatus in which the judgments express
attitudes towards norms that pick out actions by their natural
features will generate the same sort of result. (His 2003 update
inherits this feature as will be explained below.) Thus each of these
theorists is able to explain supervenience. Many cognitivist theories
can also explain supervenience. Reductive naturalists get the
supervenience of the moral on the natural for free. If moral
properties just are natural properties, there should be no surprise if
two items cannot differ in their moral properties without also
differing in their natural properties (Dreier 1993). And while
nonreductive naturalists and even nonnaturalists may have to offer
explanations, it isn't obvious that these explanations must
fail. (McPherson ; van Roojen 2023) We might thus conclude that
supervenience does not favor either cognitivism or
non-cognitivism.



Simon Blackburn, however, argues that the phenomenon of supervenience
especially favors non-cognitivism. According to Blackburn, it is not
just the simple fact that moral properties supervene on nonmoral
properties that needs to be explained. Nor is it just that appropriate
moral predication must supervene on nonmoral predication, to put the
point in a way that does not beg the question against non-cognitivism.
It is rather to explain how honoring the supervenience constraint can
be a requirement of linguistic competence, even while there is no
analytic entailment from nonmoral claims to moral claims. In other
words, what needs explaining is how supervenience can be a conceptual
requirement even while there is no analytic equivalence between moral
properties and any non-moral property. Blackburn thinks that we
require such an explanation even if there are metaphysically or
nomically necessary connections between moral and nonmoral terms or
properties. For, he thinks, it is hard to see how such nomic or
metaphysical connections could justify the analytic status of the
supervenience thesis. People can be ignorant of nomic necessities for
it is an empirical matter what natural laws govern our world. And they
might be ignorant of certain metaphysical necessities while knowing
all the truths about the meanings of their terms. So these necessities
cannot justify the apriori and analytic status that the supervenience
requirement has. Or to put the same point differently, a requirement
to recognize some constraint that one should recognize merely in
virtue of having competence with the appropriate terms cannot be
explained by citing a fact which mere linguistic competence does not
put one in a position to recognize.



Blackburn's favored explanation of the difference in status
between the two claims is roughly as follows: Moral judgments must
supervene on judgments regarding natural properties because it is the
point of moral judgments "to guide desires and choices among the
natural features of the world" (Blackburn 1993, 137). Since this
sort of explanation makes reference to our purposes in using moral
terms rather than to an independent realm of moral fact, Blackburn
thinks it supports a quasi-realist account rather than a
straightforward realist theory. He goes on to suggest that because the
explanation relies on facts about what beliefs can coexist with
linguistic competence, there is "no further inference to a
metaphysical conclusion" (Blackburn 1993, 143).



It should be obvious that Blackburn's argument is not entirely
independent of the arguments for non-cognitivism that we have already
surveyed. The claim that there is no analytic entailment from any
natural property to any moral property is simply Hume's Law
- a datum often supported through use of the open question
argument. Thus any reductive naturalist about moral properties will
deny that premise of the argument along with the validity of the open
question argument. (Dreier 1993) The thought that an explanation which
involves the practical purposes to which moral judgments are put must
favor non-cognitivism over cognitivism might well depend on accepting
a Humean division between inert beliefs and motivating desires.
Anti-Humeans just think that action-guiding purposes can be served by
beliefs concerning genuine properties (McDowell 1981; Bromwich 2010;
Swartzer 2013, 2018; van Roojen 1995). And cognitivists who agree that
the analytic status of supervenience needs explanation will not need
to deny that such explanations require claims about what the competent
can believe; on many understandings of analyticity, analytic claims
just are claims the linguistically competent must accept (Dreier
1993).



Allan Gibbard (2003) has recently proposed a new argument for the
supervenience of normative judgements grounded in his fact-prac world
apparatus as a representational device for capturing normative
judgments. Given that account of the content of normative judgments it
will turn out to be necessary that those with moral attitudes are
committed to normative judgments which treat descriptively identical
items the same for purposes of planning. This is because the plans
themselves must be formulated so as to individuate circumstances of
action using "recognitional" concepts. Thus any two
recognitionally identical circumstances will yield the same plan of
action. If Gibbard's reasons for thinking that plans must be
formulated in recognitional terms are cogent, this result would allow
the theory to explain the relevant phenomenon of supervenience. It
does not, however, show that a cognitivist theory might not do just as
well on its own terms.


### 3.5 The Distinctiveness of Moral Disagreement?



Theorists sometimes present the motivations for noncognitivism as
rooted in the distinctive nature of moral disagreement. For example,
Gibbard (1990) begins with a puzzle about how (for instance) two
people who both fully understand the prisoner's dilemma scenario
can still disagree over what it is rational for someone in such a
situation to do. It doesn't seem that they are asking after the
meaning of the word 'rational' yet there also
doesn't seem to be any descriptive fact over which they
disagree. And Stevenson (1944) begins his book by distinguishing the
kind of disagreement in play when two people disagree in their
ordinary beliefs from "disagreements in attitude" which
involve conative clash. Having made the distinction he suggests that
moral disagreements involve both, and then uses that diagnosis to
motivate his own noncognitivism as developed in the rest of the
book.



