Philippa Foot - Critique of Non-cognitivism

Critique of Non-cognitivism

Foot's works of the late 1950s were meta-ethical in character: that is, they pertained to the status of moral judgment and speech. The essays Moral Arguments and Moral Beliefs, in particular, were crucial in overturning the rule of non-cognitivism in analytic approaches to ethical theory in the preceding decades.

The non-cognitivist approach may already be found in Hume, but it was given its most influential analytic formulations in works of A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and R. M. Hare. These writers focused on so-called 'thin ethical concepts' such as "good" and "bad" and "right" and "wrong", arguing that they are not employed to affirm something true of the thing in question, but rather, to express an emotion or (in Hare's case) an imperative.

This sort of analysis of 'thin" ethical concepts was tied to a special partitioning account of more concrete or "thick" concepts, such as "cowardly", 'cruel", or "gluttonous": these were supposed to combine a non-cognitive "evaluative" element with the obvious, "merely descriptive" element.

Foot's purpose was to criticize this distinction and the underlying account of thin concepts. Because of the particular way she approached the defense of the cognitive and truth-evaluable character of moral judgment, these essays were crucial in bringing the question of the rationality of morality to the fore.

Practical considerations involving "thick" ethical concepts – but it would be cruel, it would be cowardly, it's hers, or I promised her I wouldn't – move people to act one way rather than another, but they are as descriptive as any other judgment pertaining to human life. They differ from thought such as it would be done on a Tuesday or it would take about three gallons of paint, not by the admixture of any non-factual, attitude-expressing "moral" element, but by the fact that human beings have reasons not to do things that are cowardly or cruel.

Her lifelong devotion to this question appears in all periods of her work. It may be found in her continuing discussion of the Platonic immoralists, Callicles and Thrasymachus, and of Nietzsche.