 Motivism is a moral theory. What does it actually say? Before worrying about whether it's right or wrong, whether it applies to all cases or just some cases, what does it actually say? What did you get from the reading? McIntyre sort of gave a few kind of evolutions. If you were on the spot and you had to explain it to somebody else who wasn't in this class, what would you say? It's a moral theory that's based on a person's emotions. That's a good start. In what way? What expresses your preference? What expresses your preference? Your judgements. The motive is when you're making moral judgements or using moral language, what he uses in your moral terms, a good, bad, right, wrong, should, shouldn, that sort of stuff. What do you really do? You are really just expressing, as he puts it, feelings, attitudes. I would extend it to include desires, maybe an expression of your own self-interest. Let me read you one or two things that people who actually were a motivist said. McIntyre is not a law, but sometimes it's nice to hear it in people's own words. So this is A.J. Ayer. He was a famous philosopher. He was associated with what's collogical positivism, but I don't know what that would mean that much to you. He says, here's my view. In saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I'm not making any factual statements. Not even a statement about my own state of mind. I'm not saying that this is how I think about it. What I am doing is expressing certain moral sentiments. The man who's ostensibly contradicting me, who's taking a different position, is merely expressing his moral sentiments. He says, there's plainly no sense in asking which of us is in the right. Neither of us is asserting a genuine proposition. Neither of us is actually saying something meaningful. We're just expressing how we feel. So if I look at somebody doing an action, and I say that person is bad, or that person is disgusting, or that's a horrible thing to do, and you say, I think they ought to do it. I think that's a great thing that they're doing it. Ayer would say, well, neither one of us is right, neither one of us is wrong. We're just expressing how we feel about it. And then he says, in every case in which one would commonly be said as being an ethical judgment, the function of the relevant ethical word, so not all this stuff, but just the ethical terms, is purely emotive. It's used to express feeling about certain objects but not to make any assertion about them. He says it's worth mentioning also that ethical terms don't serve only to express feelings. They also have another purpose, which is to arouse feeling in other people, and thereby to motivate them to action. So if I see you doing something, what's a typical thing that professors get on students about? Cell phones. Oh, perfect, yeah. Okay, so you're on your cell phone, and I say, you know, you really shouldn't do that. And what am I doing? I'm expressing my disapproval. And I'm trying to get you to feel that you really want not to do that. I'm trying to get you to feel bad in some way. I'm trying to have you reflect on your own thing. I'm trying to get you to feel in such a way that if the person next to you also gets on their cell phone, you don't like that, right? You don't see them as now akin to you. You're more like me, and you say, that's a bad thing. Meaning, I don't like that. And that'll get you to act differently, right? And I can do it in a lot of different ways. I can like blow up at you, get that cell phone off, right? I mean, that would be one way to do it. That might produce more emotion quickly in you. Or it might be, you know, a very sweet, you know, we're not supposed to have cell phones in this classroom. We have this kind of implicit contract here. You know, it might be something like that. But if air is right, all we're doing, it's the same thing. We're really just trying to express a certain disapproval and get you to feel that disapproval yourself and get you to change your behavior. What's something that students want professors to do that they typically don't do, that they should do? Not like give everybody A's or something like that, but something that professors fall down on the job sometimes. There's got to be stuff that you guys would like to see, yeah. Getting work back on time? Oh, that's a big one. Work with good feedback, delivered, you know, saved within a week, right? It was a week a good amount of time. I mean, even that's kind of pushing it for some things. Okay, so you say to me, then, something like, you really ought to get your, we're handing in the work on time ourselves, you really ought to get the work done on your part. You should be held to the same standards as us. What you're doing there is you're expressing a kind of positive attitude. And if you say Dr. Sather's a good professor so far, because he actually graded our stuff within the first week, we'll see how that goes the rest of the semester, right? You're expressing approval of me for my actions. And then I can feel warm and fuzzy inside. I wonder if they had this when you guys were kids, cold and prickly and warm and fuzzies. It was like a kindergarten thing when I was a kid. Probably they changed all these things. But that's what the emotivist theory is saying, our moral language basically is. We're expressing how we feel and what our attitudes are, whether we approve or disapprove of things. And when we disagree about it, there's nothing to be done, other than try to maybe bring pressure to bear on somebody. You can't actually rationally argue them into it, because if you could, they'd already hold that position. So is no one right and no one wrong? It's interesting to ask that. In a certain way, yes. Nobody would be right and nobody would be wrong. We all just have our own views. Now, like