What is the Emotivist Person Like?

I'm back in full swing once again teaching an Ethics course at Marist College (actually, just coming off of teaching a very intensive 4-week online Ethics course, before launching right back into Spring face-to-face courses), and we just finished discussing Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of Emotivism (in After Virtue) as the moral theory that has become embedded and embodied in our late modern culture.  Last year, around this point in the semester, I wrote two blog posts focusing on that diagnosis (here and here). There's three particularly important features to MacIntyre's account -- precisely why I have my students read chapters 2 and 3 of After Virtue at the start of the semester.

First, MacIntyre does not think that many people in our contemporary culture explicitly endorse one of the academic forms of emotivism (derived from Ayer or Stevenson, Nietzsche or Sartre) -- rather their behavior, actions, expressions betray an implicit reliance on that moral theory as their default, the horizon within which they act and move and work out their being. Second, MacIntyre also does not think emotivism is remotely close to being correct or adequate as a moral theory.  But, if there are many people who on some gut-level do seem to think it the right theory, and act, judge, and communicate as if it was, that has some real implications for our moral environment.  Third, MacIntyre does not see these developments as particularly good ones -- even for the emotivist.  And, that is what I'm going to discuss here -- starting from the question: what kind of person does a lived-out commitment to Emotivism make one into?

Does MacIntyre get Emotivism Right?

Last month, I discussed a criticism of contemporary culture made by a thinker with whom I like to begin my Ethics courses -- Alasdair MacIntyre, who in After Virtue (as well as certain of his other works), maintains that we now inhabit a culture in which, like it or not, true as a moral theory or not, Emotivism has become the predominant framework within which moral discussion, and particularly disagreement, occur -- and this is bad, overall, for a number of reasons.

But it's worth asking -- particularly given the importance he accords to a moral theory attempting to get rival theories correct -- is MacIntyre himself right about Emotivism as a moral theory?  Is he representing it -- particularly in its self-conscious, explicitly philosophical form -- accurately, for instance when he claims that while "Emotivism has been presented by its most sophisticated proponents . . . as a theory about the meaning of sentences which are used to make moral judgements," if we look at it more closely, what its proponents failed to see is that it is "a cogent theory of use" of moral language, "rather than a false theory of meaning"?  In order to answer this, we have to compare MacIntyre's views on Emotivism in After Virtue against a few of Emotivism's "sophisticated proponents."

Emotivism in Contemporary Culture

My Ethics classes -- a staple course for me since grad school days -- generally start out with exploring some features the culture we inhabit and a few common obstacles or impediments to doing any serious work in Ethics.  So, we very quickly get into reading and discussing a few selections from the work of a contemporary proponent of (and convert to) Virtue Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre -- not a lot, certainly not as much as I'd like to, or as much as my students could use -- but if my aim is to cover enough material and moral theories over the course of an-always-too-short semester, we can't afford too much time to anyone (just for comparison, Bentham and Mill get 2 class sessions each, Plato, Kant, and Aquinas 3 sessions, and Aristotle lucks out with a total of 5). 

This time around, in addition to his essay "Plain Persons and Moral Theory," my students are studying chapters 2 and 3 of MacIntyre's landmark work, After Virtue. I've used the first piece because in it, he shows how moral theory connects up with our ordinary lives, decisions, and concerns.  He also provides an introduction to three moral standpoints commonly adopted in our culture and contrasts them to the sort of standpoint articulated by Virtue Ethics.  Many people in our culture do effectively operate more or less along the lines of Utilitarianism -- determining whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, depending on its consequences for those concerned -- or Deontology -- determining the morality by the conformity of actions or motives to rules and duties.  A third possibility is to hold that moral matters -- and our judgements about them -- really boil down to our subjective preferences, to our non-rational emotions, to "criterionless choice" -- that is, to Emotivism.