Emotivism is the water we swim in. In our society it is the default means for discerning right from wrong. We should understand how we got here, and its implications.
Realism
In our day, as in all days, the difference between right and wrong is of primary concern. We are fixated on it all day, every day. But how we distinguish right from wrong has evolved.
The dominant understanding in societies during the Christian era was moral realism: the conception of morality as fixed in the universe. To decide the rightness or wrongness of something, we would look to external hierarchies of value and disvalue, universals that apply the same to everyone. In this way of thinking, morality is extant in the universe, to be discovered and then acted upon; it is not internal to my individual psyche, to be reacted to. Murder, for example, is wrong; it is not just something I have a bad feeling about.
Moral realism was a natural incident of belief in divine revelation. What we value corresponds to that which promotes life, and our thriving within it. God, who created every good thing, was understood to be the Author of mankind, and the ongoing Sustainer. We are sustained in pursuing what we value and avoiding what we disvalue. Values, including moral values, originate in Him.
Relativism
Christianity gradually gave way to ideologies, man-made systems divorced from the natural order. Without divine injunction, it is difficult to place the source of moral values and disvalues, other than in those changing ideological systems. Those systems of thought are sustained in social norms, which we absorb as our conception of right and wrong. That right and wrong are what society says it is becomes normalized. It is regarded as situational, and highly colored by the ideological shibboleths of the day.
In the age of ideology, acting on self-interest rather than principle comes to seem right and normal. This leads inevitably to transactional commodification of self and others, in addition to the challenges of living in an ever-shifting moral landscape.
Ideological social engineering movements, influenced by the likes of Comte, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marcuse, have been numerous and overlapping, but all rest on a morality (or moralities) that are fluid rather than fixed. Relativism became the water we swim in, and it served midwife to the birth of emotivism.
Therapy as Ideology
Among the ideological detachments from natural order is therapeutic self-care. It is the conviction that one’s paramount concern in life should be with one’s own psychological well-being rather than emotional resilience and self-control, or the well-being of others. It is a confusion of disease and cure, in which pursuit of healthy or valid personal psychology ahead of all else leads inexorably to pathology instead.
Not least among the negative consequences of this worldview is a re-thinking of morality. What is right and wrong is a psychological matter. It is sourced not in God, or the universe, or in social norms, or in ideology, except insofar as we understand the therapeutic mindset itself to be an ideology. The psychological revolution shifts moral thinking away even from concepts of right and wrong in the abstract. Right and wrong are simply that which serves or disserves the therapeutic imperative. What is comforting is good. What is upsetting is bad.
Emotivism
I began my book The Discovered Self: Identity in the Therapeutic Age with a discussion of emotivism, because it is foundational to the therapeutic worldview that predominates today. It is the idea that all evaluative judgments, including moral judgments, are expressions of personal preference, discerned by how one feels.
With the emotivist perspective, people make what they count as moral judgments, and they may use sophisticated-sounding arguments, but generally those float on waves of evolving social norms. Ultimately they’re really only making judgments of what they approve or disapprove. It is the essence of moral relativism, driven by self-interest rather than principle.
Emotivism rests on the idea that all our actions, including those that seem to be altruistic, are actually only expressions of self-interest. Mother Teresa seemed to live a life of devotion to others, but maybe that just appealed to a misguided desire for ultimate significance, or she sought moral gravitas, or she wanted to be admired. So she acted from self-interest, says the emotivist, and her actions deserve no more praise or rebuke than anyone else’s.
The idea behind emotivism was articulated in the 1920’s by A.J. Ayer, one of the logical positivists who, for all their pretensions to analytic rigor, simply stated as if axiomatic a condition of empirical verifiability to our apprehension of the world. That man-imposed condition excludes by definition the objective reality of transcendent ideals like truth, falsity, justice, injustice, beauty, ugliness, good, or evil. A statement that something is good or bad (e.g., “murder is wrong”) is not a statement of fact, therefore, but a statement of one’s feeling only: that he finds murder emotionally upsetting.
Translating from fact-based language
The emotivist disposition may not be so obvious in ordinary discourse. Language use reflects the mental activity of the emotivist: it initates in subjective emotional reaction, but then proceeds on the forms of objective rationality. To say the same thing in reverse, though the emotivist may provide a rational explanation for his point of view concerning a moral question, his stance begins in emotional reaction.
The shift from moral realism to emotivism means loss of the neutrality of fact-based language. The emotivist doesn’t attempt to persuade on the premise of rational thought rooted in objective moral principle. His language—and therefore his thought—is centered on his own feelings, and that means his communication with others is centered on his own feelings, as well.
He recognizes, however, that others are self- and other-aware creatures also. This is a function of the intersubjectivity of consciousness, which we all carry as tacit knowledge, unthinkingly applied in social situations in the same way we unthinkingly balance on a bicycle. The emotivist speaks the language of objective morality, but it is not his native language. He can engage others in that language, but only to the end of manipulation of others to further his aim of psychological self-care. As emotivism spreads, it means, in Alisdair MacIntyre’s words (After Virtue, 1981) “obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.” All social interactions become occasions of advancing self-interest, and that interest will be serving one’s own emotional need before all else.