some emotivists have pointed out, that doesn't prevent us from feeling that other people are wrong. One of the guys who I'm putting a link to in the supplemental stuff for you, but I'm not suggesting you have to read for this class, he was pointing out that we're a motivist that doesn't mean that we have to say, Hitler's OK. We can feel that what he's doing is definitely wrong. We can watch footage of the concentration camp and say, this is horrible. But all we're actually doing is expressing our feelings. We're not actually right in the sense that it conforms to any sort of objective, moral order. And of course, Hitler apparently didn't think that what he was doing was wrong. Or almost those other people that were lined up with him. They thought that that was the right, the good thing to do. But all they were doing on their part was expressing their feelings. They're doing a lot more than expressing them, aren't they? The actions are significant. So in that sense, yeah, nobody's right, nobody's wrong. We all have a sense that we're right and the other person's wrong. Now, that's not the whole story, though. Because emotivists, like McIntyre points out, if you really buy into this theory, you probably think that people should quit all this moralizing. And if you say that, you're actually saying that other people are wrong, aren't they? That we should abandon all this high-brow moral theory stuff. And if you don't abandon it, but if you're like somebody like me who likes Aristotle, then I'm wrong in a certain way. So there's two answers to that, really. But it's an important question. This other guy, Stevenson, he's a particularly important emotivist. Thank you. He wrote at the end of one of his essays, ethical statements are social instruments. They are used in a cooperative enterprise in which we are mutually adjusting ourselves to the interests of others. So there are ways in which we try to make people feel the way that we want them to feel and do the things that we want them to do. And everybody else is doing the same thing to us. So when your mom disapproved of something that you were doing or didn't like one of your friends and said they're a bad person and you're doing the wrong thing, all she was doing was expressing her feelings, but she was trying to get you to feel likewise. And when you responded in kind, I suppose, and said, no, they're a great person. You were just expressing your feelings to see things your way, yeah. So emotivists are saying that no one's really telling you what to or to not do, but they're just saying how they feel will be able to change your view. It's not quite so. So innocence is that. They think that we're constantly exerting a kind of pressure on each other to see things. And our society does that, too. You know, if we're emotivists and I want you to stop doing the action, that you're doing and I really hate what you're doing, feel really strongly about it. I don't know that we could say that I'm just trying to offer you another way or suggest that you should go a different way or something like that. I'm really trying to force you into it in some cases. But then in that case, they're saying that there is a right and wrong? No, again, the emotivist thinks there's only right and wrong from the perspective of, you know, how I see it or how you see it. There is no universal right and wrong. This is one of the problems with the theory. So you're kind of leading us ahead to some of the criticisms of the theory. So emotivism is, like McIntyre says, it's the doctrine, all the value of judgments and specifically moral judgments are nothing more than expressions of preference, attitude or feeling, insofar as they're expressive of those things in character. So what are the implications of this? I put some of this in Islayer for you. Moral claims aren't true and false. They're indexed to the individual person. Even more importantly, if emotivism actually is right, then there's no rational way to decide disagreements. So when it comes to big issues, the moral things that we, say, get involved in politics about or activism, we just feel different ways about it. We may produce theories and we may make arguments, but that's just sort of window dressing from an emotivist perspective. It's not really what's going on. Those are words being used kind of as tools. Now, one of the things that I want to point out with this, so McIntyre says that if somebody's saying from an emotivist perspective, x is good, what they're saying is something like, I like x, you should like it too, or hoorayax, or I approve of x, or I have a positive feeling or attitude towards x. And you can ask why a person has this positive feeling, right? Let's say we take something that I'm willing to bet most of you and say, okay, right? You still like candy? I have a candy. Why do you like candy? Think about your favorite candy, whatever it happens to be. And then after that, we can argue about which is the best candy. We can all get an emotivist about it. No, this is the best. But why do you like your candy the best? Candy sweet, it gives you pleasure. That's it right there. You're through its sweetness, and you've experienced this so many times in your life, and I'm willing to bet that you also psychologically associate candy with some other things, like being rewarded. Yes? If you're good, then you get some candy. Now after a while, you start to associate, it could be in school, you go to the store, and you're not acting like a jerk with your parents because they want to shop, and you get a candy bar afterwards, or you keep your mouth shut about something, and you reward as a candy bar. Or how else do we get rewards of candy? You do your chores. I was thinking about Halloween, and Halloween is a little bit different because I guess you're