The bolded is drawing an implication, not representing a view.

The second link specifically says:

If there are no moral properties or moral facts it's difficult to say morality exists.

I've said before that deism is indistinguishable from atheism, because if God exists but we know nothing about him, and can't, then it's as if he didn't exist. So with aliens and morality.

But this has nothing to do with whether or not people believe he does exist. Deism is an absolutely perfect example, in fact. Given that they're are deists, I am actually struggling to see what your objection is here.

Imo you're right to raise this issue, and even if you didn't know what non-cognitivism was before, it's a little unfair of those who did to not grant you a more charitable interpretation of your intuition about what it means for the metaphysics of morals if non-cognitivism is true.

Thanks. I knew what it was - it's been around since Adam. I just didn't know they had a new $64 word for it.

Don't push your luck though, it hasn't been around since Adam. We may have been debating the metaphysics or epistemology of morality 'since Adam', but the $64 dollar word is for a relatively recent philosophical thesis about the linguistic meaning of moral statements. For example, denying that morality exists (old) is not equivalent to being a non-cognitivist (new); although per the sep article you cite, it's hard to see what a non-cognitivist can say about the existence of moral properties.

Never mind about deism, etc. I could make the point but here's a better one. From the sep link:

Applied to your example it would read:

noncognitivists think that [alien existence] has no truth conditions

IOW, NC's are not just discussing semantics or moral epistemology, that the morality may exist but we can't know about it - they are asserting that moral statements are not statements about anything real - i.e., morality doesn't exist.

I think it's generally taken to be more like moral statements being similar to aesthetic statements. You can say that aesthetic statements have no truth conditions without committing to the non-existence of art.

I think this is a confusing way to put it. I would guess that most noncognitivists would not say that morality "exists." Under noncognitivism, our moral language isn't about moral objects or properties or anything else that exists. So it would be confusing to say that it claims that morality "exists." However, it would be equally confused according to noncognitivists to claim that morality doesn't exist. NotReady bolded a sentence from SEP on this:

but notice the immediately following sentence:

The point here is that noncognitivists understand moral language to be outside of the realm of describing the world, i.e. talking about what kinds of things exist or do not exist. They claim it has some other linguistic function towards which the category "exists" doesn't properly apply.

Not sure the analogy is very helpful as so many philosophers think aesthetic value is objective.

I am not bothered if you want to view noncognitivists as not thinking that moral properties don't exist, it isn't really accurate but it is close enough.* I just don't know what you think you are proving here. Here is the intro to noncognitivism from the linked SEP article:

It states right there in the first two sentences that noncognitivism is a variety of irrealism, that noncogntivists do not think there are moral properties or facts, etc. Maybe you think I've been using noncognitivism as an example of how objective moral values exist without a god. If so, let me be clear, I am not. Rather, this discussion is a sidetrack from the OP based on a question by dereds about whether it was possible to honestly talk about morality without presupposing objective morality. I was using noncognitivism as an example of a way of understanding moral talk that explicitly rejects the claim that moral claims are objectively true.

This is why I don't know what you are trying to say here. For instance, you earlier said, "I admit I don't know what is meant by noncognitivist. I have a suspicion that what you are basically trying to do is deny there is objective morality." I am not here trying to deny that there is objective morality (although noncognitivism does deny this). Rather, I am explaining how to understand morality that isn't objective. Are you trying to show that noncognitivism rejects objective morality? Fine. Acknowledged.

*Here is the way it isn't exactly accurate. Most moral anti-realists are either noncognitivists or error theorists. Error theorists believe that moral language does have a truth-value--that we are referring to moral properties in our moral statements, but that the moral properties or objects we are attempting to refer to don't exist. In this way, it is similar to theories about phlogiston or witches. It would be accurate to say that error theorists believe that moral properties or objects don't exist.