While each of these theorists highlights disagreement, it seems that
disagreement is only part of what generates the argument for
noncognitivism. On one reading, Gibbard's argument seems to
tacitly involve one of the assumptions that makes the Open Question
Argument seem compelling - that property identities are fully
transparent to competent thinkers. Our confidence that the dispute
over what is rational in the prisoner's dilemma dispute is not
over a descriptive fact seems rooted in the stipulation that all the
descriptive facts are clear to both thinkers. But that stipulation
only settles the matter if we further assume that the identity of
rationality and the property picked out the the relevant description
(if indeed there is such and identity) will be transparent to the
parties to the dispute. So this reading of Gibbard's argument
will have it stand or fall with the Open Question Argument.



On a second reading of Gibbard's argument it emphasizes the
distinctive practical or action-guiding nature of moral concepts. What
any purely descriptive account of the dispute leaves out is that the
parties disagree about what to do when in a prisoner's dilemma.
This version of Gibbard's point aligns with Stevenson's
- there is a kind of practical disagreement that purely
cognitive analyses of moral arguments leave out. If that is the point
of adverting to disagreement we are back with the motivating concerns
discussed in section 3.3. So it may be best to just think of
disagreement as highlighting these prior ideas.


## 4. Problems, Objections and Response Strategies



One strategy of objection to non-cognitivism is to find fault with the
main motivating ideas. We have already surveyed many of these in the
course of discussing the arguments for non-cognitivism. We now turn to
objections resting on the content of the theory rather than its
motivations.


### 4.1 The Embedding Problem



Non-cognitivism as it is often presented is incomplete. It gives us an
account of the meanings of moral expressions in free standing
predicative uses, and of the states of mind expressed when they are so
used. But the identical expressions can be used in more complex
sentences, sentences which embed such predications. Thus far we have
not considered what the expressions might mean when so used. We say
things such as the following:



It is true that lying is wrong.
  

Lying is not wrong.
  

I wonder whether lying is wrong.
  

I believe that lying is wrong.
  

Fred believes that lying is wrong.
  

Is lying wrong?
  

If lying is wrong, he will be sure to do it.
  

If lying is wrong, then so is misleading truth-telling.



So, in addition to their analyses of unembedded predication,
non-cognitivists owe us an account of the meanings of more complex
sentences or judgments such as these. Of course there are some
desiderata we would like an adequate account to fulfill. (1) One is
compositionality; the meaning of a complex sentence embedding a moral
claim should be a function of the meaning of its parts so as to
explain the ease with which speakers can understand novel normative
sentences. (2) Another is that it should preserve and explain the
logical relations between moral judgements and other judgements which
embed them, at least for central cases. And (3), we want the account
not to require implausible verdicts in attributing attitudes to people
who use the sentences. For example, if a non-cognitivist says the
meaning of 'Lying is wrong' is to express disfavor towards
lying, that does not yet provide a good explanation of the attitude
expressed by the very same words used in many embedded contexts. When
those words occur in the antecedent of a conditional, or when a person
says, 'I wonder if lying is wrong' they they are typically
not being used to express such disapproval. The point here is not that
these desiderata cannot be satisfied. Leading contemporary
non-cognitivists have all tried to provide accounts. As it turns out,
the task is difficult and generates much controversy.



Geach thought that the second and third desiderata would be especially
hard to accomplish simultaneously. Normally we believe that the status
of an argument as valid depends, at least in part, on the words not
shifting in meaning as we move from premise to premise. But the
simplest story of the meaning of moral terms, that they are devices
for expressing pro and con attitudes, seems then to require that they
mean something else when embedded in the antecedents of conditionals.
Consider the following example from Geach (1965, 463):



(P1) If tormenting the cat is bad, getting your little brother to do
it is bad
  

(P2) Tormenting the cat is bad.
  

*Ergo*, getting your little brother to torment the cat is
bad.



The argument is valid. But if the entire meaning of 'tormenting
the cat is bad' in the second premise is well explained by
saying that it is suited for use in expressing disapproval of
tormenting the cat, then that meaning cannot be the same as the
meaning it has in the first premise (which one might accept even if
one approves of tormenting cats). This doesn't show that the
expression is not being used emotively in the second premise; a
descriptivist can agree to that. But it does indicate that more will
need to be said to explain what is going on. For straightforwardly
descriptive arguments of the same form, the explanation of why the
argument is valid relies on the idea that the phrase in the antecedent
has a constant meaning that it represents both unembedded and
embedded. This is what Geach has called The Frege Point: "A
thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth
or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now
unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition" (Geach
1965, 449). As Geach saw it, if content did not remain constant across
embedded and unembedded occurrences of predicative moral sentences, we
would routinely commit a fallacy of equivocation in arguments. (It is
due to Geach's invocation of Frege in this context that the
embedding problem is often called the Frege-Geach problem. Searle 1962
independently raises a version of the same objection and some credit
W. D. Ross (1939, 34-38) with an earlier yet statement of the
objection.)



Semantic nonfactualism, the non-cognitivist commitment to the view
that moral judgments do not express propositions or predicate
properties, rules out one simple way of explaining matters. (But see
the discussion of hybrid theories below and in the supplementary
document
 Embedding Problem Response Strategies.)
 If there is no proposition expressed in normal predicative uses of
moral expressions we eliminate one candidate for a constant element
that generates relations of implication with other expressions
embedding the same form of words. Arguably we need some other
candidate to provide the commonality. As Geach noted, it isn't
plausibly the attitude expressed by the a free-standing sentence since
this feature doesn't always survive embedding as we saw. Perhaps
it might be some predictable function of this attitude. That would
serve the goal of providing a compositional semantics for the terms in
question.



