Felix Danowski
University of Vienna
Metaethical Non-Cognitivism is the view that moral judgments are non-cognitive, i.e. conative mental states. They are functionally more like desires rather than ordinary non-moral beliefs, e.g. in being inherently motivating.
This view is often regarded as troubled by objections centered around the “surface structure” of moral thought and language. We think and talk just as if moral matters are like any other descriptive subject-matter, freely employing notions such as moral truth, facts, and knowledge. Non-Cognitivists have to explain this.
More recently, many philosophers with sympathies for Non-Cognitivism have tackled this problem by embracing so-called Hybridism about moral judgments. Moral judgments, on this picture, have both cognitive and conative features because they are literally pairs of both kinds of mental states.
In this talk, I want to question the way the boundary between both views is usually drawn. In particular, I want to argue that even if a pure Non-Cognitivism about moral judgments were to be true, the vast majority of our everyday moral judgments would turn out to be hybrid, i.e. constituted out of combinations of cognitive and conative mental states. This, I will argue, follows straightforwardly from a) the prominence of instrumental desires in everyday life, and b) a plausible `hybridist’ theory of these instrumental states. Most of our everyday desires are, on this account, instrumental desires, and thus hybrid mental states. Evidence in favor of this view is based on the sensitivity of instrumental desires to belief-change.
If this line of thought holds for desires, then it should apply to moral judgments as well. If Non-Cognitivism is true, then most of our moral judgments are instrumental moral judgments, which in turn are constituted by pairs of cognitive mental states and purely conative, basic value judgments. We should keep these hybrid states distinct from the basic value judgments that underlie them. This, I will argue, in turn has some implication to the way in which Non-Cognitivists should explain the cognitive surface structure of moral thought and language, most prominently in regards to the epistemic evaluation of moral judgments and moral reasoning.
Chair: Ugur Yilmazel
Time: September 6th, 17:30-18:00
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 