Noncognitivists

Noncognitivism is a family of positions in metaethics that contends moral judgments do not express propositions that can be true or false. Instead, moral statements are seen as expressions of approval or disapproval, or as prescriptions intended to guide action and influence others. Because of this, moral sentences are not considered truth-apt in the same way as ordinary descriptive claims.

Historically, noncognitivism emerged during the rise of logical positivism and the analysis of moral language. Emotivism, associated with A. J. Ayer and later C. L. Stevenson, holds that moral utterances primarily express emotions and aim to affect the listener’s attitudes. Prescriptivism, developed by R. M. Hare, treats moral language as universalizable prescriptions that guide conduct rather than as reports of belief. Expressivist approaches generalize the idea that moral language expresses attitudes and is used to influence or commit others.

Variants and developments since the 20th century include more sophisticated expressivist theories that attempt to account for theability of moral discourse to function in argument and discourse, sometimes drawing on quasi-realism to explain why moral language appears to have objectivity despite noncognitivist commitments.

Key challenges facing noncognitivism include the Frege-Geach problem, which questions how ethical terms can participate in logical inferences if they are not truth-conditional. Critics also contend that noncognitivism struggles to explain moral disagreement and the apparent presupposition that moral claims can be true or false. Proponents respond that noncognitivism preserves a meaningful, practice-oriented account of moral language while denying truth-conditional semantics.