It isn't just that semantic nonfactualism eliminates a candidate
for the constant element uniting embedded and unembedded uses of the
same normative expression. Such nonfactualism also serves to
complicate the semantics, because it eliminates a straightforward and
easy way of explaining how different beliefs can be inconsistent and
how one belief can commit one to another. On a standard model for
belief in general, belief content is propositional and two beliefs are
inconsistent when their contents - the propositions they are
directed at - are inconsistent. And one belief logically commits
one to another when the content of the first entails the second. Those
two ideas, plus an account of what it is for contents - that is
propositions - to be inconsistent is all you need to explain the
logical relations among beliefs. It isn't even really important
to this general point that the contents be propositions. The point is
that if you treat all beliefs as inheriting their logical properties
from the logical properties of their contents in this way, you get a
relatively simple story about attitudinal inconsistency and
commitment.



Once you say that ordinary beliefs and moral beliefs represent
different types of attitude towards their contents (if they have
contents at all) you can't any longer tell the simple story.
This remains so even if the theory can allow moral attitudes to have
contents in some sense and even if these contents are the same kind of
thing as the contents of ordinary beliefs. That's because the
different relations to those contents (taking different attitudes
towards them) will need to be taken into account. The resulting theory
will need more complicated inconsistency and inference-licensing
rules. I'll use R. M. Hare's (1952) logic of phrastics and
neustics to illustrate. Because it furthers my purpose in providing
this example I'm going to assume that sincere speech acts using
moral terms express attitudes and that these attitudes are what we
attribute when say they believe something about morality. This may be
more than Hare was committed to himself.



Hare thought we could model the logic of speech acts by employing one
element that represented a possible way things might be (the phrastic)
and a second element that in effect gave instruction for how to
interpret the point of the representation (the neustic). For our
purposes here we can think of the first element as the contents of the
attitude expressed by the speech act and it would not distort the
theory too much to say they are propositions. On this way of
presenting things, several different speech acts expressing a number
of different attitudes will all involve the same phrastic. The
differences between them will be represented by differences in the
neustic. The belief that *P* will be expressed by a speech act
which is represented by a neustic that reflects the status of
assertion and a phrastic that represents *P*. A question about
whether *P* is the case will be represented by the same
phrastic, but a different neustic - the one that represents the
speech act as a question rather than an assertion. The sentence which
expresses the thought that *P* is good (say) will also employ
this same phrastic. What distinguishes it from the first two is once
again the neustic which will reflect that this judgement is a
universal prescription to bring about *P*. This means that we
cannot compute the logical compatibility or incompatibility of two
judgements by noting the compatibility or incompatibility of their
phrastics which we are treating as their contents. The assertion of
*P* and the attitude it expresses is different from the
assertion that *P* is good and the attitude it expresses.
Standard semantic theory captures this by assigning these judgements
different contents. Within the theory which treats the phrastic as the
content, the difference must be captured by assigning them different
neustics as a reflection that they're supposed to be different
kinds of speech acts and to express different kinds of attitudes.
There isn't yet a problem with that. But insofar as the
judgements clearly have different consistency conditions and involve
different logical commitments the resulting logic must now include
principles that allow differences in attitude type to matter to
consistency and inconsistency.



Hare was aware of the point. And if we were dealing with only a few
different types of attitude and corresponding expressive speech act it
should be no difficulty at all. But once we introduce new sentences
joining the terms we have so far with logical connectives we are
likely to need to postulate yet further attitude types and to need
further principles to capture their logical properties. Such complex
sentences express attitudes that don't reduce to the attitudes
which would be expressed by either conjunct (Schroeder 2008c, 49). It
would thus be wrong to equate the attitude expressed with either
accepting the one attitude or accepting the other. Relatedly, a speech
act "asserting" a disjunction with one normative disjunct
and one non-normative disjunct should be a new kind of speech act. It
doesn't universally prescribe anything, nor (on the theory
we're working with) does it assert anything. And similarly for
the attitude expressed by that speech act. It will be a new type of
state of mind. So we'll need a new sort of neustic to capture
the kind of speech act this is. And we'll need additional rules
to tell us about the logic of speech act types represented by those
neustics.



Schroeder (2008b, 2008c) dubs the distinction between inconsistencies
that involve one attitude-type directed towards inconsistent contents,
A-type inconsistencies and contrasts them with B-type inconsistencies
which postulate inconsistencies that stem from incoherences between
the attitude types in conjuction with their contents. For example
approving of a proposition and disapproving of the same proposition is
inconsistent (if it is) not in virtue of directing one and the same
attitude at inconsistent propositions, but rather because two
allegedly incompatible attitude-types are directed at the same
proposition. And he notes that the clearest examples of genuine
inconsistency - beliefs in contradictories and intentions to
pursue inconsistent courses of action - seem to be A-type. He
further suggests that this would be a reason to prefer an A-type model
if non-cognitivists could construct one.



Non-cognitivists have developed various ingenious strategies for
constructing a theory that preserves the intuitive logical relations
between normative attitudes, non-normative attitudes and various mixed
attitudes, along with the sentences that express them. We will briefly
survey some main variants below. For a more thorough survey see the
supplementary document
 Embedding Problem Response Strategies,
 which can be read in place of the remainder of section 4.1.



