Someone says: 'Torturing animals is wrong.' According to an emotivist (a non-cognitivist), what is this person actually doing?
ADescribing an objective property that torture has, verifiable in principle by observation
BExpressing a negative attitude toward animal torture — something closer to 'boo, animal torture!' — rather than asserting a truth
CCiting a natural fact about suffering and its relationship to animal welfare
DMaking a logical claim that follows deductively from first-order ethical principles
Emotivism holds that moral sentences don't express beliefs capable of being true or false — they express attitudes. 'Torturing animals is wrong' doesn't attribute a property to an action; it vents disapproval. This contrasts with cognitivism, which says the sentence expresses a belief with a truth value. The emotivist reading makes moral discourse more like cheering or booing than like scientific reporting.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
G.E. Moore's open question argument claims that for any natural property N (like 'conducive to happiness'), it remains an open question whether something with N is truly good. What position does this argument target?
AEmotivism — Moore is showing that moral language cannot express mere attitudes
BNon-cognitivism — Moore wants to show that moral language has truth conditions
CMoral naturalism — Moore argues that 'good' cannot be identified with any natural property
DPrescriptivism — Moore is refuting the claim that moral sentences are commands
Moore's open question argument is directed specifically at moral naturalism — the view that 'good' is definable in terms of natural properties like pleasure, welfare, or fitness. Moore argues that for any such definition, we can always coherently ask 'But is X that has N really good?' and this question remains open — showing the definition fails. Moore is a cognitivist non-naturalist who holds that 'good' refers to an irreducible non-natural property.
Question 3 True / False
A non-cognitivist can agree that 'torture is wrong' and 'theft is wrong' are both meaningful statements while denying that either one is true or false.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Non-cognitivists do not claim moral sentences are meaningless — they are meaningful as expressions of attitudes, prescriptions, or commitments. The non-cognitivist denies that moral sentences are truth-apt (capable of being true or false), not that they are unintelligible. A sentence can perfectly convey information about the speaker's attitudes and invite agreement without asserting a proposition that could be verified or falsified.
Question 4 True / False
The cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism debate is primarily about whether we should follow moral rules, not about the meaning of moral language.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
The cognitivism/non-cognitivism debate is a metaethical question about the semantic status of moral sentences — what they mean, what they refer to, and whether they are truth-apt. It is not a first-order normative debate about which rules to follow. First-order ethics asks 'what should I do?'; metaethics asks 'what kind of claims are we making when we say what we should do?' The two levels of inquiry are distinct.
Question 5 Short Answer
Why does it matter whether moral sentences are truth-apt? What is at stake in the cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism debate?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: If moral sentences are truth-apt (cognitivism), genuine moral disagreements are disagreements about facts, and one party could in principle be wrong. If moral sentences merely express attitudes (non-cognitivism), moral disagreements are more like differences in preference — with no fact-of-the-matter that makes one side correct.
The stakes are significant for moral epistemology. If there are moral truths, moral inquiry resembles empirical inquiry — we can make progress, gather evidence, and converge on correct answers. If moral sentences only express attitudes, asking 'who is right in this moral disagreement?' is like asking who is right when one person prefers coffee and another prefers tea. This shapes whether moral argument is the kind of thing that can genuinely persuade through reasoning and evidence.