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Are Ethics Just Emotions? - Simon Blackburn

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Summary

  • The conversation explores the distinctions between realism, anti-realism, cognitivism, and non-cognitivism in ethics. Blackburn argues the traditional battle lines between these positions are stale.
  • Cognitivism relates to knowledge and truth value, while non-cognitivism focuses on sentiments and attitudes.
  • Ethical subjectivism (truth relative to individuals) is discussed, but Blackburn notes its unpopularity.
  • Blackburn critiques G.E. Moore’s introduction of non-natural properties and intuitionism, arguing it led ethics down a wrong path, away from the more practical approach of the Scottish sentimentalists like Hume and Adam Smith.
  • There’s a debate on whether ethics describes objective moral properties or merely explains human moral reactions. Blackburn favors the latter, aligning with Hume’s approach.
  • Deflationary theories of truth, where asserting something is true adds nothing to the original statement, are discussed. This is used to counter realist claims.
  • Blackburn expresses regret for coining the term “quasi-realism,” originally intended to show that sentimentalism isn’t as problematic as perceived.
  • The discussion shifts to emotions versus attitudes in ethics, with Blackburn favoring “attitude” to avoid connotations of strong, fleeting emotions.
  • The Frege-Geach problem is addressed, questioning how emotivism can account for logical inferences in ethical statements. Blackburn explains how indicative forms allow for inference.
  • The possibility of extending emotivism beyond ethics is explored.
  • The conversation wraps up with considerations of the pragmatist tradition.

Content

Summary

1) Opening frame: realism vs. cognitivism (0:00–4:22)

  • Two familiar camps:
    • Moral realism: there are stance-independent moral truths (e.g., “murder is wrong”).
    • Anti-realism: no such objective moral facts.
  • Different (but often conflated) distinction: cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism.
    • Cognitivism: moral claims are truth-apt (can be true/false).
    • Non-cognitivism: moral utterances function more like expressions, prescriptions, or plans, not straightforward truth-bearers.
    • Blackburn notes the terms have been used “quite interchangeably” with realism/anti-realism, though they’re conceptually distinct. For background: Stanford Encyclopedia overviews on cognitivism/non-cognitivism and moral anti-realism. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

2) Blackburn’s diagnosis: the 20th-century “rot” and Moore (6:04–8:04; 9:33–10:02)

  • Blackburn traces a lot of modern metaethical puzzles to G. E. Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica: postulating a special, non-natural property of goodness known by intuition (“intuitionism”) sent ethics down a metaphysical rabbit hole.
    • He thinks Hume/Smith (the “Scottish sentimentalists”) showed a cleaner path: describe the psychological mechanisms of moral life without positing spooky properties.
    • Classic Moore sources: SEP entry and Moore’s text (public domain). (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

      Paraphrase of Blackburn’s point: once you posit a non-natural property and a non-natural faculty to detect it, you’ve created mysteries instead of solving them.

3) What ethics should do: description and function, not “what goodness is” (9:45–12:14)

  • Blackburn endorses a functional/anthropological lens (analogy with physics: Newton described gravity’s laws without telling us what gravity “is”). Ethics should explain:
    1. Which human qualities count as virtues/vices;
    2. How those qualities affect us (they evoke admiration, disgust, etc.);
    3. How we express and coordinate those reactions in language and practice.
  • This is Humean virtue theory: virtues are mental qualities useful and/or agreeable to self/others; they “excite admiration” and we then express approval/disapproval. See Hume’s Treatise Book III and SEP on Hume’s moral psychology. (Early Modern Texts)

4) Against the “moral property” hunt; Kant’s contrast (12:14–13:34)

  • Blackburn recommends not asking “what goodness is in itself.”
  • The temptation to demand more (a noumenal moral realm) resembles Kant’s phenomena/noumena split. The Humean alternative: stick to regularities, expectations, and sentiments.