Much of the recent innovation in developing non-cognitivist theories
is motivated by a desire to address the embedding problem. In what
remains of this section we will briefly survey three differing
approaches to the task, which may also be combined. These are (1)
developing a logic of the sentences by explaining how that logic falls
out of logical relations among the attitudes they express, (2)
exploiting minimalism with regard to truth and related notions to
provide an account of certain locutions, and (3) allowing the
descriptive semantic component postulated by hybrid expressivist
theories to explain the logical relations among normative sentences
and attitudes.


#### 4.1.1 *A logic of attitudes*



The idea behind a logic of attitudes is to change the normal order of
explanation to explain why normative sentences and attitudes bear the
logical relations that they do to other sentences and attitudes. As
noted above, standard cognitivist accounts of a domain of discourse
will explain the consistency or inconsistency of states of mind by
citing the consistency or inconsistency of that state's content,
that is what it represents. The belief that dogs howl is inconsistent
with the belief that dogs don't howl because their contents
(that dogs do or don't howl) are inconsistent with one another.
And similarly for the sentences expressing those beliefs. Since
noncognitivists don't postulate such representational contents
they can't deploy that explanation. But they might still be able
to do justice to the fact that normative judgments and sentences stand
in logical relations to one another if they can explain how the
judgments themselves stand in certain logical relations to to one
another and then go on to explain that the sentences are inconsistent
just because they express judgments that are inconsistent.



One such approach has been to suggest that the complex moral or
normative judgments are higher order attitudes aimed at the judgements
that would be expressed by the sentences which they embed. These
higher order attitudes might either be complex beliefs (Blackburn
1971) or further non-cognitive judgments (Blackburn 1984) expressed by
the corresponding complex sentences. The hope is that these judgments
will have rational connections to the other judgments that are likely
to play a role in valid arguments. If all goes well, a kind of
pragmatic incoherence or irrationality will be involved when someone
accepts the judgments of a valid argument so analyzed while at the
same time rejecting the conclusion. Such a speaker would be in a state
similar to those uttering sentences of the sort that feature in
Moore's paradox, such as 'It is raining but I don't
believe that it is.'



A simple example of this sort of approach comes from Blackburn.
Conditionals express higher order attitudes towards accepting certain
conjunctions of attitudes. "If lying is wrong, telling your
little brother to lie is wrong," (when sincerely uttered)
expresses approval of making disapproval of getting one's
brother to lie "follow upon" disapproval of lying.



> 
> ...Anyone holding this pair [the above attitude, plus the
> attitude expressed by 'lying is wrong'] must hold the
> consequential disapproval: he is committed to disapproving of getting
> little brother to lie, for if he does not his attitudes clash. He has
> a fractured sensibility which cannot itself be an object of approval.
> (Blackburn 1984, 195)
> 



Logical entailments involving moral judgments are explained as
follows: A constellation of attitudes which includes the attitudes
expressed by the conditional and by the seemingly assertive premises
but not those expressed by the conclusion is irrational, because it
goes against the purposes of moral discourse. Somewhat more
sophisticated ways of developing this strategy can be worked out but
the basic idea is well exemplified in this proposal. The logic of
attitudes strategy has met with much resistance on the part of
cognitivists. One line of thought is that these proposals conflate
genuine inconsistency with mere pragmatic incoherence (Hale 1986;
Schueler 1988; Brighouse 1990; Zangwill 1992; van Roojen 1996). And
non-cognitivists have responded with increasingly more sophisticated
proposals about the logic of attitudes, including several proposals
that do not employ higher order attitudes (Baker & Woods 2015;
Blackburn 1988b; Gibbard 1990, 2003; Horgan and Timmons 2006b;
Schroeder 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, Silk 2015). These are discussed in more
detail in the supplementary document
 Embedding Problem Response Strategies.


#### 4.1.2 Minimalism



Some have suggested that minimalism or deflationism about truth or
truth aptness can allow non-cognitivists to bypass some of the above
debates. (Stoljar 1993) A very rough characterization of minimalism
about truth will hopefully suffice to explain. Minimalist theories are
often presented by contrast with theories of truth according to which
truth is some sort of "substantial" relation or property.
For example correspondence theories which claim that truth involves a
real relation between truth-bearers and reality are often cited as
paradigm cases of a substantial theory of truth. Most minimalists
about truth suggest that truth is not such a substantial property.
Different minimalists formulate their positive claims in somewhat
different ways. One version suggests that all you need to know to
understand the 'is true' locution is that it is
appropriate to use it in conjunction with any indicative sentence
which is itself appropriate in the context of use. To call a sentence
true is just to assert or affirm the sentence (Ramsey 1927). There are
other variants besides this one. What we need to note is just that the
suggestion helps explain the meaning of normative sentences in only
one embedded context, namely the one in which it is embedded along in
an 'is true' construction. Extensions of this minimalist
strategy have attempted to deploy minimal conceptions of other notions
such as truth-aptness, proposition (Horwich 1990, 18-22) and
more besides to extend the account to normative sentences seeming to
employ these notions. The explanations allow noncognitivists to
explain our use of terms that seem to express realist commitments.
Still it is a further step to conclude that this will enable
noncognitivists to use them to do the same explanatory work as
realists do when they use those terms. But in fact some minimalists
have even claimed that they do. Discussion of those proposals is found
in the supplementary document
 Embedding Problem Response Strategies.
 Some of the points about order of explanation in section
 5.2
 below are also relevant to the issue of how much work minimalism can
really do.