being rewarded for putting on a costume. It's almost like a social ritual, right? And Halloween and Easter is the time when you luck out on candy. Easter is even easier. You just put your mask in there, and somehow it winds up full of candy. Christmas, maybe the stockings. In my house, we had St. Patty's Day because my mom had an Irish friend who the leprechauns would come, on St. Patty's Day. They would turn the milk green, the toilet water green, and the best part was they would leave green-colored candy. It's a lot of green-colored candy, unfortunately. It's all mint stuff. If you're like, mint, that's a good time of year. You're not being rewarded in that case. You're just, like, lucky. But, now, this whole story, right? You associate candy not just with the sweetness that you've experienced many times. You also associate it with warm, fuzzy, positive feelings about good times and rewards or at least not getting punished or something like that, right? Now, that's an answer about why you like candy. Why you have a positive attitude towards candy. What about cheating on assignments? Do you have a negative attitude towards that? You think it's bad? How many of you think that cheating on assignments is bad? How many of you think it's good? Nobody? Do you do? It depends on, like, good in what sense. It's not good for you to ask them to stand here. It's good if you want to, like, get ahead of them. Like, it is expedient to get through. Yeah. Whether there's an argument that could be made there, right? So, those of you that feel that it's good, those of you that feel that it's bad, sorry, those of you who feel that cheating is bad, do you think you could tell some sort of story about why you came to think that cheating is bad? Yeah. My cousin and her, like, husband and sweetheart got married. This isn't going to be about cheating on spouses, is it? This isn't going to be about cheating on spouses, is it? Oh, boy. Yeah. She got married to her husband and sweetheart, and while she was pregnant with their second kid, it was discovered that he was having an affair with someone that he worked with. Now, the real twist comes in not obviously cheating is not good in my moral opinion, but the real twist comes in is that the doctor that we thought he was having an affair with, she was a woman, ended up just being a cover for the fact that he was having an affair with another guy. So, like, she literally I think she was like eight and a half months from it when she started to go down and she had, like, she delivered the baby, he came into the hospital for, like, an hour and my and her mother went up to him and told him to leave that he knew what was good for him because, like, I come from, like, an Italian family and you are going to get your S.P. for something like that. So, I mean, ever since then that's kind of really opened up my eyes, so, like, cheating in terms of, like, is it? Why it's bad? Is being something bad or why it's bad? Yeah, okay. That makes sense. I mean, you could probably come up with all sorts of reasons. Now, here's the thing, so you can come up with a story about why people have the particular feelings they do, right? If you're an emotivist, it doesn't make sense to ask should they feel the way they do. Do they have good reasons to feel that way? If you're an emotivist you sort of take that out of the toolbox or what they feel that way. Um, there, why is that? Well, anytime you're bringing in these moral terms you've got the same problem again, don't you? If you say that, well, let's take some sort of thing that we probably can all agree shouldn't have good feelings about. Like, um... Harrowing. What's that? Yeah, okay, that's a good one. I mean, heroin addicts would probably disagree with you. But, you know, I think we can have a consensus that you shouldn't shoot up heroin. Right? As a matter of fact, let's even broaden that. Don't shoot up heroin. Don't smoke crack. Don't... Oh, the other big one. Don't smoke meth. Don't use it in any form. There's other ways. They can be used, of course. Those are the big three, at least in our country right now. Did you say coke? No, because there's not many people doing coke as there's crack in heroin. But we can add it in. We can also say don't do PCP, because that's bad for you too. PCP? Okay, so we say you shouldn't you shouldn't do these sorts of things. Now, from an emotivist's perspective, all we're doing is expressing our disapproval. Right? And the other person who says but I love crack. That's really nice. Or somebody else who's like a contrarian says, I think people should be able to do whatever they want, even if it's crack. Right? They're just expressing their feelings as well. And if the emotivists are right, there's no rational way to decide between this. And you can't even say about the person who say likes crack. You can't say, well, that's a mistaken point of view that you've got there. You shouldn't feel that way. There's something wrong with you. Because again, what are you doing? You're just expressing your feelings. You're not actually expressing anything that has any real content, just feelings. This is kind of a good place to make a break. So if we start where Mack and Tyree starts in chapter two, talks about moral disagreements in our society. This part of the text at least should have been fairly easy. He talks about some sort of basic examples. Let's actually look at these. We won't go into any great detail. So the first one is about war. This is a contemporary issue. And he puts forth three different positions. Are these recognizable to you? Is things that people actually say that you hear today? So it's, even though the book was written in 81, the basic terms haven't changed that much. So a just war is one in which the good to be achieved outweighs the evils