Noncognitivist Heirs of Simple Subjectivism

Noncognitivists agree with subjectivists that moral judgments are rooted in emotions in a deep way, and they accept the naturalistic metaphysical picture shared by both simple and complex subjectivists. But they reject the idea that moral judgments are about such emotions or attitudes, whether actual or hypothetical. Noncognitivists think moral judgments express these attitudes without talking about them. Noncognitivism, thus, develops the underlying motivations for simple subjectivism in a radically different direction. The complex subjectivists of the previous chapter responded to problems for simple subjectivism by complicating the contents of moral judgments while retaining a basically representational picture of that content. In other words, they treated the judgments as still about the attitudes of relevant individuals, just as simple subjectivism does. Noncognitivists, by contrast, react to the same problems by rejecting the representational picture shared by both simple and complex subjectivist theories. In rejecting that picture, they reject minimal realism. The crucial part of the noncognitivist view is thus double-barreled and negative: (1) Moral sentences don't represent the world in the way other sentences in the indicative mood normally do, and (2) moral “beliefs” don't represent the world in the way that genuine beliefs do. This means they answer “no” to each question at the top of our introduction's taxonomic chart, generating a variety of positions depicted on the right-hand side of that chart. The differences between the varieties mostly concern their positive takes on what moral sentences and moral thought do since they don't represent the world.