Moral Emotivism

We often hear the argument, when legislators consider laws that would restrict things like pornography, that morality cannot be legislated. Laws, it is claimed, can only be designed to address non-moral matters. The claim is so obviously wrongheaded, however, that it's surprising that anyone seriously believes it.

In his book Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, J. Budzizewski says about this assertion that,

From the horrified way in which modern people usually pronounce the phrase ["We can't legislate morality"], one would think that all its vowels were gasps. But let us try to breathe normally.

First, we need to understand that it is impossible to legislate without legislating morality. Try to think of a law that is not based on a moral idea; you won't be able to do it....you may be able to think of some that are based on false moral ideas, but that is not the same thing.

The law requiring highway taxes is based on the idea that people should be made to pay for the benefits they receive.

The law requiring graduated income taxes is based on the idea that some people ought to be made to pay for the benefits that others receive.

The law punishing murder is based on the moral idea that innocent blood should not be shed, that private individuals should not take the law into their own hands, and that individuals should be responsible for their deeds.

The law permitting abortion is based on the moral idea that innocent blood may be shed if the victim is still in the womb.

Because laws are based on moral ideas what could be wrong with making sure they're based on true ones?

Budzizewski, of course, is well aware that in our postmodern society the ideas both of truth and morality are problematic. He wrote the book, partly, to show that those postmodern ideas are vacuous.

Nevertheless, it's true (irony intended) that we live in a moral climate in which right and wrong are simply expressions of one's own personal preferences, tastes, biases and prejudices - a climate Alisdair MacIntyre, in his much cited book After Virtue, calls emotivism. To say that something is wrong is simply to express one's negative feelings or emotions about it.

Our modern culture is saturated with emotivism which makes agreement on many moral matters extremely difficult, if not impossible. If two people have different feelings about, say, abortion or affirmative action how can one person argue that the other person's feelings are wrong? They quickly find themselves at an impasse, and the only recourse is to change the subject (if they're polite) or start screaming at each other (if they're not).

Because we've reduced morality to subjective feelings, MacIntyre writes, our moral discourse has been essentially emptied of meaning. "We possess the simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have - very largely, if not entirely - lost our comprehension" of what those words actually mean. We no longer even know what we're saying when we make moral judgments.

We act as if we believe our moral judgments are righteous and true and those who disagree are moral reprobates, but, in the absence of an objective standard it's like believing that our judgment that Coke tastes better than Pepsi is righteous and true and those who disagree are aesthetic reprobates.

How have we come to the place where one of the most important aspects of being human, the ability to objectively distinguish right from wrong behavior, turns out to be an illusion?

As long as people believed that God had woven a moral law into the fabric of the universe and inscribed it on our conscience, people could believe that the law was objective and independent of our feelings about it. There was a moral right and wrong regardless of what we thought.

But when belief in God became less tenable among our cultural elites, so did belief in an objective moral law. If there's no transcendent moral authority who imposes moral duties and who can hold us accountable for obeying them then morality becomes a delusion, an insubstantial shadow.

We still use the words, as MacIntyre says, but the words are just tools for expressing our attitudes and emotions. They don't have any real meaning in themselves.

Consider this question: What does it mean to say that something is morally "wrong" if there are no objective standards and no ultimate accountability for violating whatever subjective and arbitrary standards there may be? It doesn't mean anything more than that the speaker is expressing disapproval of the act.

One wonders, as more and more people come to realize that in a secularized world morality is both an illusion and a delusion, what the consequences will be for our ability to live together in a coherent society and indeed what the structure of that society will ultimately be.