in waging the war in which a clear distinction can be made between combatants and innocent noncombatants. Okay, so that's a moral claim, right? Is the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq, which now appears to be at least as far as we're concerned, mostly over, but really isn't over. Is that a just war and a just war? You have a criteria there, right? Somebody says, here's what a just war counts as. And people argue about this. I think back to your middle school, where people getting worked up about the Iraq war and whether it's a just war or not. They got worked up about a lot of other things. It's about a well, you know, a new democracy doctor and all this kind of stuff, but where do they go from this? Well, in modern war, you can't calculate these things, and so we should all be pacifists. That's a moral claim too, right? Shouldn't engage in any wars. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. The only way to achieve peace is to deter potential aggressors. Therefore, you have to build up your armaments and make it clear that going to war at any particular scale is not ruled out by your policies. If you don't do that sort of thing, then you won't avoid war. People talk like this, don't they? Have you heard people saying that probably just as much as the other thing? Some people say I'm really not that worried about whether the war is just. It's us versus them. And if we don't think about the war on terror, what do they say? If we don't defeat them over there, then what's going to happen? They're going to come here. So if you want to fight over there, fight here. You've got to fight either way. That's another position, isn't it? That's not the same as that first position. The third one. Wars between the great powers are purely destructive. What would be the great powers, us and maybe China, Russia. But wars wage to liberate oppressed groups are a necessary and therefore justified means for destroying the exploitive domination which stands between mankind and happiness. Are there people who talk like this? War is usually bad, but if it's for some sort of oppressed group, then it's okay. Forget about wars. Think about violence in general. Generally, we shouldn't be violent towards each other, but if you've been kept down by whoever, some dominant class your society, then it's okay to say riot or attack people or engage in war-like activity. People say that sort of stuff, right? There was a whole position during the 60s. Yeah, you're right. That's actually a good point. You can look around societies, and you can not only find these positions kind of free-floating out there, you can actually look around and say, hey, that person over there says this. This group over here expresses this point of view. I mean, within some groups you have those different moral theories that, you know, break me. That's why you can have debates within a group, like should we do this or should we do that? Panthers? Yeah, the Black Panthers would be a good example of that sort of thing. Although they seem to have settled on a consensus eventually, right? But even in the early civil rights movement we had different consensus as far as non-violence and violence and what you should do and what you should do and when it was our right to defend yourself and when it wasn't. Yeah, that's another good example. Mac and terrorism used that, but that would be a case where you had several different moral positions being put forward, so Martin Luther King's position is very different than Melvin X's position and they didn't it's not as if these guys didn't talk to each other and try to convince each other. Martin Luther King actually wrote a whole book which hardly anybody read where do we go from here where he's actually talking about the Black power movement and he's condemning it. And you can see some other examples here. He talks about abortion and the most divisive issues of our time. Justice and opportunity. I came up with some suggestions about contemporary stuff that you see people talking about right now. Think about the you built it or you didn't build it discussion that's going on right now. That's a moral discussion. That's saying something about what people owe to each other. And I'm not going to worry about whether it was taken out of context both sides are taking each other out of context, but that's the way a lot of argument goes in our culture, isn't it? What would be some other examples? The Chick-fil-A issue, remember that a little while back. What was that about? Whether their sandwiches are tasty. What was it about? I felt like they didn't support gay marriage. You could put it different ways. They didn't support gay marriage. If you put it like that it almost sounds like the default position is to support gay marriage. They were being accused by opponents of being hateful because they not only do they not spouse gay marriage they espouse like a whole sort of comprehensive idea about what a Christian way of life would be. Right? Now are all Christians against gay marriage? You can find some churches coming out in favor of it, some against it and people articulating different positions. Gay marriage, the reason why I brought up Chick-fil-A is gay marriage is one of those issues on which you could find yourself not just in the four camp or against camp but you could find yourself in the four camp for different reasons or in the against camp for different reasons. Right? Maybe there's even middle positions. What else? Think about the food choice issues that keep coming up and what's the big worry that people have about kids and their cafeterias these days? The soda? What's that? The soda. So it was a minor thing although in New York of course that's a kind of, it's become a big issue, right? And it could sort of stand for the