Abstract
According to noncognitivism, normative beliefs are just desire-like attitudes. While noncognitivists have devoted great effort to explaining the nature of normative belief, they have said little about all of the other attitudes we take towards normative matters. Many of us desire to do the right thing. We sometimes wonder whether our conduct is morally permissible; we hope that it is, and occasionally fear that it is not. This gives rise to what Schroeder calls the ‘Many Attitudes Problem’: the problem of developing a plausible noncognitivist account of the full range of attitudes that we take towards normative matters. This paper explores the problem and proposes a solution.
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Notes
In the early years, noncognitivists proclaimed that there are no normative beliefs (e.g., Ayer 1936). But contemporary noncognitivists have sought to distance themselves from the more radical proclamations of their intellectual forebears. Contemporary ‘quasi-realists’ allow that there are normative beliefs. It’s just that normative beliefs are best understood as desire-like states (Blackburn 1993, 1998; Gibbard 2003; Yalcin 2012). For further discussion of the quasi-realist notion of belief, see Ridge (2006a), Köhler (2017).
For noncognitivist accounts of belief, see Gibbard (1990, 2003), Köhler (2013), Björnsson and McPherson (2014). For noncognitivist theories of credence, see Sepielli (2012), Eriksson and Olinder (2016), Ridge (2018). For noncognitivist takes on knowledge, see Blackburn (1996), Gibbard (2003: chp.11).
The one exception is Köhler (2017: 205–207), who briefly discusses how noncognitivists might understand normative desire, as well as the attitude of entertaining the thought that... While there are some important differences between our approaches (see fn. 14), I am broadly sympathetic to Köhler’s suggestions. Indeed, the project of this paper is to systematically expand something in the spirit of Köhler’s compressed remarks into a full-fledged theory of normative attitudes.
The notion that many propositional attitudes can be reduced to simpler components can be found as far back as Descartes’ Passions of the Soul. For contemporary endorsements of Belief-Desire Reduction, see Lewis (1974: 332) and Searle (1983: 31–36). Even when it is not explicitly endorsed, I think that some version of Belief-Desire Reduction can be discerned in the background of many programs in philosophy of mind—for example, the belief-desire theory of intention (Sect. 5). For a recent attempt to explain a wide variety of mental phenomena in terms of belief and desire, see Sinhababu (2017).
There are different ways of fleshing out Belief-Desire Reduction, depending on how one thinks the reduction goes. In order for my strategy to get off the ground, I only need the claim that a wide variety of attitudes can be partially characterized in terms of some combination of belief and desire. I discuss this issue at greater length later in the paper (Sect. 4.5).
Similarly, Schroeder does not simply say that people believe pairs of properties. He tells us what this involves: to believe a pair of properties \(\langle \pi _1, \pi _2 \rangle \) is to be for both \(\pi _1\) and \(\pi _2\), where being for is a desire-like state.
Thanks to a referee for raising this sort of case.
Note that since both Dispositions-to-Act and Dispositions-to-Experience are formulated as necessary conditions on desire, the two are perfectly compatible.
My recipe for developing a noncognitivist account of normative desire bears comparison with the account in Köhler (2017: 205–207), which was developed independently and is, to my knowledge, the only published discussion of how expressivists should analyze desire. On Köhler’s account, descriptive desire and normative desire have different “conceptual roles.” The conceptual role of desiring a descriptive proposition is to motivate action, à la Dispositions-to-Act (p. 205). By contrast, Köhler denies that normative desires motivate action. Instead, the conceptual role of desiring some normative proposition p is dispose one to “take pleasure in entertaining the thought that p”, to have one’s attention drawn to the thought that p, and to entertain this thought in a “fantasizing manner” (p. 206).
Köhler’s description of the conceptual role of normative desire has some important similarities to Dispositions-to-Experience. In this regard, our approaches are complementary. That said, there is also a major difference: since Köhler denies that normative desires motivate action, he is not able to derive the conceptual role of normative desire as a special instance of a more general conceptual role shared by all desires.
This is arguably equivalent to interpreting the disposition as taking wide-scope over a conditional—e.g., if S desires p, then, for any action \(\phi \), S is disposed to (\(\phi \) if S believes that \(\phi \) will bring about p).
A referee points out that a variant of this worry is less easily defused. Consider Kyle, who desires the conjunction c: lying is permissible and I (Kyle) never existed. According to Dispositions-to-Act (Unpacked), this amounts to saying that Kyle is disposed to act in various ways in the event that he comes to believe that so acting will satisfy c. But can we even make sense of forming such an absurd belief?
