Topics Ethics

Question What is the difference between Emotivism and Quasi-realism? Wikipedia says that Emotivism is '... a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes', and that Quasi-realism is '... the meta-ethical view which claims that: Ethical sentences do not express propositions.Instead, ethical sentences project emotional attitudes as though they were real properties.' It is said that these two theories stand in opposition to each other.

Accepted:
June 2, 2015

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This is not an easy question

This is not an easy question to answer! Part of the difficulty is that quasi-realism is a very technical theory. So I can start by saying that Wikipedia is not quite right…

Quasi-realism can be understood as a descendant of emotivism, and both theories claim that ethical sentences express emotional attitudes. They agree that these attitudes are not representations of how the world is; they can’t be true or false. But the two theories disagree on further details about ethical language and how it functions. There is even disagreement within emotivism. Ayer’s emotivism takes the expression of emotion as central: in saying that an action is wrong, I’m not making any further factual claim about it, but expressing my moral disapproval, he says. Stevenson’s emotivism argued that the purpose of ethical language is not merely to express how we feel but to influence how we and others behave, to motivate us to act in certain ways and not others.

Blackburn’s quasi-realism argues that ethical language is rather more complex than either emotivist theory claims. First, ethical language does express propositions, such as ‘what she did was courageous’ or ‘his remark was unkind’ as well as ‘murder is wrong’. The predicates ‘was courageous’, ‘was unkind’, ‘is wrong’, attribute a property to something (what she did, his remark, murder). However, second, these predicates aren’t genuine descriptions of what she did, etc. but ‘projections’ of our evaluations. In using ethical language, we don’t speak of and think in terms our personal evaluations, but in terms of the properties of things in the world. We treat our evaluative commitments (to courage, to kindness etc.) as though they were judgments about how the world is. This is enormously useful, because it is much easier to coordinate our attitudes with other people if we think in terms of an intersubjective world of moral properties. Third, this isn’t simply a mistake or illusion. Quasi-realism argues that we can meaningfully talk of moral judgments being true or false. These are all important differences from emotivism.

If moral judgments don’t ascribe genuine properties to actions, how can they be true or false? We shouldn’t think that our evaluations make something right or wrong – that’s a confusion. We can only talk about things being right or wrong from within some evaluative perspective; but having a certain perspective is not a reason for something being right or wrong. For instance, suppose I kick a dog, and you tell me off. The fact that you disapprove of my action doesn’t make it wrong, nor do you think this (I shall assume!). Rather, what makes my action wrong is the pain it causes the dog.

But don’t people simply have different evaluative perspectives? If so, how can we talk about truth in ethics? Because nobody’s perspective is perfect (and if they think it is, that’s so arrogant it shows that their evaluations are perfect!). ‘True’ ethical statements are those that form part of the ‘best’ set of attitudes we can have, and the best set is what results from improving our attitudes as much as possible. There are not may ‘liveable, unfragmented, developed, consistent, and coherent systems of attitude’, says Blackburn.