#### 4.1.3 Piggybacking on the Descriptive Content in a Hybrid Theory



We noted earlier that non-cognitivists have long granted to evaluative
utterances and thoughts some secondary "descriptive
meaning" and that hybrid theorists have gone on to give that
descriptive content nearly co-equal status. One motivation for such
views is rooted in a strategy for solving the embedding problem:
Hybrid theorists hope to explain logical relations among moral
judgements by using the descriptive component of meaning to do much of
the work. Hybrid theorists have differed over whether the
non-cognitive component is expressed semantically by some component of
the sentence or pragmatically. Still hybrid theorists tend to agree
that the belief contents are part of the semantic values of the
sentences that express them (Jackson 1999, Barker 2000; Copp 2001;
Ridge 2006a, 2006b, 2014; Boisvert 2008; Copp 2009). This would seem
to entail that these sentences are inconsistent with any judgement
that a sentence expressing only the belief component would be
inconsistent with. Hybrid theorists can thus use the alleged
descriptive component of the meanings of moral judgments to generate
most of the required logical relations that moral judgements bear to
other judgements, supplementing the basic account just enough to
account for complications introduced by the non-cognitive component of
relevant judgements.



Cognitivists have raised doubts about the adequacy of several of these
proposals due to the manner in which the descriptive meaning is
determined by many of these theories (van Roojen 2005; Schroeder 2009)
and how they can be used to communicate the content they allegedly
have (Schroeder 2009). Hybrid theorists have, of course, resisted
these complaints (Alm 2007, Ridge 2007; Eriksson 2010). and hybrid
theories that take epithets and slurs as their model aren't
subject to the same objections (Copp 2001, 2009; Boisvert 2008). A
more thorough discussion of these issues can be found in the
supplementary document
 Embedding Problem Response Strategies.


### 4.2 The Wishful Thinking Objection, Moral Reasoning, and Moral Uncertainty



A well-known objection to non-cognitivism pays close attention to the
distinction between explaining logical relations on the one hand, and
explaining the use of moral judgments in reasoning on the other. Even
if the embedding problem is solved, so that we know what moral
utterances mean and what complex sentences embedding them also mean,
we might still think it irrational to reason in accordance with
ordinary logical principles applied to such judgments. The basic idea
here is that conditionals with moral antecedents and nonmoral
consequents should, together with the moral judgment in the
antecedent, license acceptance of the consequent. Thus someone who
accepts such conditionals would be rational to infer the consequent
upon coming to accept the antecedent. But if expressivism is correct,
accepting the antecedent just is holding a non-cognitive attitude.
Thus the licensed inference is really a form of wishful thinking, for
a non-cognitive change of attitude has licensed a change of belief.
For example, suppose someone accepts a judgment expressible by saying,
"If doing an action is wrong, George will do it." Normally
we think that it would be rational for that person to infer the belief
that George will hit Sam upon coming to accept that hitting Sam is
wrong. But according to non-cognitivism, coming to accept that hitting
Sam is wrong is just a change of non-cognitive attitude, and it can
seem wrong to think that a change in such attitudes can rationalize a
change in belief. It looks like the non-cognitivist is committed to
approving of something analogous to wishful thinking. That is they
believe something, not because of a change in their evidence but
because of a change in attitude alone (Dorr 2002). Enoch (2003)
presents an early response which is criticized in (Schroeder 2011,
chapter 9). See also (Budolfson 2011; Lenman 2003; Mabrito 2013;) who
generally support the idea that solving the Frege-Geach problem will
be sufficient for handling Dorr's wishful thinking objection.
But van Roojen (2019) argues that Dorr is right to want something
beyond a solution to Frege-Geach. Logic can rule out certain
combinations of belief, but does not on its own tell us which member
of a bad combination to get rid of. But the difference between good
and bad reasoning may depend on which is retained, and this in turn
depends on one's evidence. Dorr's argument might then
suggest that noncognitivists need to explain how the relevant
noncognitive attitudes can relate badly or well to such evidence. And
this may contravene Humean arguments for noncognitivism.



Another issue to do with moral reasoning has to do with uncertainty,
insofar as we can be uncertain of our moral judgements and this will
affect how we reason with them. Michael Smith (2002) argues that
non-cognitivists have insufficient resources to distinguish variations
in moral certainty from differences in both the perceived importance
of what is being judged right or wrong and in the stability of such
judgements under the influence of new information. The gradable
dimensions of desire seem to be strength and stability. If strength is
used to represent importance and stability to capture stability of
judgements in the face of new information, desires will lack a
dimension to represent the certainty with which the moral judgement is
held. Cognitivists, by contrast, can allow perceived importance to be
captured by a further belief - the belief that the matter is of
a certain importance. So they can let certainty just be a matter of
credence and robustness in the face of new evidence be just what it
seems. Non-cognitivists, as usual, won't just concede the point.
Rather they will explain how their theories have the resources to make
the needed distinctions. Lenman (2003c), Sepielli (2012), Eriksson and
Francen Olinder (2016), and Ridge (2020) are responses in this
vein. A series of papers and a book by Krister Bykvist and co-authors
(Bjorkholm, Bykvist, & Olson, 2021; Bykvist & Olson 2009,
2012, 2017; MacAskill, Bykvist & Ord 2020) criticizes each of the
afformentioned noncognitivist proposals. Finally, Staffel (2019)
offers an original account of credence for non-cognitivists and
responds to Smith's argument along the way.