In response, let me make two further points. First, while the belief in question is absurd, it might still be psychologically possible. After all, many people have confused beliefs about the ways in which they could change the past, as the paradoxes of time travel reveal. Second, the problem raised by this case is not specific to normative desires or any noncognitivist theory thereof. After all, the troublesome feature of Kyle’s desire is its second conjunct (his desire not to have been born), which is a descriptive content. As long as there is some way for proponents of a motivational condition on desire to make sense of Kyle’s desire never to have been born, noncognitivists should be able to appeal to this solution to make sense of the conjunctive desire.
Thanks to a referee for helping me appreciate this point.
In Beddor (2019), I defend a different version of the Identity Strategy. On the view developed there, normative and descriptive beliefs have the same functional role—a role characterized in terms of their action-guiding potential. However, an agent stands in this belief relation towards a normative proposition just in case they stand in a different psychological relation—in particular, a conative relation—towards some descriptive proposition. As a result, we still vindicate the noncognitivist idea that an agent believes lying is wrong if and only if they desire that no one lies. See Beddor (2019: 15–24) for the details.
Indeed, one advantage of my account of normative desire is that it makes room for agents who desire to do evil. Imagine a further variant of our scenario in which Michelle desires to do something wrong. The account developed here predicts that this desire consists—in part—in a disposition to break her promise, given a belief such as promise. Of course, since her belief in promise is itself a desire-like state, this means that evil Michelle will have conflicting noncognitive attitudes, and hence conflicting dispositions. But this by itself is no cause for concern—indeed, this seems to be precisely what noncognitivists should say about such cases.
Versions of a belief-desire theory of intention are defended in Davidson (1963), Audi (1973), Davis (1984); Ridge (1998), and Sinhababu (2013, 2017). Applying the simplest version of the belief-desire theory to normative intention, the idea would be that Michelle intends to do no wrong just in case she both desires to do no wrong and she has a belief about the means of doing no wrong (e.g., a belief such as promise).
Arguably, we should place further constraints on the degree of belief. Perhaps in order to genuinely fear that p, S’s degree of belief in p needs to be sufficiently high. But it also should not be too high—if Edmund is certain a burglar will break in, it seems wrong to describe him as fearing this outcome. I’ll set these complications aside going forward.
These belief-desire conditions on fear and hope were anticipated by Hume (Treatise 2.3.9). For a more contemporary analysis of fear and hope in terms of these conditions, see Day (1970).
For discussion of how this sort of view helps solves the ‘negation problem’ for expressivism, see Schroeder (2008a: chps. 4–5).
Bykvist and Olson (2012) raise a number of important challenges for this account, e.g.:
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(1)
Why is the conative attitude that constitutes normative credence gradable in the same ways as descriptive credence?
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(2)
If normative credence and descriptive credence are very different states, why can we make comparative confidence ascriptions (e.g., I’m more certain that 2 + 2 = 4 than that stealing is wrong)?
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(3)
According to the Normalization Axiom for normative credence, everyone is rationally required to be certain of the tautology, Either stealing is wrong or it isn’t. But on Sepielli’s view, this means that everyone is rationally required to have a maximally strong conative attitude towards the tautology: Either I will blame for stealing or I won’t (\(\top \)), which seems implausible.
Let me make two brief remarks about how one might address these problems. Arguably, (1) and (2) are instances of a more general—and by now familiar—question: what explains why normative belief has so much in common with descriptive belief, given that the former is a desire-like state? As we saw in Sect. 4.4, there are two strategies for answering this: the Similarity Strategy and the Identity Strategy. If either strategy works for binary belief, it’s natural to hope it will carry over to the fine-grained case. For example, proponents of the Identity Strategy could say that normative and descriptive credence have the same functional role. This would explain why both are gradable, and also why we can make comparative confidence ascriptions.
With regards to (3), one option is to question whether this implication is really so objectionable. We’ve seen that one plausible condition on conative attitudes is given by Dispositions-to-Act. According to Dispositions-to-Act, desiring \(\top \) involves being disposed to act in ways that one believes will satisfy \(\top \). Now, every action trivially satisfies \(\top \); moreover, we can know this a priori. So, at least on a purely motivational conception of desire, it seems plausible that rational agents are committed to maximally desiring \(\top \). For further discussion of these issues, see Beddor (2019, p. 25).