whole thing. Yeah, what were you going to say? I don't have like a choice really, it's kind of just like French fries soda. Yeah and even, you know, it's interesting if you watch that Jamie Oliver show he spends a lot of time trying to convince people not to eat French fries, doesn't he? And they'll offer like healthy food choices and a lot of the kids will say kind of like the French fries you know, so just putting the healthy food choices out there is not enough to actually get people to do it. Somebody had their hand up over here, yeah. I was just saying in general like obesity? Yeah, obesity and there's worries about I mean, obesity wouldn't be that bad a thing if it was just didn't have any effects, right? We just all get fat and then we carry on some extra weight. But it leads to all sorts of other things, right? Like medical issues and then somebody's got to pay for those and you know, it keeps you from doing things you'd like to do. I mean, you know, we kind of joke about this, but you know, try to fit into some of these chairs in the classroom, right? I have a harder time fitting into those because I ate too much on an airplane. Yeah, airplanes are not fun for me at all. There's no such thing as a, you know, enough leg room this tall. But the seats are even kind of small too. It's worse when you get like, you know, three guys my size all piled into one pile. Well, to go back to the food issue though, have any of you ever watched that Jamie Oliver show? It's interesting to watch in part because the people involved on both sides or maybe on all sides, they start out nice and then when it happens after a while, these kind of shows when they don't get their way, when the other person doesn't see it their way. Aggravated? Okay, they get aggravated and that's an expression of emotion, right? Why do we get aggravated? Because that other person is too stupid to see what we're saying to them. They can't see their true interests or they're not being convinced by our argument and there's reason why they ought to be convinced because we're right. Maybe we are right but that's something different from that aggravation. They go from nice to nasty pretty quick. Think about how many of you watch political shows or any sort of TV show where they've got the talking heads, you know, they'll have like the commentator and then they split the screen and you've got somebody from the right and somebody from the left and then somebody out somewhere else, you know, or maybe a moderating point of view and they start out talking about an issue. What happens? They make arguments, don't they? They make moral claims. They say, here's why I think this and so everything's going pretty good at that point. Then what happens? Yeah. They'll start like over talking to each other and no one's really listening to what the other person is saying. Yeah, or they're listening but they're only listening to like what they want. They want to find that one point where they can like concentrate and say, I got you now. So you're a bad person. I'm a good person. And that's kind of unfortunate, right? Because do you convince anybody of the rightness of your position that you actually have a rationally defensible position when you resort to that? Or if you just start shouting, you know, try to talk over the other people. You might convince people, people who think that, yeah, you must be right because you're louder. But that's not rational conviction. Go ahead. It also depends on who's watching and where the venue is. Yes, you're right. I've watched a lot of like political debates and depending on where they're at they can definitely have a swing. Oh yeah. I was at Harper Union and it was a room full of... What was it about now? It was something to do with finance. I can't believe it. But it was a bunch of, it was like two conservatives in his panel. And why he was pretty liberal. Yeah. It was very one-sided time argument. Yeah, and that is McIntyre things. That is characteristic now think about personal arguments that you've gotten into with people. Maybe some of you don't like to argue with people. Maybe some of you actually like to argue too much. You know, you fit into a continuum, right? And where have you actually gotten into arguments with people where you have tried to convince them that something was the right thing or the wrong thing and they had a different position and they tried to convince you. Where does that happen? In the laundry room? Probably not, right? If it does, man, you like to argue. Where does that happen to you? Mostly in classes? Does it happen to you much in classes? Probably not, right? Where does it happen to you? Because it does happen to you, doesn't it? Who did you first start arguing with when you got here to Marist? I better know. Yeah, exactly. You're a roommate or a housemate, right? Why did you start arguing with that? Because you didn't see eye to eye on certain things. What do we argue about? Do we argue about things that are just facts, usually? Not that much, because we can go check them. So we have Wikipedia for provided the entry is correct. What do we argue about? Plato says early on, we argue about the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, and the shameful and the honorable. These sort of moral values. And we give reasons why we think something is the good thing or the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do or the bad thing to do. Now, the thing that McIntyre is pointing out with this is not that we just have different positions. That's been like that throughout all of history. Next week, when we look at Plato, we're going to see people putting forth radically different positions about what's right and wrong. What's different is that quite often these things boil down to shouting matches mere assertion. I'm