Abstract
Propositions are abstract entities that express the content of declarative sentences, and serve as truth-bearers. Moral non-cognitivists deny that first-order moral discourse is propositional, hence is neither true nor false, while moral cognitivists hold that first-order moral discourse is propositional. Commonsense morality is cognitivist, as is the metaethical theory to which it is committed, viz., moral realism. I argue that moral realists are correct. First-order moral discourse mirrors most of the features of non-moral discourse: the conditions for meaningfulness are similar; their internal structures are similar; their formal characteristics are similar; they function similarly in arguments; etc. Cognitivists are on much firmer ground than non-cognitivists in their respective analyses of moral discourse.
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Notes
- 1.
John Dewey, in discussing the social aspect of morality, says this of the role of private soliloquy:
In language and imagination we rehearse the response of others just as we dramatically enact other consequences. We foreknow how others will act, and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed on action. We know with them; there is conscience. An assembly is formed within our breast which discusses and appraises proposed and performed acts. The community without becomes a forum and tribunal within, a judgment-seat of charges, assessments and exculpations. Our thoughts of our own actions are saturated with the ideas that others entertain about them….Explicit recognition of this fact is a prerequisite of improvement in moral education….Reflection is morally indispensable. (From John Dewey, “Morality is Social,” in The Moral Writings of John Dewey, revised edition, ed. James Gouinlock [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994]: 182–84; my emphasis)
- 2.
Actually, this may not be strictly be true. I have in mind the recent claims of success in teaching Koko, a lowland gorilla, to sign in surprisingly complex ways. Nevertheless, this point is in its fundamentals correct.
- 3.
A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952).
- 4.
Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). See Sect. 2.2.
- 5.
R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).
- 6.
See, for example, Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
- 7.
See J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Viking Press, 1977); also see his “A Refutation of Morals,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 24, Nos. 1 and 2 (1946): 77–90.
- 8.
Substitute unicorn theory if you are a partisan of ghosts. Here’s another way to put it: it would be like inquiring into the metaphysics of the members of {Ø}.
- 9.
Among English speakers, the expression ‘Oww’ is properly used in some contexts, improperly or unintelligibly in others. Much like words such as ‘cat’ and ‘go’, it too operates in rule-governed contexts. It would, for example, be odd were S to utter ‘Oww!’ while gazing upon a painting by Degas or listening to a softly-played nocturne by Chopin, but not when S hit her thumb with a hammer.
- 10.
For worthwhile discussion of objectual belief, see Robert Audi, Epistemology, 3rd edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).
- 11.
See William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1907]): Ch. 1.
- 12.
For a very useful and accessible discussion of sentences, statements, and propositions, see Susan Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
- 13.
By “empirical evidence,” it is standardly understood that one means evidence available to the five senses: visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, olfactory. Other putative senses are routinely regarded with suspicion, as occult.
- 14.
See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, esp. Ch. 1, “The Elimination of Metaphysics.”
- 15.
For a good discussion of problems with radical physical reductionism, see John F. Post, Faces of Existence (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1986).
- 16.
See, for example, Willard Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”: 20–46; and “On What There Is”: 1–19; both reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Also see Hilary Putnam, “What Is Mathematical Truth”: 60–78; and “Philosophy of Logic”: 323–58; both in Mathematics, Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). On the ineliminability of number from science, see also Post, The Faces of Existence.
- 17.
Indeed, it certainly appears that there are truths inexpressible in any possible human language, because such truths are too complex to be expressed in any language manageable by finite beings. The same applies mutatis mutandis regarding statements.
- 18.
There are concerns about whether subjunctive conditionals, such as 4n-m and 4m have determinate truth values. We will come back to this issue in Chapter 4; but for now, we shall regard them as being either true or false.
- 19.
Actually, I once had a student who disputed the baldness proposition…but what can I say?
- 20.
This is the thrust of much of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), and other posthumously published books cobbled together from Wittgenstein’s lecture notes, etc.
- 21.
We will need to revise this preliminary analysis in Chapter 4, but this will do for now.
- 22.
- 23.
In Chapter 4, I will suggest that there are answers to questions like this which are not determined by normative ethical theory.
- 24.
I refer here to literal uses of the term ‘wife’, not to analogical or figurative uses, e.g. ‘My work is my wife’.
- 25.
See John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive (University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, 2002 [1843]): Bk. I and Gottlob Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Vol. 100 (1892): 25–50; English translation as ‘On Sinn and Bedeutung,’ in M. Beaney, The Frege Reader: 151–171 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
- 26.
Quine makes the case against the analytic/synthetic distinction in inter alia his highly influential “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Quine’s work was presaged by Morton White’s “The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism,” Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 16‚ No. 3 (1951): 201–11, which was based on a paper read at the annual meeting of the Fullerton Club at Bryn Mawr College, May 14, 1949. However, it was Quine’s article that generated a huge literature.
- 27.
Beginning with H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson’s “In Defense of a Dogma,” Philosophical Review, Vol. LXV (1956): 141–58, there has been considerable pushback in support of analyticity. I discuss the legitimacy of the analytic/synthetic distinction in Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017): §5.1.
- 28.
See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1690]; and David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 29.
See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965 [1787]: 48ff.
- 30.
Whether this applies to all analytic propositions, however, is disputed. See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
- 31.