Noncognitivists on the other hand think that moral language isn't truth-apt. Their view (usually) is not so much that moral properties or objects don't exist as that moral statements are not actually attempts to refer to moral properties or objects. Thus, attempts to understand moral statements as doing so and then asking whether such properties exist is just confused--it is based on a misunderstanding of language. For instance, when I say, "Run faster!" I'm not attempting to describe the world and so it would be very strange to ask if "Run faster" existed.

I don't think this is accurate. While it is certainly true that Plato's forms is one very clear example of an objective morality, it isn't the only one. For instance, some natural law theorists (e.g. the Stoics) didn't believe that there were abstract Forms a la Plato (they were generally materialists), but they did believe that morality was objective. That is, they believed that the structure of the universe was such that there were natural laws about how to live your life such that you would be living as a good or bad person.

I'm confused as to what you are asking for here.

So why did NotReady get so much grief about bringing up Hitler? He commented on your claim that you think rape is revolting by saying that Hitler thought that Jews were revolting. You correctly said that Hitler's revulsion is not a counterexample to non-cognitivism, but I don't think NotReady was trying to say that non-cognitivism treated these cases inconsistently, he was trying to say that given non-cognitivism we cannot articulate any relevant moral difference between your revulsion of rape and Hitler's revulsion of Jews*, which seems like a problem.

* pending what you have to say about 'immoral acts'

What issue is he raising? Please tell me. All I can tell is he is raising the issue that according to noncognitivism morality isn't objectively true (or doesn't exist, which is a confusing way to put it in my opinion). Of course that is true--that was the starting point for the whole discussion!

I can't speak for other people, but I did respond to exactly the point you identify here. I didn't think Hitler presented a counterexample to either the correctness of noncognitivism as a theory of moral language or showed that moral relativism was an implication. Basically, I said that you could still have an account of wrongness without using truth as a criterion. What exactly that account is would obviously depend on the specific theory in question.

We've tried your buttoned-down lucid explanations, Poindexter, and look where they've got us. Step aside and let me try some left-field weak analogies.

Incidentally, noncognitivism is in my opinion consistent with (and an underexplored option for) religions like Christianity. Christianity's ethics was very strongly influenced by stoicism and so many of its great theologians have understood morality in very rationalistic, moral law, sort of way. But I would think that you could also plausibly ground a, say, divine law command morality in a noncognitivist framework quite easily.

I think I agree with that. Or at least it seems in line with all of my half baked ideas about Christian theology

I think his point was just that you end up with no framework by which to argue that your revulsion of rape is any more [insert moral/ethical/right/justified] than Hitler's revulsion of Jews. If this is nothing you contest, then perhaps he overlooked that you were explicitly biting the bullet in the beginning and instead thought you were trying some esoteric route to avoid this ostensibly undesirable surmise.

If you're interested in expanding, I'd be curious about any account of wrongness that you think is available to you. For instance, do you believe in any kind of normative component that applies to people making moral decisions?

On the moral relativism point, my takeaway from your point is that if nc doesn't imply moral relativism, it implies something worse or equivalently undesirable which is ammorality; unless the existence of absolute yet non-propositional moral properties is an option for you (I take it it's not), which would have it that one only acts morally by accident.

Okay, but the preferences and aversions the noncognitivist is expressing are still relative or subjective preferences and aversions. So while you may have an aversion to rape, a noncognitivist who prefers to rape would not have an axiological reason not to do so. In other words, the noncognitivist rapist has the same grounds to rape as you have to prevent him from doing so, because while it is 'wrong' to you it is 'right' to him.

I think this is a somewhat prejudicial way of putting the question. We ordinarily think of "argument" in a philosophical context as a way of showing that some proposition is true or false. Obviously the noncognitivist cannot do that. However, that doesn't mean that he can't still attempt to persuade Hitler that his revulsion towards Jews is wrong and should be given up (or that we shouldn't attempt to block Hitler from acting on that revulsion). It also doesn't mean that we need view Hitler's revulsion as being as "justified" as our own revulsion towards rape. Rather, we would view "justified" as itself being part of the moral context and so part of a network of desires and emotions we have that are more or less conscious. As such, we could appeal to the other moral attitudes of the listener as a way of justifying our attitude towards Hitler's actions. What we wouldn't do is at some point appeal to some normative moral fact about the world.

