Sep 29 JDN 2460583

The theory of expressivism, often posited as an alternative to moral realism, is based on the observation by Hume that factual knowledge is not intrinsically motivating. I can believe that a food is nutritious and that I need nutrition to survive, but without some emotional experience to motivate me—hunger—I will nonetheless remain unmotivated to eat the nutritious food. Because morality is meant to be intrinsically motivating, says Hume, it must not involve statements of fact.

Yet really all Hume has shown is that if indeed facts are not intrinsically motivating, and moral statements are intrinsically motivating, then moral statements are not merely statements of fact. But even statements of fact are rarely merely statements of fact! If I were to walk down the street stating facts at random (lemurs have rings on their tails, the Sun is over one million kilometers in diameter, bicycles have two wheels, people sit on chairs, time dilates as you approach the speed of light, LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US, Coca-Cola in the United States contains high fructose corn syrup, humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA), I would be seen as a very odd sort of person indeed. Even when I state a fact, I do so out of some motivation, frequently an emotional motivation. I’m often trying to explain, or to convince. Sometimes I am angry, and I want to express my anger and frustration. Other times I am sad and seeking consolation. I have many emotions, and I often use words to express them. Nonetheless, in the process I will make many statements of fact that are either true or false: “Humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA” I might use to argue in favor of common descent; “Time dilates as you approach the speed of light” I have used in to explain relativity theory; “LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US” I might use to argue in favor of some sort of gay rights policy. When I say “genocide is wrong!” I probably have some sort of emotional motivation for this—likely my outrage at an ongoing genocide. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure it’s true that genocide is wrong.

Expressivism says that moral statements don’t express propositions at all, they express attitudes, relations to ideas that are not of the same kind as belief and disbelief, truth and falsehood. Much as “Hello!” or “Darn it!” don’t really state facts or inquire about facts, expressivists like Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard would say that “Genocide is wrong” doesn’t say anything about the facts of genocide, it merely expresses my attitude of moral disapproval toward genocide.

Yet expressivists can’t abandon all normativity—otherwise even the claim “expressivism is true” has no moral force. Allan Gibbard, like most expressivists, supports epistemic normativity—the principle that we ought to believe what is true. But this seems to me already a moral principle, and one that is not merely an attitude that some people happen to have, but in fact a fundamental axiom that ought to apply to any rational beings in any possible universe. Even more, Gibbard agrees that some moral attitudes are more warranted than others, that “genocide is wrong” is more legitimate than “genocide is good”. But once we agree that there are objective normative truths and moral attitudes can be more or less justified, how is this any different from moral realism?

Indeed, in terms of cognitive science I’m not sure beliefs and emotions are so easily separable in the first place. In some sense I think statements of fact can be intrinsically motivating—or perhaps it is better to put it this way: If your brain is working properly, certain beliefs and emotions will necessarily coincide. If you believe that you are about to be attacked by a tiger, and you don’t experience the emotion of fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you are about to die of starvation, and you don’t experience the emotion of hunger, something is wrong. Conversely, if you believe that you are safe from all danger, and yet you experience fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you have eaten plenty of food, yet you still experience hunger, something is wrong. When your beliefs and emotions don’t align, either your beliefs or your emotions are defective. I would say that the same is true of moral beliefs. If you believe that genocide is wrong but you are not motivated to resist genocide, something is wrong; if you believe that feeding your children is obligatory but you are not motivated to feed your children, something is wrong.

It may well be that without emotion, facts would never motivate us; but emotions can warranted by facts. That is how we distinguish depression from sadness, mania from joy, phobia from fear. Indeed I am dubious of the entire philosophical project of noncognitivism, of which expressivism is the moral form. Noncognitivism is the idea that a given domain of mental processing is not cognitive—not based on thinking, reason, or belief. There is often a sense that noncognitive mental processing is “lower” than cognition, usually based on the idea that it is more phylogenetically conserved—that we think as men but feel as rats.