Emotivism is an incident of the therapeutic worldview. The therapeutic means inward-looking in all things, and emotivism is application of that inward-looking to moral reasoning. The prevalence of emotivism is behind the increasing sense that we must deal with others suspiciously, distantly, contractually, with self-protection paramount, devoid of brotherly love. It is the reason we increasingly sense the atomizing, instrumental usage of others in all our relations, manipulation for self-interest always ahead of common interest. We come to expect all political and social affairs to be conducted for self-interest rather than principle.
This is the natural consequence of abandoning objective, applicable-to-all morality, in favor of reliance on feelings for distinguishing moral good from bad. If murder is bad, it’s only because of how I feel about it, not because it violates divine command.
Realism vs. Nominalism
We touched on what “moral realism” is: the perspective that right and wrong are written into the cosmos, so to speak. They are are objective and universal virtues and vices by which to make moral judgments.
Moral realism is a sub-species of “realism” more generally. As with moral right and wrong, other ideals can be “real:” truth, justice, mathematics, analogy, metaphor, categories, groups, one-and-many universality, and so on. It is a Platonic concept, the notion that there is a higher reality by which we make sense of what manifests in space-time. There are category differences throughout our experience of life that enable us to make sense of things. You distinguish pine trees from deciduous because it is a real distinction among trees, and it is a real distinction in your mind that discerns them categorically.
The reason for re-visiting realism and moral realism in particular is to highlight a contrast between realism and nominalism. We’ll then apply the same rubric to the contrast between moral realism and emotivism.
Moral realism was the bedrock of Jewish thinking and then Christian, for centuries. But there was always a tension between Platonic realism and Aristotelean particularity, and this tension manifested in the nominalism of William of Ockham in the 14th century. He was actually trying to defend Christianity against excessively theorizing metaphysics, paring away theories unnecessary to a more pure fideism: all in all in God, and we in Him by faith alone (hence “Ockham’s Razor”). But on the way to doing this, he insisted on his nominalist view that there are no universal essences by which disparate things are grouped. Each thing is its own thing, you might say, and when we group according to purportedly universal labels we are merely attaching unhelpful and unreal mental constructs.
William of Ockham’s fideism lives on in some strands of Protestant theology, but in general some species of Platonic realism underwrites most orthodox religion (excepting perhaps among liberal theologians and congregants who get lost in the weeds of ideological moral relativism).
Realists may sneer at nominalism because it is incoherent. Why is it incoherent? Because to even explain how nominalism is wrong, one has to use the very terms for categories of thinking that nominalism eschews. Yes, murder is wrong because God says so, end of story for the nominalist, but how can murder be murder if you don’t accept as real the category of human being? And if God prohibits murder, doesn’t He thereby make real the categories of murder, and of good and evil?
Emotivism is incoherent
Just as nominalism is incoherent, so is emotivism. Emotivism is incoherent because you have to use the language of the logos, of rationality, to even say what it is. Logos is the word, and words are symbols, categorizing functions rendering the world and others within it intelligible.
Like nominalism, emotivism denies universal categories. Indeed, one could describe emotivism as a species of nominalism, because one’s feelings do not involve a parsing of categorical essences to discern right from wrong. Things just are what they are. Murder is “wrong” because I don’t like it. Abortion is not murder because I ambiguate the category of human being, which is to say I present a muddle as to whether it is a category at all, or even relevant.
Indeed emotivism is uniquely open to casuistry. Moral questions sounding in realist terms (“murder is wrong”) are translated to psychology terms (“I feel bad about murder”) and once we’re in the terrain of psychology, realism is discarded at the door, so to speak, rejected ab initio. The question of moral realism never gets its day in court, for the emotivist. Thanks a lot, Freud.
If I assign good and evil, right and wrong, to my feelings, whence my feelings? Not conscience, because whether it is from God or is evolved, the conscience is real, in that there is a source outside myself for it. So my feelings must derive from ambient social norms, or from the atavistic subconscious, perhaps the well of conflict between id and superego. What is right and wrong ebbs and flows according to the fashions of the day. I feel it—good or bad—because that feeling is socially reinforced.
Emotivism is demonic
Except it’s even worse than that. Realism relates to valuing according to ultimate good, and it follows from this that ultimate good resides in an ultimate Authority which makes that ultimate good real. The reference for good (and for its contrast to evil) is the Divine.
Emotivism, on the other hand, resides within. It is psychologically satisfying to embrace the shibboleths of the day, or to selectively reject them according to the setting on my filter for reflexive transgression. Either way, my moral decision-making is an empty sail catching the winds of fashion.
But maybe its source is something more sinister. Remember William of Ockham pinned all authority on God, and none on metaphysical tropes of human reason. Psychological man does not attach moral valence according to any source outside himself. He is the sole arbiter of good and evil; right and wrong.
Except that he’s not really all alone in that after all. If the theists are right, and even if the nominalist William of Ockham is right, there is a supernatural reality out there beyond this mortal plane. Millions of Christians and Jews throughout history have subscribed to a vision of reality in which the supernatural is populated by angelic agents, some of whom are dark influencers, fanning the embers of mankind’s worst instincts.