Counterarguments to emotivism?

One argument from an anti-realist perspective is that this doesn't seem to align with what people mean by morality. Ie. when someone says X is immoral, they do not merely mean they dislike X, but also seem to be asserting that other people should not do X in some kind of objective sense.

I think this observed intent of morality doesn't really square with the argument that "morality is a special kind of emotion". We could certainly argue that it underlies morality: that people are only stating the moral beliefs they hold because of an underlying emotive stance towards the thing. Likewise we could claim the only "real" part of morality, and that they are mistaken in taking this objecitve stance and the emotivism is the only true part of it, or that this is what people should mean by morality.

However, it seems like this should correctly be interpreted as anti-realism. Sure, this thing that looks a bit like morality exists, but it doesn't contain important properties that are included in what most people mean by morality, and so is false. If someone believes their lights come on by magic, but we look and see it's actually electricity, we don't say "It turns out magic actually exists - it's just another word for electricity, because those words mean different things, even if, for this person, they were functionally interchangable in this situation.

So you could argue that this is only a claim for the existence of "shmorality", nor morality: that emotivism is the "electricity" to morality's "magic" - it exists, and does the same things the person ascribed to "magic", but fundamentally, those words still mean different things, and the actual thing they mean by morality, with its reliance on objective truth still doesn't exist.

Could you clarify whether you are talking about the psychology of morality - that is, how people make moral judgments and how "moral" considerations constrain or guide behaviors.

Or instead whether you are talking about metaethics - that is, independent of how humans answer moral questions, how can moral statements ultimately be justified and what exactly do moral terms like "obligation" and "blameworthy" really mean.

Your question relates to both of these things. First on the the psychological side of things. The idea that, at bottom in the moral sphere, everything is based foundationally just on on how something feels is called Social Intuitionism. Jonathan Haidt defends this view, saying that the actual arugments we make come after our feelings and act as post-hoc justifications. This is meant to counter earlier moral psychology that treats moral judgment as a form of rational processing. And again this contrasts something like Josh Greene's Duel Process view, where, it is argued there are two mental processes, one emotive and one rational and they often conflict and give different answers to moral questions. The two processes are argued to serve different adaptive functions and they reside in different areas of the brain.

There is a place to start to see where the arguments between these positions began, but really, this is early stuff in moral psych and things have changed a lot since then with more updated views. I didn't want to make this comment too big to talking about them but happy to say more.

Now, onto the philosophical side of things which somewhat mirrors psychology. Emotivism, as the term is traditionally used, doesn't argue that "morality is a special kind of emotion" only that it is the result of normal "moral" emotions like anger and disgust and guilt etc. (The study of "Moral Emotions" is also a big topic in psychology, see for example, the work of Roger Giner-Sorolla). I believe Emotivism originated with A.J. Ayer and this is just one view among a few different kinds of non-cognitivism. And the arguments against non-cognitivism come from the cognitivists (which either argue for Moral Realism or (J.L. Mackie's Error Theory).

Note that it could be true that the way humans answer moral questions is purely based on emotion and post-hoc reasoning and yet the "real" answers to moral questions could be true or false (i.e. psychological emotivism + ethical cognitivism)

So it all comes down to whether one wants to explain what humans are doing (i.e. psychology, see Fiery Cushman, Kurt Grey, Josh Greene etc) or what morality is (i.e. metaethics, see Bentham, Mill, Kant, Hume, Aristotle, Parfit, Darwal, Railton).

Personally I am a fan Alonzo Fyfe's Desirism which is a kind of moral realism but this is a niche position.

I do agree that morality is linked with emotion. I think that morality has largely the same origin and type of function as other socially related emotions like shame: an evolved characteristics that help us make the right choice (from an evolutionary point of view!). It is no coincidence that what is considered immoral is also frequently felts as disgusting.

But for me morality is also frequently linked to values in a more intellectual way, like, of course, for example in effective altruism. In this case, it seems to me that the emotion part is not directly linked with morality and that morality is constructed rather than felt.

Most people who see moral truths as silly or logically impossible conceptualize them as these supernatural floating commandments that exist independently of any life, evolution and society. That makes no sense, so they reject such a thing.

But there are more naturalist accounts of moral truths that mean something different. Objective morality in this sense could be something like general priciples of game theory that "exist" logically just like math does. And humans (and other social animals) discover them via evolution because stuff like "cooperation helps survival" has broad usefulness. It's mind independent/non-subjective in a sense that prefering different moral behavior principles doesn't make it so, reality is what it is. Not in a sense that it has nothing to do with human brains.