5) The “queerness” worry and error theory (5:46–7:08)

  • The host cites J. L. Mackie’s famous “argument from queerness”: if objective values existed, they’d be metaphysically and epistemologically “queer.” (Mackie’s error theory: all positive moral judgments are systematically false.) (Wikipedia)
  • Blackburn’s response (throughout): you don’t need queer properties to explain why we are rightly horrified by atrocities; sentiment and shared human responses suffice.

6) Why deflationary truth matters (18:47–28:52)

  • Blackburn leans on deflationary/minimalist theories of truth (associated with Frank Ramsey, and defended in book-length form by Paul Horwich): saying “It’s true that p” adds nothing over asserting p.
    • Example: “The Nazis were bad” = “It’s true that the Nazis were bad” = “It’s really true…”; piling on “true” ladders you nowhere further—Blackburn calls this “Ramsey’s ladder… lying on the ground.”
    • This undermines a realist’s rhetorical move: “Yes, you say murder is wrong—but is it true?” The deflationist: I already said it; “true” adds no extra metaphysical commitment. See SEP on deflationism and on truth. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
      Key quote (Blackburn’s image): “Ramsay’s ladder is lying on the ground. It doesn’t carry you any higher.”

7) Emotions vs. attitudes; why Blackburn resists “emotivism” as a label (28:57–33:10)

  • The host self-describes as an ethical emotivist (“boo/hurrah”).
  • Blackburn prefers attitudes to “emotions”: moral stances often lack hot phenomenology; they’re stable commitments or policies (e.g., regretting a historical outcome) even when you’re not “hot under the collar.”
  • Still, the Scottish sentimentalist core remains: morality is rooted in our affective-attitudinal lives. (Background on classic emotivism: A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson.) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

8) “Table-thumping” without realism: the WWII/Nazis example (16:14–18:41)

  • Post-WWII, many insisted only realism could justify strong condemnation (“Nazis were really wrong”).
  • Blackburn: the right response (revulsion, shame, indignation) does not require intuition of non-natural properties; it flows from the appropriate human sentiments when confronted with Auschwitz/Belsen.

9) Quasi-realism (19:01–21:45; 28:03–28:52)

  • Blackburn’s long-standing project (“quasi-realism”) aims to earn realist-sounding talk (truth, fact, objectivity) from within an expressivist/sentimentalist starting point—especially once you pair it with deflationary truth.
  • Result: anti-realists can say “It’s true that the Nazis were bad” without committing to queer properties; “true” does no extra metaphysical work. For context on how quasi-realism and minimal truth fit non-cognitivism, see SEP notes on moral disagreement. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

10) The Frege–Geach (embedding) problem and Blackburn’s strategy (44:16–59:52)

  • The problem: If “Murder is wrong” just expresses emotion/attitude, how can such sentences embed in conditionals, negations, arguments, and support valid inference (e.g., modus ponens)?
    • Classic form (Geach’s example with lying):
      1. If lying is wrong, getting your little brother to lie is wrong.
      2. Lying is wrong.
      3. Therefore, getting your little brother to lie is wrong.
    • If premise (2) is just “Boo lying!”, how can it be true/false to make the logic work? Background: SEP on the embedding/Frege–Geach problem. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Blackburn’s response (two complementary moves):
    1. Adopt the indicative form to enable inference. Once in indicative mood, deflationism lets us freely use “true/false” talk without importing heavy metaphysics.
    2. Re-analyze conditionals as higher-order attitudes to patterns of attitudes. Roughly: “If murder is wrong, then murdering Simon is wrong” expresses disapproval of holding Boo(murder) without Boo(murdering-Simon).
      • This preserves the logic as constraints on attitude consistency across contexts.
  • Blackburn built a formal system along these lines (he mentions early work in Spreading the Word, 1984). The host recasts it in “boo/hooray” notation to show how modus ponens can be reconstructed in attitude-logic terms.