right, no, no, I'm right. Why does that happen? What happens when you get into arguments? Forget McIntyre for a minute. What happens when you get into arguments and it turns into that? Why did it turn into that? I think, fundamentally, what ends up happening is it stops being an argument about more or less it turns into a power struggle who has the power. Okay, does that jide with it turns into a power struggle? And McIntyre talks about that as like one will trying to dominate another will. And what are you trying to do in that case? You're trying to make your preferences or your feelings the one that rules. Trying to get somebody else not just to think the way that you do but to feel the way that you do about moral things. So, if you think that abortion is a terrible evil and you talk about it and you get into a debate with somebody who's pro-choice, sooner or later, if you have a kind of a motivist point of view you're going to resort to just saying it's wrong. It's just wrong and that's all there is to it and you'll say it louder and louder and louder and the other person will just say it's my right it's my right, it's my right it's my right. Now that's very different than trying to rationally convince the other person trying to produce arguments. McIntyre says that that's a sign of emotivism in our culture. So, let's let's look at this difference now between what he calls impersonal criteria and self assertion. When you want to actually make a case to somebody and so you're writing a paper, that's probably the paradigm case for you. You have a professor and they say you didn't actually make your case. How many of you have had this happen in English papers when you're doing your writing classes and you said something that you believe in and you maybe even given some reasons for it and they found those reasons insufficient. What would you do at that point? If you don't want to just if they're being a nice professor and not just saying here you go. But they're actually letting you revise the paper. What would you do? Yeah? Probably go like their office hours and have them go through it with you and see what you did wrong. Okay, but now you're at the point where you actually know what you did wrong because they wrote on there you didn't support your argument. And I was just like fix it. How? What would that mean? Like take their comments and then do exactly what they said. Well, it's kind of open-ended though isn't it? And this is actually kind of the problem with a lot of writing classes isn't it? They give you open-ended. I'd just like to see you doing more with this. How many of you have had that sort of feedback? Yeah, someone had their hand up over here. I was going to say like go find like reputable sources that back up to point to your sentence. Okay. Yeah, you could go and try to find sources for the facts and what you're saying. Or you could try to find other people who seem reasonable who agree with the values in what you're saying. You're going to say something. No, I'm going to say something similar to her. Just go for stuff that will support your argument and then build an argument around those that support it. Yeah, generally the way you support an argument is producing a little bit more argument. And you do do this by trying to look for what the other person might find convincing. So you say, okay you didn't buy this argument. I need to find some common ground for us where we share something, some premises that we can argue from that we agree on. And then I'll get you to see things my way. Now McIntyre talks about this in a very nice way. He says this is the kind of appeal to a type of consideration which is independent of the relationship between speaker and hearer. So it doesn't, if we're engaged in that kind of thing, it doesn't have anything to do with me as me. It doesn't have anything to do with you as you. And it could be about personal things like you could be arguing with your parents about whether you ought to be allowed to drive the car when you're on break which maybe they don't want to let you do because it's a nice car. They'd rather you drive whatever beater you've got. It could be about you but you can do it in an impersonal way, can't you? It's a reference to general principles that aren't just about the relationship between the two of you or about who you are. You can even talk about your character I'm trustworthy Mom and Dad but you would do it in such a way as to say things like trustworthy people you should actually trust them with things. That's what it means for them to be trustworthy. And then just say I just happen to be one of those kind of people. You see the difference between that and saying I'm just right and you ought to see things my way. There's a real difference there. So he talks about the existence independently of the preferences or attitudes of the speaker and here of standards some sort of criteria, some sort of standards. And that's what we start out with. But if McIntyre is right about contemporary discussions that's what we quickly start veering away from. And we end up focusing much more on our own preferences our own attitudes the attitudes of the other person we interpret them as saying what they're saying not because there could be anything real to what they're saying but just because they happen to feel that way or it would suit them or they have some sort of unreasonable, rational, weird thing coming from their background or things like that. Let's think about that Chick-fil-A very ugly incident that none of you see any Facebook wars about that. Do you guys end up seeing things in people's Facebook streams where debates start happening about moral matters or is that just people my age? I would stare was very critical of it. Yeah and you'd expect them to be wouldn't