I think your position is correct, but not sure if calling it emotivism is fitting. I find the standard emotivist account lacking as it conflates the whole thing into expressing personal feelings. But sometimes people say that something is morally right even if they don't want it to be, and even if they struggle to act on it. There's an underlying system of "rules of life" that can be reasoned about, of which "eww, I disapprove" type expressions is just one aspect.

I guess in the end it doesn't matter what you label it, as long as it's the right picture of how morality works and what can be expected in terms of finding answers.

I don't have a strong objection to the overall model, having been sympathetic to it for a while by way of Simon Blackburn.

However, I do want to point out you may be leaning too heavily on evolutionary pressures in your account.

This presents the risk of underestimating cultural effects and just-so-storifying things to fit. Some norms, such as 'cannibalism bad', are heavily culture-dependent and not universal. While evolutionary pressures do have an input, I doubt the biological 'platform' is that different between groups that do practice it vs. ones that do not.

If anything, the cultural pressure can likely override the evolutionary ones - I recall reading about a culture that not only mandates cannibalism as a form of funerary rites, but has its members actively suppressing nausea in order to fulfill the norm.

It would be interesting to verify if it holds up in isolation, because you could argue this is a matter of group coercion. If not, then the 'installed' moral intuitions are stronger than biological ones.

You can define anything any beings experience or think away this same way, like free will. Start from how consciousness / qualia is often dealt with: "it's emergent". So, if that is "not real", then anything else beings experience isn't real, is just an emotion, which is just chemistry..

But it doesn't actually prove that your definiton is right, or a/the sensible one.

Same as with "free will", you can for example start to look at measuring it. Being free has different aspects, so does "having free will" when looked from practical (and not some "we have this model of universe called physics") viewpoint. The same goes to morality. You can try to define it from "what is good for me/you/us", "what does compassion mean", or some other viewpoint. But defining it on lower level leads to same kind of perhaps too easy argumentation "it's not real, it's emergent (emerging from complexity)". How about starting from the word "real"? I don't know, I have dishes to make..

Emotivism might be a logically sound idea, and may even be a good scientific explanation as to why humans have morality at all, but to me it misses the mark of being what a philosophy is actually supposed to be. A philosophy is supposed to provide justification as to why humans should act a specific way independent of a threat of punishment.

Emotivism is an incredibly weak as a philosophy for justifying “Why” I shouldn’t kill my father. If the only reason is because “You’re biologically programmed not to want to”, then there should be nothing immoral about killing my father if that’s what I want to do. My emotions are telling me I want a new Ferrari so I should kill him and inherit his IRA, and not telling me not to kill my father. If morality is simply emotion, and I lack that specific emotion, then to me, there is no morality in that case, or perhaps even worse, my morals tell me to kill my father.

You can even imagine cases where the baseline emotion is towards immorality. Many children will steal a candy or snack if they get the chance and it’s only after punishment or the threat of punishment, do may children realize stealing something is wrong.

The whole philosophy seems to me to be a fair and reasonable scientific explanation as to why the concept of morality arose in the first place, but a very poor argument as to why we should or should not do certain actions now. Objective philosophies might not have the scientific grounding to reasonably claim their true objectivity, but I’d much rather buy into a philosophy that actually attempts to justify why I should follow it, rather than one that just describes why we have philosophy.

Emotivism as you’ve described it here reads like an explanation of our sense of morality based on evolutionary psychology. You’ve presented it as an alternative to the claim that there is an objective external source of moral values. But I have one counter argument and one reason that I don’t think this is a very interesting claim:

My counter argument: morality obviously isn’t just emotions/feelings. For instance I think people who I will never meet have equal moral value to close family and people I love. I think we’ve developed a much greater appreciation for morality over the last few hundred years, but we haven’t evolved at all.

Why I don’t think it’s interesting: it relies on a false dichotomy between objective moral truth and subjective feelings - these are not the only two possible sources of morality. I don’t have to believe that it’s grounded in a perfectly objective source of morality (or feel a particular way) to believe that there are good moral reasons to act one way and not another.

By analogy, there are good evolutionary explanations for people’s subjective feelings and behaviour which do explain some of how economics works, but understanding them doesn’t undermine economics as a field of study, or mean that economics is purely just about how people feel.

Consider fairness, honesty, or keeping promises. When we talk about someone violating these moral norms, there seems to be something going on beyond "they hurt someone else's feelings".

Rather, the moral feeling of "truth is better than lies; fairness is better than unfairness; keeping promises is better than cheating" seems to be a practical model of an underlying reality.