It's probably true that someone who was a true amoralist would be outside our ability to persuade. But, this is not a problem unique to the noncognitivist. A cognitivist would have the exact same difficulty in convincing him that he should view objectively true moral reasons as a motivation for behavior.

I think the reason people are worried that this would result in relativism is because they think something like this. On noncognitivism your moral attitudes will ultimately be caused by contingent features of your psychology. That is, we could have been such that we had different emotional attitudes towards things like rape--see for example the people who have had such different attitudes. And, there is no reason so say that one or the other of these psychological attitudes is better than the other.

I think the right answer to this is to say, yes there is. But not on scientific or factual grounds. It is true that we won't be closely examining the brain to discover that one psychology is the "right" one and the other is the "wrong" one. But that is fine. Saying that one or the other is "right" or "wrong" is not a question of scientific fact, but rather a moral evaluation--i.e. a moral attitude taken towards the effects of particular sorts of psychologies.

In other words, it is an acknowledgement that there is no neutral dispassionate ground from which we can compare moral views and decide which one is correct. Rather, our very grounds for deciding which is correct are moral attitudes themselves.

I'm not a noncognitivist myself, so I can't answer your question directly. I guess it would depend on the specific version of noncognitivism that someone holds.

I don't see how this follows at all. It seems to me that here you are doing exactly what I was criticizing NotReady for doing: rejecting noncognitivism out of hand because you start from the assumption that morality is about moral truths and objective facts and so any theory of moral language which says differently is nihilistic.

I'm not sure what you mean here by "relative" preferences and aversions. Relative to what? The person expressing the moral attitude? It seems entirely possible to me that someone could express a fairly universal aversion to anyone stealing from anyone else. Alternatively, they might be expressing a preference towards a universal norm of behavior (such as, "Don't steal.").

But, you say, what if someone expresses a different attitude towards stealing? Wouldn't that person be equally justified in acting on that attitude as you? No. Why would they be? Emotivism is not claiming that what justifies our moral attitudes is that we have them (although I suppose some emotivists might have this view).

As for whether the person who doesn't have this aversion has an axiological reason to avoid stealing, probably the answer is no, at least if she is unable to be persuaded to change her mind. But this doesn't impress me very much as an objection. I think Open Question Argument shows that there is no way to avoid this for some people on any view. Moral reasons just don't affect everyone in the same way and if you run into a true amoralist, then there just isn't a way to motivate them to act on moral reasons.

It's a small consolation prize that we can still 'attempt to persuade Hitler' or 'appeal to other moral attitudes'; we have ruled out giving Hitler properly moral reasons to stop doing what he's doing because we don't believe in them.

It's not the same difficulty, amoralism is something noncognitivism either implies or cannot rule out. On a realist cognitivist account*, amoralism is simply false. In other words, according to realist cognitivism, the amoralist is plainly wrong, according to noncognitivism he's at best not necessarily right. * Imo, non-realist cognitivism is either incoherent or collapses into nihilism, so it would be funny for a nihilist to persuade an amoralist of anything.

Which leaves us where? How do we settle moral disagreements? What normative principles guide our decisions?

Sort of but not really. I accept that it's possible that moral properties don't exist, and I accept that noncognitivism is a good theory about moral language especially if one is already partial to the verificationist account of meaning. But I do think that anything worth calling morality is real, objective and absolute/universal (but with some slack for how these terms are defined).

You're not addressing our core difficulty; what then justifies our moral attitudes?

You seem to have a deep intuition that morality is about moral truths. Fine. Rest assured that noncognitivism as a theory that explicitly rejects that claim will not satisfy you. However, you are quite wrong that noncognitivism has ruled out giving Hitler "properly moral reasons to stop doing what he's doing." Rather, they have a different account from you of what would count as a "properly good reason," one that doesn't rely on saying that Hitler holds some false moral beliefs.

