Questions: Moral Non-Cognitivism: Alternatives to Truth

Question 1

Consider the sentence: 'If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong.' What problem does this sentence pose for simple emotivist non-cognitivism?

• A. It shows that non-cognitivism cannot explain why stealing is considered wrong in the first place
• B. The word 'wrong' in the antecedent is not being asserted, yet it must retain its meaning for the conditional to be valid — which emotivism struggles to explain
• C. It proves that moral sentences do have truth conditions, because the conditional can be evaluated logically
• D. It demonstrates that prescriptivism is a stronger theory than emotivism

Answer: (B)

This is the Frege-Geach problem. Emotivism says 'stealing is wrong' just expresses a negative attitude ('boo to stealing!'). But in the conditional 'If stealing is wrong, then...', 'stealing is wrong' appears in the antecedent — you are not asserting it or expressing an attitude toward stealing, just using the phrase hypothetically. If the phrase only means expressing a boo-attitude, it's unclear how it could function in a logical context where no attitude is being expressed. The sentence's logical validity seems to require that 'wrong' retains a stable meaning across contexts, which simple expressivism cannot easily provide.

Question 2

A student hears about moral non-cognitivism and concludes: 'So non-cognitivists think morality is just made up and nothing is really wrong.' What crucial mistake is this student making?

• A. The student is right — non-cognitivism entails that all moral claims are false
• B. The student is confusing non-cognitivism with nihilism; non-cognitivists think morality is meaningful and binding, just not fact-stating
• C. The student is confusing non-cognitivism with relativism, which says morality varies by culture
• D. The student is right that non-cognitivism implies arbitrariness, which is its main weakness

Answer: (B)

Non-cognitivism is NOT nihilism. Nihilism says morality is meaningless or all moral claims are false. Non-cognitivists like Ayer, Hare, and Blackburn think moral discourse is genuinely meaningful — it guides action, expresses norms, and can be done coherently or incoherently. The non-cognitivist point is narrower: moral sentences don't express truth-apt propositions (claims that can be true or false). They express attitudes, prescriptions, or norm-endorsements instead. Morality can be serious, binding, and universal while still not being fact-stating.

Question 3

Both emotivism and prescriptivism are versions of moral non-cognitivism.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Non-cognitivism is the umbrella term for views that deny moral sentences express truth-apt propositions. Emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson) is one species: moral sentences express emotional attitudes. Prescriptivism (Hare) is another: moral sentences issue universal prescriptions. Both deny that 'stealing is wrong' states a fact that can be true or false. They differ in what they say moral sentences DO instead of stating facts — but they agree in denying truth-aptness.

Question 4

Moral non-cognitivism implies that moral attitudes are subjective and arbitrary — that a person who approves of cruelty is just as correct as one who condemns it.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Non-cognitivists typically deny that moral attitudes are arbitrary. Hare's prescriptivism, for example, holds that moral prescriptions must be universalizable — you cannot prescribe something for others that you wouldn't prescribe for yourself in relevantly similar circumstances. This provides a form of rational constraint on moral attitudes. Quasi-realism (Blackburn) goes further, arguing non-cognitivists can earn the right to talk about moral truth and moral knowledge. The key non-cognitivist claim is that morality doesn't require mind-independent moral facts — not that anything goes.

Question 5

What is the Frege-Geach problem, and why does it challenge simple non-cognitivist theories like emotivism?

Model answer: The Frege-Geach problem (also called the embedding problem) points out that moral sentences appear inside logical constructions — conditionals, disjunctions, negations — where they are not being asserted. In 'If stealing is wrong, then getting your brother to steal is wrong,' the phrase 'stealing is wrong' occurs in the antecedent unasserted. If emotivism is right that this phrase merely expresses a boo-attitude toward stealing, then using it unasserted in a conditional seems meaningless — you're not expressing any attitude. Yet the conditional is clearly meaningful and logically valid. This requires moral terms to have stable semantic content that persists whether or not the speaker is asserting or expressing anything — which is difficult to provide within a simple expressivist framework.

The problem drove non-cognitivists toward more sophisticated theories. Quasi-realism (Blackburn) tries to show how expressivists can reconstruct all the logical features of moral discourse — including valid inference, moral truth, and moral knowledge — without abandoning the expressivist starting point. The Frege-Geach problem is not a knockdown refutation of non-cognitivism, but it forced the view to become much more technically elaborate to survive it.