Yet in fact this is not how human emotions work at all. Poetry—mere words—often evokes the strongest of emotions. A text message of “I love you” or “I think we should see other people” can change the course of our lives. An ambulance in the driveway will pale the face of any parent. In 2001 the video footage of airplanes colliding with skyscrapers gave all of America nightmares for weeks. Yet stop and think about what text messages, ambulances, video footage, airplanes, and skyscrapers are—they are technologies so advanced, so irreducibly cognitive, that even the world’s technological superpower had none of them 200 years ago. (We didn’t have text messages forty years ago!) Even something as apparently dry as numbers can have profound emotional effects: In the statements “Your blood sugar is X mg/dL” to a diabetic, “You have Y years to live” to a cancer patient, or “Z people died” in a news report, the emotional effects are almost wholly dependent upon the value of the numbers X, Y, and Z—values of X = 100, Y = 50 and Z = 0 would be no cause for alarm (or perhaps even cause for celebration!), while values of X = 400, Y = 2, and Z = 10,000 would trigger immediate shock, terror and despair. The entire discipline of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy depends upon the fact that talking to people about their thoughts and beliefs can have profound effects upon their emotions and actions—and in empirical studies, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is verified to work in a variety of circumstances and is more effective than medication for virtually every mental disorder. We do not think as men but feel as rats; we thinkandfeel as human beings.

Because they are evolved instincts, we have limited control over them, and other animals have them, we are often inclined to suppose that emotions are simple, stupid, irrational—but on the contrary they are mind-bogglingly complex, brilliantly intelligent, and the essence of what it means to be a rational being. People who don’t have emotions aren’t rational—they are inert. In psychopathology a loss of capacity for emotion is known as flat affect, and it is often debilitating; it is often found in schizophrenia and autism, and in its most extreme forms it causes catatonia—that is, a total lack of body motion. From Plato to Star Trek, Western culture has taught us to think that a loss of emotion would improve our rationality; but on the contrary, a loss of all emotion would render us completely vegetative. Lieutenant Commander Data without his emotion chip should stand in one place and do nothing—for this is what people without emotion actually do.

Indeed, attractive and aversive experiences—that is, emotions—are the core of goal-seeking behavior, without which rationality is impossible. Apparently simple experiences like pleasure and pain (let alone obviously complicated ones like jealousy and patriotism) are so complex that the most advanced robots in the world cannot even get close to simulating them. Injure a rat, and it will withdraw and cry out in pain; damage a robot (at least any less than a state-of-the-art research robot), and it will not react at all, continuing ineffectually through the same motions it was attempting a moment ago. This shows that rats are smarter than robots—an organism that continues on its way regardless of the stimulus is more like a plant than an animal.

Our emotions do sometimes fail us. They hurt us, they put us at risk, they make us behave in ways that are harmful or irrational. Yet to declare on these grounds that emotions are the enemy of reason would be like declaring that we should all poke out our eyes because sometimes we are fooled by optical illusions. It would be like saying that a shirt with one loose thread is unwearable, that a mathematician who once omits a negative sign should never again be trusted. This is not rationality but perfectionism. Like human eyes, human emotions are rational the vast majority of the time, and when they aren’t, this is cause for concern. Truly irrational emotions include mania, depression, phobia, and paranoia—and it’s no accident that we respond to these emotions with psychotherapy and medication.

Expressivism is legitimate precisely because it is not a challenger to moral realism. Personally, I think that expressivism is wrong because moral claims express facts as much as they express attitudes; but given our present state of knowledge about cognitive science, that is the sort of question upon which reasonable people can disagree. Moreover, the close ties between emotion and reason may ultimately entail that we are wrong to make the distinction in the first place. It is entirely reasonable, at our present state of knowledge, to think that moral judgments are primarily emotional rather than propositional. What isnot reasonable, however, is the claim that moral statements cannot be objectively justified—the evidence against this claim is simply too compelling to ignore. If moral claims are emotions, they are emotions that can be objectively justified.