11) Ethical discourse aims at persuasion and coordination (42:29–43:53; 52:03–53:28)

  • Drawing on Charles L. Stevenson (Ethics and Language, 1944): moral talk is partly persuasive—we don’t just report our conative states; we try to get others to share them. That social-pragmatic role explains our migration into the indicative (so we can reason, plan, embed, and coordinate). (Internet Archive)

12) Beyond ethics: conditionals, “inference tickets,” pragmatism (59:52–1:05:44)

  • Blackburn generalizes to non-moral conditionals.
  • He cites Gilbert Ryle’s paper “If, So, and Because”: to assert “If A, then B” is to license an inference—to issue an “inference ticket.” This is a pragmatic function of language, not metaphysical overlay. See Ryle references and SEP overview. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
  • This connects with American pragmatism (Peirce/James/Dewey): start with what people do with words, not with “pure ideas” (“Don’t begin with vagabond abstractions but with men and their conversations”).

13) Truth, propositions, and when to stop (1:15:01–1:19:20)

  • The host probes whether even ordinary empirical claims (“the table exists”) ultimately rest on a felt confidence in sense-data or logic (e.g., rejecting contradictions feels like a “boo” to “P & ¬P”).
  • Blackburn’s counsel is methodological: don’t reify abstractions (like “proposition”) beyond their role in our practices; inquire first into how such terms are used to locate information in conversations, not what they “are.” This echoes the deflationist stance about truth and the pragmatist focus on use. Background on deflationary truth and general truth discussions. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

14) Sellars and the “Myth of the Given” (1:12:24–1:17:17)

  • Blackburn approvingly nods to Wilfrid Sellars: there are no self-justifying “givens”; even perceptual reports sit within a web of commitments (holism), not isolated, foundational data. See Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind; SEP on Sellars. (ditext.com)

Key concepts, people, and crisp definitions (with illustrative lines)

  • Non-cognitivism / Expressivism: Moral claims function to express attitudes, plans, prescriptions, not to describe moral facts. (Background: SEP/IEP overviews.) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Quasi-realism (Blackburn): From an expressivist base, earn realist-sounding discourse (truth, facts, objectivity) via deflationary truth and attitude-logic, allowing us to keep ordinary moral reasoning without spooky ontology. (See SEP note on quasi-realist strategies.) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Deflationary truth (Ramsey/Horwich): “ ‘p’ is true” = p. Saying “it’s true” adds no metaphysical heft; hence talk of “truth” doesn’t force you into realism. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Frege–Geach / embedding problem: Challenge to emotivism: moral sentences appear in embedded logical contexts; Blackburn’s answer uses indicative form + higher-order attitudes about attitude patterns, preserving validity. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Moore’s non-naturalism / open-question: Goodness is simple/indefinable, grasped by intuition; Blackburn thinks this launched a century of unhelpful metaphysics. (Primary text available.) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Mackie’s “queerness” and error theory: If objective values existed, they’d be metaphysically/epistemologically strange; since they’d be “queer,” posit no such facts. (Wikipedia)
  • Hume/Smith sentimentalism: Morality arises from sentiment (approval/disapproval via sympathy), not pure reason; virtues are qualities useful/agreeable to self/others. (Early Modern Texts)
  • Ryle’s “inference tickets”: Conditionals license moves in reasoning—spotlighting the use of language in planning/coordinating action. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
  • Sellars’ “Myth of the Given”: No foundational, non-conceptual “givens” that secure knowledge; judgments sit within a holistic web of commitments. (ditext.com)

Select quotations (from the discussion)

  • On deflationary truth: “Ramsey’s ladder is lying on the ground. It doesn’t carry you any higher.”
  • On Auschwitz as grounding moral certainty: You don’t need to intuit non-natural badness; the appropriate sentiments (revulsion, shame) suffice to ground condemnation.
  • On “just attitude”: Blackburn resists “merely”: attitudes are not trivial—they structure our practical lives and reasons.

Bottom line

  • Blackburn urges a Humean-pragmatic, expressivist picture: ethics explains what moral language does in our social lives (expressing, coordinating, reasoning about attitudes), not what “goodness” is in metaphysical isolation.
  • With deflationary truth and a solution to Frege–Geach, we can keep logic, objectivity-talk, and table-thumping condemnation—without positing non-natural moral properties.

Further reading (plain-text Markdown links)