### 4.3 Non-cognitivism and Relativism



It has seemed obvious to many that non-cognitivism has much in common
with various relativist metaethical views. Though non-cognitivists may
deny that the truth values of moral judgments are relative to speakers
or agents and their attitudes, non-cognitivists do accept a
constitutive connection between a speaker's attitudes and their
moral judgements. Specifically, non-cognitivists hold that it is
semantically appropriate for a person to utter a moral judgment
whenever she wishes to express the relevant non-cognitive attitude.
This has led some to suggest that noncognitivists must agree with old
fashioned subjectivists about the truth conditions for moral
utterances. (Jackson and Pettit 1998; Suikkanen 2009; Peacocke 2004)
Many noncognitivists in fact believe that there are few rational
constraints on holding the relevant attitudes. And then it is hard to
see how consistent moral judgments can be mistaken (Carnap 1937, 30;
Hare 1963, 110). Thus if relativism is problematic, it may seem that
non-cognitivism inherits the problems. Still, it is worth noting that
arguments to this effect import extra premises that noncognitivists do
not and need not accept. Semantic appropriateness need not (and should
not if expressivists are right) be construed as truth. Expressivists
think that it is semantically appropriate to use a moral sentence when
one has the attitude that it expresses. This commitment is parallel to
the claim that it is semantically appropriate to use "Grass is
green" when one believes that grass is green. (Schroeder 2014,
see also Barker 2000 and Dreier 2004a) That a cognitivist should agree
that this use is appropriate does not commit cognitivists to the claim
that the truth of "Grass is green" turns on one's
beliefs.



Non-cognitivists claim that whether or not a moral judgment is
mistaken is itself a matter for moral theorizing. A speaker should
only call a moral judgment true if he or she accepts that judgment. A
speaker who expresses his or her acceptance of relativism in the
normal way might say something such as "They're both
saying something true". This might seem to be expressing
commitment to a very deferential moral theory - one according to
which each agent should just do what she believes is right. The
non-cognitivists who adopt this response argue that this natural
interpretation of such claims is correct. What may seem to be a higher
level metaethical claim - that no consistent set of moral
judgments is mistaken - , is really just another moral judgment
and hence one which would be rejected by any moral judge with
substantive moral commitments (Blackburn 1998, 296 & 304; Timmons
1999; Horgan and Timmons 2006c). If this line of argument works it
will allow non-cognitivism to gain the allegiance of those who wish to
deny relativism while giving the motivations that lead to both it and
non-cognitivism their due.


### 4.4 Capturing The Varieties of Normative Thought Within A Non-cognitivist Metaethic



Many think it a desideratum in metaethical theorizing that a candidate
theory be consistent with all or most normative theories actually
defended by serious normative ethical proponents. This idea has played
some role in the debate over the embedding problem insofar as some of
the proposals have been inconsistent with substantive positions taken
in the debate about the possibility of moral dilemmas (Gibbard 1990,
88; Shea 2024; van Roojen 1996, 324). But even aside from that
particular issue, the desideratum can make a good deal of work for the
non-cognitivist because of the variety of kinds of moral theory and
the variety of differing but allegedly consistent judgments proposed
by theorists.



As a simple example, non-cognitivists need to be able to distinguish
is that judgements of rightness from judgments of goodness. According
to standard non-consequentialist theories, rightness and goodness can
come apart. In other words, a right action can be such as not to
produce the most goodness. Of course consequentialists deny this, and
non-consequentialists who use agent-relative values to specify the
rightness of actions can also deny that rightness and goodness come
apart in this way (Broome 1991, chapter 1). But even if they are
incorrect as a matter of substantive moral philosophy, it would seem
that competent moral judges can hold views of the sort described
without contradiction. Non-cognitivists would like to be able to give
an explanation of this consistent with their analyses. Hence they need
a way of distinguishing the psychological states involved in making
the two sorts of judgment.



A salient strategy for distinguishing rightness and goodness
judgements might be to claim that they attach to different things
- rightness to actions and goodness to states of affairs. Still
it seems that competent speakers can and do consistently judge certain
actions right but not good. A different strategy would be to
distinguish varieties of positive attitudes such that one sort
involves a kind of approval distinctive of rightness, whereas another
involves a kind distinctive of goodness. Yet another method would be
to use something like the two step approach Gibbard uses when he
analyzes judgments of rightness in terms of judging it rationally
appropriate to feel guilt and anger at certain actions. The approval
could be all of the same sort, but the objects of approval might be
feelings of guilt in one case and feelings of sorrow in the other,
even when these feelings are directed at one and the same object such
as an action. No doubt there are other available strategies so the
problem does not by itself constitute an objection. It can however
complicate the task of constructing an adequate non-cognitivist
theory, especially since it can impact the force of other objections
as with the embedding problem and moral dilemmas noted above.