I primarily have in mind here occurrent (propositional) knowledge, where at time t, S knows that p. In such cases, if at t, S knows that p, S doesn’t need to consult sensory evidence at or prior to t. Other forms of knowing, such as tacit knowing, where p is true and even though S has ample justification to believe that p, S nevertheless does not believe that p, but because p obviously follows from other beliefs that S holds, S would believe that p given appropriate prompting, require further analysis which I can’t go into here. Note too that experience is necessary in order to acquire the epistemic/experiential background requisite to have knowledge of any kind (innate knowledge excepted, if there be such a thing); but this too is beside the point for understanding the possibility of a priori knowledge. I discuss the role of the epistemic background in “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions,” The New Intuitionism, ed. Jill Graper Hernandez (New York and London: Continuum, 2011): 48–66; and in “Disagreement and the Defensibility of Moral Intuitionism,” International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4, Issue 224 (December 2016): 487–502; and in Knowing Moral Truth: Ch. 5.
- 32.
See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic: Ch. IV.
- 33.
Note that analytic propositions may also be known a posteriori. For example, I may initially know that that p is true because of expert testimony, and later come to see that p is true “on my own,” i.e., see that it is analytically true. Thus, assuming that arithmetic propositions such as ‘563 = 175,616’ are analytic—as Ayer would accept but Kant would deny (he would consider it a synthetic proposition: more about Kant and analyticity momentarily)—I can know its truth because I was so informed by an expert mathematician, but later come to see its truth owing to my own understanding of the proposition.
- 34.
We shall spell out what makes synthetic propositions true in Chapter 4.
- 35.
Certainly not all agree. C. I. Lewis, for example, famously inveighed against synthetic a priori propositions. See his An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, IN: Open Court, 1946): Ch. VI, §13 and 14.
- 36.
It also seems that an analysis of analyticity like Ayer’s has some applicability to such cases, although he would of course deny it. My reason for this is that it seems that we in fact use the terms ‘murder’ and ‘rape’ in such a way as to connote moral wrongness. Put otherwise, it seems a violation of the rules governing the use of these terms to say that an act—any act—of murder is not at least prima facie morally wrong, or any act of rape is not at least pro tanto impermissible. But if this is correct, then according to Ayer’s own principles of analyticity, these are analytic propositions, and therefore members of a class of first-order moral propositions. And if this is correct, then Ayer’s emotivist project fails under its own principles. (There are, of course, many other reasons to reject Ayer’s emotivism.)
- 37.
For example, would it have been wrong all things considered to have assassinated Adolph Hitler in 1938, before he invaded Poland and set off a world war, and later instituted the state-sponsored genocide of Jews, if one had obtained credible secret information that he was going to embark on such policies? It is less than clear to me that it would—though I recognize that Kant would disagree. There is much more to be said, however, about the assessment of cases of this sort from a metaethical perspective, which we will take up in Chs. 4 and 5. I note that W. D. Ross famously engaged such matters in The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).
- 38.
In the interest of brevity and simplicity, here and throughout this book, I interpret P11, and its coming variations, in “isolation”—that is, as standing on its own, and not as necessarily embedded in a broader, e.g., utilitarian, context, where issues may arise regarding possible over-riding valuational elements.
- 39.
Some may doubt that the truth of this and similar propositions can be known, owing to the practical difficulties in addressing the implicit variables involved. In other words, its truth is just too difficult a question. Well, perhaps. In any event, I pass over such problems here.
- 40.
This is a controversial claim. It will be defended at length in Chapter 4.
- 41.
This points to the famous embedding problem, also as known as the Frege-Geach problem, formulated by Peter Geach, which he thought grew out of Gottlob Frege’s work. We will return to this matter in Sect. 6.3.
- 42.
Hare, The Language of Morals.
- 43.
See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic.
- 44.
For example, Blackburn, Spreading the Word.
- 45.
Thus, on this reading, even though S could do something that was morally wrong, even seriously morally wrong, if S did so unknowingly and unwittingly, then S would not be culpable for committing the moral wrong. Clearly, much remains to be analyzed here, but we shall not pause to do so.
- 46.
I have offered a detailed defense of moral knowledge in Knowing Moral Truth, Chs. 4–6. I am currently working on a book-length development of an even more detailed exploration of the possibility, nature, and forms of moral knowledge.
Works Cited
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Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover, 1952.
Blackburn, Simon. Spreading the Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Dewey, John. “Morality Is Social,” in The Moral Writings of John Dewey, revised edition, edited by James Gouinlock: 182–84. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.
Frege, Gottlob. “Über Sinn und Bedutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Vol. 100 (1892): 25–50. English translation as ‘On Sinn and Bedeutung,’ in Michael Beaney, The Frege Reader: 151–71. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Gibbard, Allan. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Grice, H. P., and P. F. Strawson. “In Defense of a Dogma,” Philosophical Review, Vol. LXV (1956): 141–58.
Haack, Susan. Philosophy of Logics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Hare, R. M. The Language of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
James, William. Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 (1907).
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965 (1787).
Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Kulp, Christopher B. “Disagreement and the Defensibility of Moral Intuitionism,” International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4, Issue 224 (December, 2016): 487–502.
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Kulp, C.B. (2019). Propositions and the First-Order Moral. In: Metaphysics of Morality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23410-2_3
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