If Alice and Bob make a pie together, and Alice says "Let's split the pie evenly" and Bob says "No, I'll take the whole pie" — Alice's proposal is symmetrical while Bob's is not. When we talk about "fairness" we seem to mean something about this sort of symmetry.

When someone chooses to tell the truth or tell a lie about something that matters to you, there's something similar going on. As Kant points out, the world where everyone tells the truth makes sense in a way, while the world where everyone lies doesn't make sense. (If everyone lied constantly, then speech would be meaningless.)

We have moral feelings about truth and fairness. But those feelings are not the ground truth of the situation; they're a way that squishy human brains model and participate in interactions that are governed by underlying mathematical rules.

Our emotions can be wrong about whether someone has violated one of these norms. A person who is accustomed to privilege can feel "unfairness" when they are treated as an equal instead of as a superior. A person can feel betrayed when in fact nobody promised them anything. There is a fact of the matter, separate from that person's feelings.

I like this stance because it seems to describe what is actually going on when people talk/think about morality, and does not make the mistake of going further.

Philosophy isn't in the business of discovering what ordinary people mean when they communicate using language. This is an empirical question. As such, you can pretty much discard any semantic thesis a philosopher (or you yourself as somebody not trained in sociolinguistics or social psychology) postulates about the "meanings of words".

My second biggest point is that it is the "bad" consequences of patricide that cause humans (via evolution) to often declare actions or outcomes inherently bad.

I don't think evolution has much to do with morality. Moral discourse is a socially driven linguistic behavior, just like legal discourse or fairy tale discourse or ghost discourse. Evolution obviously shaped us so that we could have these discourses vs for examples dogs who can't, but I don't think there's anything like a "moral sense" like there is a sense for seeing (and whether or not there is, this is an empirical question).

My biggest point is that nowhere in this causal chain do we have moral truths.

I don't really see the relevance of causality to truth. There's lots of things people call true that don't interact causally: moral truths, mathematical truths, truths about what's allowed/not allowed in sports, truths about who would win in a fight between fictional characters, and so on.

I think any system of morality is going to have to make use of emotivism, consequentialism, and deontology. In fact, if you dissect any system enough, you will find that even if a system of morality claims to be based primarily on only one of these, it smuggles in arguments based on the other two. With that said, I don't have good arguments against emotivism. Also, there is no such thing as a moral truth, because truth is descriptive and morality is prescriptive.

Frege-Geach problem

There is an idea in Judaism is that if the Torah hadn't been given to us, we could still figure out right and wrong by looking at nature.

For example, we could learn to be modest by watching how cats behave. In Tractate Eruvin it says we can learn honesty from ants and kindness from doves.

Have you read Hanno Sauer’s book Moral Thinking Fast and Slow? I recommend it:

“Secondly, there is the sentimentalism/rationalism distinction. To a large extent, empirically informed metaethics still operates within the basic distinction between sentimentalist and rationalist accounts of moral judgment (Prinz 2016). Triple Process Moral Psychology shows that the distinction between sentimentalism and rationalism about moral judgment is outdated. Moral judgment does not depend on emotion or reason – as if that dichotomy ever made much sense to begin with! – but on an integrated network of intuitive, algorithmic, and reflective types of cognitive processing. Affectively neutral and affectively hot processes can, just like automatic and controlled ones, be found across the board.

Thirdly, the Triple Process account of moral judgment and reasoning developed ultimately undermines the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism about moral judgment. Moral cognition is based, not on belief or desire, but on automatic, algorithmic, and reflective cognition. The functional profiles of these states – mind-to-world or world-to-mind direction of fit – are all over the place. Intuitions have propositional content, but are also affectively valenced; critical thinking dispositions define epistemic goals, but are fundamentally in the business of getting at the truth; moral mindware consists of crystallized knowledge structures that implement practical cognitive strategies. From this perspective, the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction seems crude at best and confused at worst. Some of it is affective, some of it is automatic, some of it is conscious. It’s all cognition.

Moral judgment is a largely intuitive enterprise, but that doesn’t make it non-rational, or place it outside of the space of reasons. It becomes part of the space of reasons because of the way moral intuitions are monitored by reflective capacities, overridden by conscious thinking, and shaped by moral mindware. This cooperation of intuition, con- scious processing and critical thinking may seem haphazard and kludgy at times, but it’s what we have to make do with. It is how finite beings reason.”

One promising line of objection is that by our own experiences, we can realise that certain things are good, and others bad. And then we can get additional results by applying various epistemic principles, i.e. that moral systems cannot be internally inconsistent, by applying the principle of no unwarranted differentiation etc.

This argument is well developed by Neil Sunanbahu, for example here:

https://philarchive.org/rec/SINTEA-3