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(1)
For an alternative approach, see Ridge (2018).
An exception is forgetting. But even this attitude can be analyzed in terms of the loss of belief.
Some hold that emotive factives entail knowledge, not just belief. (See, e.g., Unger 1975; Gordon 1987; Williamson 2000; Dietz 2018). If, as I’ll be arguing momentarily, noncognitivists can make sense of normative knowledge, then they are also in a position to make sense of this stronger entailment.
Other features of factive attitude ascriptions can be analyzed in a similar fashion. For example, both Blackburn (1996, 1998) and Gibbard (2003) have argued that noncognitivists can make sense of a ‘No Defeaters’ condition on knowledge. To illustrate with Blackburn’s version of this idea: to say that S’s belief is immune to defeat is to say that no improvement in S’s epistemic position would result in S abandoning her belief—where the notion of ‘improvement’ is also understood as the expression of a conative attitude. See also Moss (2013), who argues that expressivists can make room for modal conditions on knowledge, such as safety and sensitivity.
Friedman also stresses the connection between wondering and knowledge, describing wondering as an attitude that is “relieved by coming to know” (2013: 145). However, she resists any attempt to analyze wonder as a desire to know, on the grounds that desiring is a state whereas wondering is an activity. It is not entirely clear to me that the verb ‘wonder’ never denotes a state, but let us set that aside. Even if Friedman is correct, we might appeal to the distinction between occurrent and standing desires, identifying wondering with an occurrent desire to know.
See Goldman (2006: chp.2) for a proposal along these lines.
In more recent work, Ridge (2014) has substantively revised his view. On his revised view, believing that euthanasia is wrong involves two components: a normative perspective (understood as a conative state) and a descriptive belief that any admissible standard would give low marks to euthanasia, where the ‘admissible standards’ are those that are not ruled out by the normative perspective. Generalized to e.g., wondering, the idea would be that wondering whether \(\phi \)-ing is wrong involves both (1) a normative perspective n, (2) wondering whether \(\phi \)-ing would be given low marks by any n-admissible normative standard. On the face of it, this account is better-equipped to handle our problem. After all, Eugenia could know all of the descriptive facts about euthanasia while still wondering whether euthanasia is wrong, since she could wonder whether any standard consistent with her normative perspective permits euthanasia. But a residual worry remains. Note that on this diagnosis, Eugenia is really wondering about the consequences of her (current) normative perspective. This seems to misdescribe the case. Intuitively, Eugenia is not trying to figure out which courses of action she currently disapproves of. Rather, it seems she is trying to make up her mind which courses of action she should disapprove of.
See Bykvist and Olson (2009) for related worries about whether hybrid views can handle the full range of cases of normative uncertainty.
In addition to Ridge’s recent view (discussed in fn. 35), one promising place to look is the hybrid theory of normative concepts in Laskowski (2019). On Laskowski’s view, a normative concept always picks out some natural property—say, failing to maximize pleasure. Still, the normative concept is distinct from the concept of failing to maximize pleasure. On this view, for Eugenia to believe euthanasia is wrong is for her to both (1) believe euthanasia is \(c _{\textsc {wrong}}\), (2) desire to avoid actions that are \(c _{\textsc {wrong}}\), where \(c _{\textsc {wrong}}\) is a normative concept that picks out some natural property. This helps with our problem: Eugenia could know exactly which natural properties an action exhibits, while still wondering whether that action is wrong, since she might not know which natural property \(c _{\textsc {wrong}}\) denotes (for familiar Frege’s Puzzle reasons). However, difficult questions remain. In particular, can we say anything systematic about the intensions of normative concepts? Perhaps the most straightforward answer would be that the intension of \(c _{\textsc {wrong}}\) is a function from an agent x and a time t to whatever natural property x holds in disapproval at t. But note that this answer assumes that there is always some natural property that the agent holds in disapproval (even if they do not know what that property is). But this seems to misdescribe Eugenia’s case, for precisely the sort of reasons discussed in fn. 35: Eugenia is not uncertain of what property she currently disapproves of, but rather what property to disapprove of. So while I think the hybrid concept approach is promising, more work is needed before it can claim to offer a fully satisfactory solution to our problem.
Thanks to Simon Goldstein, Nick Laskowski, the NUS philosophy reading group, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.
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Beddor, B. A solution to the many attitudes problem. Philos Stud 177, 2789–2813 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01339-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01339-4