Philippa Foot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The noncognitivist tradition I spent much of my career opposing held that moral judgements are not straightforwardly true or false in the way that ordinary factual assertions are. What made this tradition cohere was a single underlying thought: that there is an ineliminable gap between the descriptive and the evaluative, so that no accumulation of facts about an action could, by itself, constitute a moral judgement about it.
Something extra had to be present — a feeling, an attitude, a commitment to act. Meaning, on these theories, was to be explained in terms of a speaker's attitude, intentions, or state of mind.1 This is what I mean by moral subjectivism: the view that moral evaluation is essentially linked to an individual speaker's subjective state rather than to any feature of the world that could be true or false independently of that state.2
The consequence is a gap — between the grounds offered for a moral judgement and the judgement itself — such that someone who accepts all the facts might still, without any inconsistency, decline to make the moral evaluation, because he has not got the attitude, is not in the conative state of mind, is not ready to commit himself to act.3 Hume is the honest ancestor of this position.
He argued that when you examine a vicious action — wilful murder, say — you find only passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts; the vice itself escapes you until you turn your reflection inward and find a sentiment of disapprobation arising in yourself.4 The subjectivism follows directly: if virtuousness cannot be a plain provable matter of fact about what is done, then two people who profess contradictory moral views are not one of them right and the other wrong in the way that one is right and the other wrong about the shape of the earth.5
The later, more sophisticated versions — Stevenson, Ayer, Hare, and after them Gibbard and Blackburn — tried to tighten the account. Hare's universalized prescriptivism, for instance, yielded something approaching a fairly tight utilitarianism, so it was no longer a simple free-for-all in which one could coherently call running around trees right-handed a moral wrong.6
But the structural mistake persisted in all these versions: description, however tightly constrained, still did not reach all the way to moral judgement.7 The conative element remained irreducibly separate. My objection is that this gap is simply not there. The grounds of a moral judgement do reach all the way to it, and the special character of moral evaluation does not require the insertion of a subjective state between the facts and the verdict.8 That is the mistake the title of my 1995 lecture names.
Meaning was thus to be explained in terms of a speaker's attitude, intentions, or state of mind. And this opened up a gap between moral judgements and assertions, with the idea that truth conditions give, and may exhaust, the meaning of the latter but not the former.Natural Goodness, p. 7
moral judgements, through conditions of utterance, were essentially linked to an individual speaker's subjective state.Natural Goodness, p. 7
Whatever 'grounds' may have been given, someone may be unready, indeed unable, to make the moral judgement, because he has not got the attitude or feeling, is not in the 'conative' state of mind, is not ready to take the decision to act: whatever it is that the theory says is required.Natural Goodness, p. 7
Take any action allowed to be vicious: Wilful murder for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice... You can never find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action.Virtues and Vices, pp. 97–98
if they were objective, like ordinary statements of fact, there would have to be some method of deciding, in case of disagreement, whether one man's opinion or another's was correct—as the opinion that the earth is flat can be shown to be mistaken by a voyage round the globe.Virtues and Vices, pp. 97–98
Hare himself has suggested that a fairly tight form of utilitarianism can actually be obtained from universalized prescriptivism. So it is not the old battle against a 'free for all' subjectivism that I want to fight.Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics, p. 114
Even if the very tightest limitations on 'descriptive content' were accepted... 'description' would still not, according to these theories, reach all the way to moral judgement.Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics, p. 114
It is this gap between ground and moral judgement that I am denying. In my view there are no such conditions on moral judgement and therefore no such gap.Natural Goodness, p. 7