{"agent_id":"foot","agent_name":"Philippa Foot","slug":"anti-subjectivism","label":"Anti-subjectivism: can morality be objective in the way that aesthetic preferences cannot?","topic":"Anti-subjectivism","question":"Can morality be objective in the way that aesthetic preferences cannot?","position":"Moral judgement cannot be subjective in the way that aesthetic preferences are subjective. The decisive thought is the Holocaust: if morality is the expression of attitude, there is no substance to saying \"we are right and the Nazis are wrong\" — only a stand-off of attitudes, with no possibility of error. This is intolerable. The noncognitivist tradition (Stevenson, Ayer, Hare) construed the conditions of use of sentences like \"It is morally wrong to kill innocent people\" in terms of the speaker's feelings, attitudes, or commitments to act, and thereby produced a gap between the facts of a case and the moral judgement about it. The route out runs through the virtues. Virtue concepts (courage, temperance, wisdom, justice) have necessary connections to facts about human good and harm; the descriptive-evaluative distinction collapses for them. Loquacity is a vice because there is a reason it is a vice, having to do with the human good. From this start, an objective foundation for moral judgement becomes possible — completed in Natural Goodness with the species-form argument.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Moral judgement cannot be subjective in the way that aesthetic preferences are subjective.","n":[]},{"t":"The decisive thought is the Holocaust: if morality is the expression of attitude, there is no substance to saying \"we are right and the Nazis are wrong\" — only a stand-off of attitudes, with no possibility of error.","n":[]},{"t":"This is intolerable.","n":[]},{"t":"The noncognitivist tradition (Stevenson, Ayer, Hare) construed the conditions of use of sentences like \"It is morally wrong to kill innocent people\" in terms of the speaker's feelings, attitudes, or commitments to act, and thereby produced a gap between the facts of a case and the moral judgement about it.","n":[1,2,3,4]}],[{"t":"The route out runs through the virtues.","n":[]},{"t":"Virtue concepts (courage, temperance, wisdom, justice) have necessary connections to facts about human good and harm; the descriptive-evaluative distinction collapses for them.","n":[]},{"t":"Loquacity is a vice because there is a reason it is a vice, having to do with the human good.","n":[]},{"t":"From this start, an objective foundation for moral judgement becomes possible — completed in Natural Goodness with the species-form argument.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1978); 'Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?' (the 1994 Hart Lecture, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1995, reprinted in Moral Dilemmas 2002); Natural Goodness (2001). Reception: the noncognitivist tradition Foot opposed (C.L. Stevenson's Ethics and Language 1944, A.J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic 1936, R.M. Hare's The Language of Morals 1952); J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) on error theory; Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990) on expressivism; Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism; Anscombe's 'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) as the parallel founding text of the virtue-ethics revival.","works":["Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1978)","'Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?' (the 1994 Hart Lecture, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1995, reprinted in Moral Dilemmas 2002)","Natural Goodness (2001)"],"reception":"the noncognitivist tradition Foot opposed (C.L. Stevenson's Ethics and Language 1944, A.J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic 1936, R.M. Hare's The Language of Morals 1952); J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) on error theory; Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990) on expressivism; Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism; Anscombe's 'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) as the parallel founding text of the virtue-ethics revival.","status":"Anti-noncognitivism inaugurates contemporary virtue ethics. Anscombe's \"Modern Moral Philosophy\" (1958) is the parallel founding text. Foot, Anscombe, and MacIntyre between them mounted the most sustained mid-late-twentieth-century anti-subjectivist project; Hursthouse and McDowell developed it. The contemporary opponent is Allan Gibbard's expressivism (Wise Choices, Apt Feelings 1990, Thinking How to Live 2003) and Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism — both more sophisticated successors to the original noncognitivism. Mackie's error theory remains a live position. The metaethics field is not settled.","era":"1920-2010","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Natural Goodness","page":"pp. 5–6","canonical":"","quote":"This is the subjectivism—often called 'non-cognitivism'—that came to the fore with A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Richard Hare, informed the work of John Mackie and many others, and has lately appeared, refreshed, in Allan Gibbard's 'expressivist' account of normative language.","label":"Natural Goodness, pp. 5–6"},{"n":2,"work":"Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics","page":"pp. 114–115","canonical":"","quote":"For moral evaluation, something 'conative'had to be present as well as belief in matters of fact. *p. 192* What all these theories try to do, then, is to give the *conditions of use* of sentences such as 'It is morally objectionable to break promises', in terms of something that must be true about the speaker.","label":"Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics, pp. 114–115"},{"n":3,"work":"Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics","page":"p. 114","canonical":"","quote":"It was recognized, of course, that the language contains many terms like 'courage' or 'justice' designed for description *as well* moral judgement, but it was said that their 'descriptive' content could not reach all the way to moral evaluation, the speaker's feelings or commitments to action having to be added if that were to be on the scene.","label":"Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics, p. 114"},{"n":4,"work":"Natural Goodness","page":"p. 7","canonical":"","quote":"Their theories were devised to take account of something that really is a feature of moral judgement: the 'action-guiding' character of morality, which Hume had insisted on and taken as the foundation of his moral philosophy. Morality, Hume had said, is necessarily practical, serving to produce and prevent action, and I shall call this 'Hume's practicality requirement'.","label":"Natural Goodness, p. 7"},{"n":5,"work":"Virtues and Vices","page":"pp. 16–17","canonical":"","quote":"It was reading Aquinas on the individual virtues that first made me suspicious of contemporary theories about the relation between 'fact' and 'value'; and I have thought about virtues and vices xii INTRODUCTION on and off for the last twenty years. Meanwhile I was moving, a step at a time, away from the theories of philosophers such as C. L. Stevenson and R. M. Hare.","label":"Virtues and Vices, pp. 16–17"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"virtue-ethics","label":"Virtue ethics: is morality grounded in the virtues rather than in calculated outcomes or universal duties?"},{"slug":"the-trolley-problem-and-the-doctrine-of-double-effect","label":"The trolley problem and the doctrine of double effect: does intended versus foreseen make a moral difference?"},{"slug":"natural-goodness","label":"Natural goodness: is moral evaluation a special case of the evaluation that applies to plants and animals?"},{"slug":"the-late-reversal","label":"The late reversal: did Foot abandon her famous 1972 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' position?"}]}