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Douglas_Knight comments on Suffering - Less Wrong
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Actually, based on this comment, TGGP actually believes in emotivism as such.
He isolates three reasons in the second chapter:
Emotivism conflates 'expressions of personal preference' ("I like this!") with 'evaluative expressions' ("This is good!"), despite the fact the first is gets part of its meaning from the person saying it ("I like this!") and the second doesn't.
Emotivism attempts to assign meaning to the sentence, when the sentence itself might express different feelings or attitudes in different uses. (See Gandalf's take on "Good morning!" in The Hobbit). This is probably where emotivism can be rehabilitated, as MacIntyre goes on to say:
Note that I'm not defending MacIntyre's position, here; I'm only bringing it up because an emotivist should know what his or her response to it is, because it is a pretty large objection. My experience is that they go into absolute denial upon hearing the second and third objections, and that's just not cool.
What does "pretty large" mean of an objection other than "good"? But you say you're not defending MacIntyre.
I'd just like to know what the position is.
The second bullet point looks like the "point and gape" attack. It simply restates emotivism and replies by declaring the opposite to be fact. The whole point of emotivism is that the "I" is implicity in "this is good," that the syntax is deceptive. The defense seems to be that we should trust syntax.
Is "moral approval" any more magic than "moral"? It seems like a pretty straightforward category: when people express approval using moral language. This fails to predict when people will express moral approval rather than the ordinary type, but that hardly makes it magical.
Is there any moral theory to which the third bullet point does not apply? Surely, every moral theory has opponents who will apply it incorrectly to "good morning." The second bullet point says we should trust syntax, while the third that language is tricky.
The quoted part seems like a good response to virtually all of analytic philosophy; perhaps it can be rehabilitated. But surely emotivism is explicit about promoting performance over meaning? Isn't that thewhole point of emotivism as opposed to other forms of moral relativism?
1) "pretty large" tends to mean the same thing as "fundamental", "general", "widely binding" -- at least in my experience. E.g., "Godel's Theorem was a pretty large rejection of the Russell program."
And no, I'm not defending MacIntyre. All I'm trying to demonstrate is that his arguments against emotivism are worthy enough for emotivists to learn.
2) No. You've never heard someone say, "I may not like it, but it's still good?" For example, there are people who are personally dislike gay marriage, but support it anyway because they feel it is good.
3) Defining "moral approval" as "when people express approval using moral language" says nothing about what the term "moral" means, and that's something any ethical system really ought to get to eventually.
4) Yes: deontological systems don't give one whit about the syntax of a statement; if your 'intention' was bad, your speech act was still bad. Utilitarianism also is more concerned with the actual weal or woe caused by a sentence, not its syntatic form.
And I'm done. If you want to learn more about MacIntyre, read the damn book. I'm a mathematician, not a philosopher.
You said that emotivists you know go into "absolute denial" at point 2; how do they react to an example like this?
I would expect them to say that the people are lying or feel constrained by social conventions. In Haidt terms, they feel both fairness and disgust or violation of tradition and feel that fairness trumps tradition/purity in this instance. Or they live in a liberal milieu where they're not allowed to treat tradition or purity morally. (I should give a lying example, but I'm not sure what I meant.)
ETA: if MacIntyre treated deontology the way he treats emotivism, he'd say that the morning is not an actor, therefore it cannot be "good" so "good morning" is incoherent. But I guess deontology is not a theory of language, so it's OK to just say that people are wrong.
For reference, I think you've done MacIntyre sufficient justice here.
I think that's putting the cart before the horse. Figuring out what 'moral' means should be something you do before even starting to try to study morality.