Section 4.1 above explained the embedding problem, which involves
coming up with a compositional theory of meaning for sentences that
embed indicative moral sentences. And the discussion in that section
was largely focussed on embeddings involving operations such as
negation, conjunction, disjunction and conditionalization and the
logical adequacy of various accounts of these. We also embed moral and
normative sentences in attitude reports involving a variety of
attitudes. It seems plausible that noncognitivists should interpret
belief reports such as "Jasmine believes that lying is
wrong," to attribute to Jasmine the attitude (which according to
expressivism) is expressed by 'lying is wrong'. But we can
attribute other attitudes towards what a cognitivist might think to be
the same proposition. Jasmine might wonder whether lying is wrong, or
wish it was not wrong. Or be glad that it is. The noncognitivist will
need an account of what it is to have these attitudes and this account
will need to fit coherently with their account of what it is to
believe that lying is wrong. This is what Schroeder (2010 at 84) calls
the "Many Attitudes problem". See also Carr (2015),
Kohler (2017), Shiller (2017), Beddor (2020a) and Baker
(2021)



Relatedly, noncognitivists will want to distinguish moral judgements
from aesthetic judgements and from other favorable or unfavorable
attitudes, if only to distinguish genuine disagreement from seeming
disagreement. Alex Miller (2003 at 43-51) dubs this the
"Specification Problem" and it is taken up by Merli (2008)
and Bjornsson & McPherson (2014). (Blackburn 1998 at
13-14 professes skepticism that such a division can be
made.)


## 5. Can The Cognitivist/Non-cognitivist Distinction Be Sustained?



Non-cognitivist success in handling the embedding problem and related
worries about reasoning would put non-cognitivists in a stronger
argumentative position. But some commentators have suggested that
success at this endeavor might be a mixed blessing. Success may
indicate not that non-cognitivism is the right account of moral
judgments, but instead that the contrast with cognitivism is not stark
enough to make out a real distinction. Perhaps the distinction between
cognitivism and non-cognitivism collapses as non-cognitivist theories
are modified to capture all of the phenomena that cognitivists
challenge them to explain. While both its advocates and those who
argued strenuously against it would likely find themselves somewhat
disoriented if this were correct, it does seem that non-cognitivists
would be most upset by this result. For their position was defined by
denying key components of standard realist positions. If the
cognitivist/non-cognitivist dichotomy does not hold up, it would seem
to show either that the standard positions were not after all
committed to those components, or that those commitments could not be
avoided by plausible theories.



Early versions of non-cognitivism did not seem subject to this sort of
objection, precisely because they did not worry much about vindicating
overall moral practice. Carnap (1937, 30-31) was happy to
convict ordinary moral thinking of error. But as non-cognitivists have
attempted to make sense of and explain most of the seemingly realist
features of moral practice, it might seem hard to sustain the claim of
a sharp contrast between factual language on the one hand and
normative language on the other. Several challenges based on roughly
this idea find a home in the recent literature.


### 5.1 Sophisticated Non-cognitivism vs. Sophisticated Cognitivist Relativism



One way to push the point is to challenge the non-cognitivist to
distinguish non-cognitivism from cognitivist relativism. A speaker
relativist is in a particularly good position to highlight the
suggestion that there is little difference between sophisticated
non-cognitivism and cognitivism. Both speaker relativists and
non-cognitivists can say that the appropriateness of a moral judgment
depends on a speaker's attitudes. If the non-cognitivist
suggests that moral judgments predicate properties in a secondary way
(perhaps to handle embedding), the cognitivist relativist can agree.
And the theories can agree that the property predicated is determined
as a function of the speaker's moral attitudes. Thus it may be
difficult to say precisely what the difference between the views is
(Dreier 1999). However, the responses used to explain why
noncognitivism doesn't immediately entail relativism in section
4.3 would also seem to show that the difficulty can be overcome.


### 5.2 Minimalism as Undermining Non-cognitivism



Another line of argument with a similar upshot proceeds from
minimalism of the sort we have already canvassed. Deflationism about
truth or truth-aptness can be used to argue that there is no room for
non-cognitivism of the sort that succeeds in vindicating much of moral
practice. If there is no more robust understanding of truth conditions
than can be secured by minimalism about truth conditions, it will be
difficult for the quasi-realist non-cognitivist to make the
distinctive negative semantic claim - that moral judgements are
never true and not the kind of thing that can be true or false. Simple
moral sentences may be truth apt if all there is to having truth
conditions is to meet minimal requirements of having a meaningful use,
being in the right mood, and combining grammatically with other
sentences to yield more complex embeddings. Furthermore, if the
minimalist strategy extends to beliefs, so that all there is to being
a belief is to be a state of mind expressible by such minimally
truth-apt sentences, moral judgements will be beliefs. The
quasi-realist program to vindicate as much of ordinary moral practice
might thus endanger non-cognitivism when carried to this extreme.
Success would leave us with no way to distinguish plausible
non-cognitivism from cognitivism.



More concretely, some semantic theorists have proposed that all that
is needed to have minimal truth conditions is for a set of judgments
to satisfy two constraints: (1) Sentences composed of the relevant
expressions must exhibit the syntactic surface features of
paradigmatic truth-apt sentences such as those used to express
ordinary assertions, and they must embed grammatically in more complex
sentences such as conditionals, propositional attitude ascriptions,
and so on. (2) Use of these expressions must exhibit a certain amount
of discipline so that there are clearly appropriate and inappropriate
conditions for using them in sentences of the form noted in the first
condition (Boghossian 1990, Wright 1993; Divers and Miller 1994).
Normative discourse seems to meet both of these constraints relatively
straightforwardly, and this may mean that moral sentences are
truth-apt and that some of them are true (Divers and Miller 1994).



