I agree that emotivism is an accurate description, much of the time, for what people mean when they make value judgments. I would also agree that most people don’t have a specific or precise definition in mind. But emotivism isn’t the only description and for practical purposes it’s often not the most useful. Among other things, we have to specify which emotion we are talking about. Not all disgust is moral disgust.
Value judgments show up routinely in law and in daily life. It would be an enormous, difficult, and probably low-value task to rewrite our legal code to avoid terms like “good cause”, “unjust enrichment”, “unconscionable contract”, and the like. Given that we’re stuck with moral language, it’s a useful project to pull out some definitions to help focus discourse slightly. But we aren’t going to be able to eliminate them. “Morality” and its cousins are too expensive to taboo.
We want law and social standards to be somewhat loosely defined, to avoid unscrupulous actors trying to worm their way through loopholes. We don’t want to be overly precise and narrow in our definitions—we want to leverage the judgement of judges and juries. But conversely, we do want to give them guidance about what we mean by those words. And precedent supplies one sort of guidance, and some definitions give them an additional sort of guidance.
I suspect it would be quite hard to pick out precisely what we as a society mean when we use those terms in the legal code—and very hard to reduce them to any sort of concrete physical description that would still be human-intelligible. I would be interested to see a counterexample if you can supply one easily.
I have the sense that trying to talk about human judgement and society without moral language would be about like trying to discuss computer science purely in terms of the hardware—possible, but unnecessarily cumbersome.
One of the common pathologies of the academy is that somebody comes up with a bright idea or a powerful intellectual tool. Researchers then spend several years applying that tool to increasingly diverse contexts, often where the marginal return from the tool is near-zero. Just because conceptual analysis is being over-used doesn’t mean that it is always useless! The first few uses of it may indeed have been fairly high-value in aiding us in communicating. The fact that the tool is then overused isn’t a reason to ignore it.
Endless wrangles about definitions, I think are necessarily low-value. Working out a few useful definitions or explanations for a common term can be valuable, though—particularly if we are going to apply those terms in a quasi-formal setting, like law.
I agree that emotivism is an accurate description, much of the time, for what people mean when they make value judgments. I would also agree that most people don’t have a specific or precise definition in mind. But emotivism isn’t the only description and for practical purposes it’s often not the most useful. Among other things, we have to specify which emotion we are talking about. Not all disgust is moral disgust.
Value judgments show up routinely in law and in daily life. It would be an enormous, difficult, and probably low-value task to rewrite our legal code to avoid terms like “good cause”, “unjust enrichment”, “unconscionable contract”, and the like. Given that we’re stuck with moral language, it’s a useful project to pull out some definitions to help focus discourse slightly. But we aren’t going to be able to eliminate them. “Morality” and its cousins are too expensive to taboo.
We want law and social standards to be somewhat loosely defined, to avoid unscrupulous actors trying to worm their way through loopholes. We don’t want to be overly precise and narrow in our definitions—we want to leverage the judgement of judges and juries. But conversely, we do want to give them guidance about what we mean by those words. And precedent supplies one sort of guidance, and some definitions give them an additional sort of guidance.
I suspect it would be quite hard to pick out precisely what we as a society mean when we use those terms in the legal code—and very hard to reduce them to any sort of concrete physical description that would still be human-intelligible. I would be interested to see a counterexample if you can supply one easily.
I have the sense that trying to talk about human judgement and society without moral language would be about like trying to discuss computer science purely in terms of the hardware—possible, but unnecessarily cumbersome.
One of the common pathologies of the academy is that somebody comes up with a bright idea or a powerful intellectual tool. Researchers then spend several years applying that tool to increasingly diverse contexts, often where the marginal return from the tool is near-zero. Just because conceptual analysis is being over-used doesn’t mean that it is always useless! The first few uses of it may indeed have been fairly high-value in aiding us in communicating. The fact that the tool is then overused isn’t a reason to ignore it.
Endless wrangles about definitions, I think are necessarily low-value. Working out a few useful definitions or explanations for a common term can be valuable, though—particularly if we are going to apply those terms in a quasi-formal setting, like law.