So reject it if you want because it doesn't ground objective morality. But you should know that you aren't looking at the theory at all if that is the extent of your focus.

Okay, a few confusions here. First, you are using "amoralism" to mean something different than I am. I'm using "amoralist" in the the sense it is typically used in internalist/externalist debates of moral motivation. Essentially, an amoralist is someone who can understand the moral reasons for an action, but is not motivated to act by those reasons. I don't see how this is implied by noncognitivism (or not ruled out?), so you'll just have to explain yourself here.

It is true that if we think there are true amoralists then on noncognitivist grounds they wouldn't be motivated by moral language and so couldn't use it properly (many have thought that noncognitivism implies internalism). However, realism also doesn't imply that there are no amoralists--it seems possible that someone could understand the objectively true moral reasons to not perform some action, but not find those reasons motivating regardless of whether or not those reasons are objectively true or not.

So it doesn't really make sense to say that amoralism is "plainly wrong" on realist cognitivist grounds (In what sense would the amoralist be wrong? Is she actually motivated by moral reasons without her knowing it? Then she isn't an amoralist.).

The answers to these questions will depend on the moral theory you accept. Noncognitivism is a meta-ethical theory and so doesn't try to answer these questions directly.

How do you square the circle of saying that "noncognitivism is a good theory about moral language" and "anything worth calling morality is real, objective and absolute/universal"? Seems to me more like you think that noncognitivism is bad theory about moral language.

Here's my frustration with how you are arguing. I think it is perfectly fine to have the view that "anything worth calling morality is real, objective and absolute/universal." However, the primary counterexample to this claim are the various noncognitivist accounts of moral language. Thus, it would seem like if you want to justify your view you should show why the noncognitivist accounts of moral language are inadequate. But neither you nor NotReady are doing this. Instead, you are starting with the assumption that moral language should be about something real and objective and then showing that since noncognitivism implies that morality is not real or objective (we are still arguing about the relative part) it is inadequate. That just seems to me a case of you restating your assumptions rather than dealing with the issue.

My intuition is that anything worth calling morality requires the existence of real, objective moral properties. Now I assume that any intelligible interface between a human being and real, objective moral properties requires truth-apt moral language. If there is an alternative way of having an intelligible interface between human beings and real, objective moral properties (or facts or whatever) that doesn't require truth-apt language, then please build me that ladder.

This is trivial, I'm obviously extremely skeptical about the possibility of there being non-cognitivist reasons (or reasons consistent with non-cognitivism) which are worth calling moral. This is yet another opportunity for you to give me an example of a properly good non-cognitivist reason to not be an anti-semite.

Sorry, you're right. I used 'amorality' before and just naturally shifted to 'amoralist' to mean one who believes in a thorough-going absence of moral properties. As the rest of what I said was based on that infelicitous definition, the rest of your comments about amoralists are probably right but not about what I intended to say.

I accept that there are good reasons to think that moral properties don't exist. If moral properties don't exist, then we would still want a theory of what moral language means or does; there are two main options here, error theory and non-cognitivism. I'm not sure if I should be partial to error theory since I am partial to realism; but all I am saying is that non-cognitivism is a plausible theory of moral language if moral properties don't exist. However, if moral properties don't exist, then all that's left is ersatz morality and theories about the function of moral language; I don't see the point of calling any of this 'morality'. There isn't a circle to square unless you think the intuition that moral language expresses propositions has more primacy than the intuition about the necessity of the existence of real moral properties for morality.

If ghosts don't exist, would you call weirdly shaped puffs of smoke or random noises or your niece wearing a white sheet over her head ghosts? Presumably not, anything worth calling a ghost is an entity from the beyond. Once you deny the existence of real, objective moral properties, I think you're denying the essential concept of morality, and non-cognitivist accounts of moral language are just the weirdly shaped puffs of smoke or random noises that 'ghosts' reduce to, but aren't properly ghosts, if that makes sense.