Early critics of the collapse argument resisted on the basis of an
alleged constitutive connection between truth-aptness and genuinely
cognitive states. Such theorists regard it as a platitude about
indicative sentences that they are conventionally apt for making
assertions and that assertions express beliefs. If belief-expression
is one of the criteria for truth-aptness, non-cognitivists will be in
a position to use psychological non-cognitivism as a reason to deny
that moral judgments are genuinely representational even when they
meet minimalist requirements (Jackson, Oppy, Smith 1994). So-called
minimal truth conditions can remain part of the quasi-realist program
only so long as this is compatible with denying that moral judgements
express beliefs.



Partly in response to this move, minimalist defenders of the collapse
argument have moved to the notion of minimal belief. They can say that
a state of mind is a belief and hence cognitive if and only if it is
one expressed by a sentence with truth conditions. Since minimalism
secures minimal truth conditions, indicative moral sentences have
truth conditions and the states they express are beliefs. Yet if the
argument works, quasi-realist non-cognitivism would undermine its own
right to employ both of the negative constitutive claims distinctive
of non-cognitivism.



Minimalist non-cognitivists have regrouped in various ways. One way is
to resist the extension of the minimalist strategy to belief (Sinclair
2007). Another is to distinguish minimal and robust notions of belief
and representation. Minimal beliefs would need only to be states of
mind expressed in assertions by indicative sentences, while robust
beliefs would meet some stronger requirement of representationality
(Blackburn 2006). Non-cognitivism would then be committed to the view
that moral judgements did not express robust belief (Sinclair 2006;
McDonald 2012). The hope would be to contrast the entire minimalist
package with robust truth, robust truth-conditionality, and robust
belief. Such quasi-realist minimalists would be trying to find truth
conditions which are (1) sufficient to make sense of using sentences
having such truth-conditions in all of the ways that we use
paradigmatically truth-apt sentences, and (2) which still fall short
of robust representational truth conditions.



One might be a bit worried about the dialectic. If there are minimal
and non-minimal readings of all the distinctive claims that can be
used to distinguish cognitivism from non-cognitivism, we may lose our
grip on the distinction between the positions (Dreier, 2004b). Dreier
(2018) suggests that the distinction between genuinely realist
theories (of which nonrelativist cognitivism is an instance) and
anti-realist theories (of which noncognitivism and relativism are
instances) has to do with the order of explanation. According to
anti-realist theories, entities or properties such as proposition,
property, truth, truth conditions, and representation are explained by
our use of terms for them in our thought and talk. Realists on the
other hand think that our thought and talk is explained by these
entities or properties. If this can be defended, we can distinguish
minimalist and nonminimalist uses of the terms and ideas in question.
The distinction between cognitivists and noncognitivists can then be
made using the non-minimalist reading. But this may undercut the
ability of noncognitivists to use minimalism beyond making sense of
seemingly realist linguistic constructions. For minimal propositions,
properties, and so on will likely not be suited to do much explanatory
work of the sort that robust propositions, properties, and so on are
suited for. The discussion continues. (Golub 2017, 2021; Simpson 2018,
2020)



It is in any case controversial whether the minimalist proposal is
viable, either for truth conditionality or for belief, let alone for
further extensions beyond these (Dreier 2006; Dunaway 2010).


### 5.3 Non-cognitivist Overreaching and Possible Collapse



One final sort of worry about the distinctiveness of non-cognitivism
is worthy of mention. This worry is that if too many domains of
discourse are such that they require non-cognitive analysis, the
contrast between cognitive and non-cognitive domains on which the view
depends will be hard to sustain. Blackburn, for example, suggests
quasi-realist approaches not just to moral discourse, but also to
modality, causation and probability. One may wonder what he means to
deny about these domains that is not also applicable to the rest of
our seemingly contentful judgments (Rosen 1998). Huw Price, along with
various others, has argued for global expressivism. (Price and
O'Leary-Hawthorne 1996; Macarthur and Price 2007; Price 2013,
2015) On such views the notion that any language is representational
is called into question. This kind of collapse is in danger of
assimilating the putatively cognitive and the putatively non-cognitive
from the other direction - by making the former look more like
the latter, rather than the other way around as with the worries about
minimalism. Even Blackburn himself on occasion expresses worries about
this problem (Blackburn 1993, 34), but more commonly he and other
non-cognitivists resist the worry by pointing to other domains of
discourse which are not amenable to non-cognitivist analysis. Simpson
(2020) argues that the most promising version of global expressivism
should be understood so as not to contradict local expressivism.


## 6. Conclusion



Non-cognitivism first came on the scene as a rather starkly drawn
alternative to prevailing cognitivist and realist construals of moral
discourse. As it developed to enable it to explain features of moral
discourse relied on by its critics, the view became more subtle and
presented a less stark contrast with realist positions. The main
negative claims were often somewhat moderated. For example, the claim
that moral judgments had no descriptive meaning evolved into a claim
that any such meanings were secondary. The claim that moral judgments
could not be true or false became the claim that they could be true or
false only in a minimal or deflationary sense. Not all of the shifts
have been embraced by all non-cognitivists, but it is fair to say that
current versions are more complex and subtle than the theories from
which they descend. As a result the arguments for and against the
views have gotten rather intricate and even technical. That trend is
likely to continue for at least a while longer as ideas from other
areas of philosophy are employed to further hone the objections and
fill out the responses to them.