you? I mean he's a committed liberal. He's in some ways very libertarian. He certainly doesn't like conservatives or traditional things. When people got into it did they get particularly ugly? What did they say about the other side? I mean there were a lot of funny jokes out there. Do you like the taste of hate in your chicken sandwich? I mean you know attributing that to somebody is no longer doing rational argument. Now you're doing something quite different. Now you're trying to influence the other person to feel differently, right? You're trying to make them feel bad. Why do that? Why would somebody instead of trying to make a rational argument why would they just try to make somebody feel bad? Yeah. Okay. So a lot of different things. Let me sort of reconstruct that. Person A is making the other person feel bad. They're saying something to try to make them feel bad so that they'll abandon their position. They'll feel bad about holding their position and then the argument's won by. That's it, yeah. I think it has to deal with the feeling of power that it's like you're feeling when you dominate someone. That's like I don't know. There's a flip side to it too. How many of you like being dominated? Anybody? How many of you like other people ordering you around and telling you how to feel? Do you kind of recoil against that? Is there kind of an emotional gun reaction against that? What's that? People pig... Yeah, masochists, right? There are a class of people who like other people to dominate them and order them around. Yeah, back to the topic. I think part of it also is that if you minimize the argument and turn it into something more concrete, as opposed to moral right and moral right, but hate is wrong. We all agree that, you know, to hate anything would be wrong. Just to say you hate this, you hate goodness is, you know, you can build the argument around that there are hate models, so therefore, if you hate them... That's an interesting one, because the hate gets used in a very manipulative way by people in argument too. You have to accuse somebody else of hating. That's what that... You hate. Oh, therefore, you must be wrong. Yeah, and we throw that term around really easily these days. I mean, there could be a good argument there for like, reserving term hate for things where it's demonstrably hate and not calling a whole bunch of other things hate, because of the emotive effect of hate. That's a good sort of segue into talking about this emotive theory, right? So this emotive theory of meaning that McIntyre is talking about, we saw a little bit with Sarge, is saying that the meaning of moral language, or evaluative language, is just expressing the viewpoint of the person saying it. And what viewpoint is it expressing their thoughts? No, it's expressing their feelings, their attitudes. So when I say something like, you're a good person, what I'm saying is I approve of you. Or... What was your last name? Vera. I was going to say Vega, but I think that wasn't right. Something like, yeah, Mr. Vera, right? If that's the case, then all of our arguments, all of our moral positions are really just expressing our feelings. That's why we call it emotivism. Yeah. And emotivists say, well, you know, if you actually look at the way people are, that's all it boils down to. So this is a moral theory. This is a viewpoint that a lot of people do in fact hold. I think you could walk out on the street and find somebody who would actually say something along those lines if you listened, or go over to the cafeteria, listen for a little while, especially, you know, people coming out of ethics class or, you know, political science class or whatever. Somebody's going to say something like that. Ah, they're only saying that because they feel that way. And they'll generalize and say, yeah, that's just the way people are. All this stuff about right and wrong is all, yes. It's just ways we try to control each other. Ways we try to manipulate each other. That's the emotivist theory. That's that viewpoint that McIntyre is looking at. And one of the things... Go ahead. If I hate something that is good, it doesn't mean I'm wrong, right? Say that one more time. If I hate something that is so-called good, it doesn't mean I'm wrong, right? Well, if the thing was genuinely good, and you hated it, yeah, you'd be wrong to hate it. How am I wrong? It's my own choice. Okay, so that's a good question. Putting things that way is a problem. To say that all there is is it's just my point of view. There's no other point of view by which we can evaluate these things. That's exactly what a motivism is saying. And if we have a natural tendency to do that McIntyre saying, well, that's because our culture preaches that all the time. There are other points of view. You can actually say. It is meaningful to say, well, it's wrong to hate things that are actually good. Even if you do feel that way, your feelings could be wrong. Your feelings aren't automatically right just because they're your feelings. That would be a non-emotivist. It wouldn't be wrong, though. Say again? It doesn't have to be wrong. Oh, sure. I mean, if you hate something that's, again, let's step outside of the emotivist perspective for a second. If there are things that are genuinely good, and you hate them, you are actually wrong to hate them. All right, now listen, I'll say just one thing. Just one good thing. We're not making this about you, anyway. No, I'm not talking about just an individual. You're not saying that he hates all good and makes them bad. Okay, yes, I could hear it in the map. Oh, okay. Just one good thing. But usually he loves good things. Right? Well, then, insofar as that person loves good things, they're on the right track. They're right. Insofar as they hate these few things that they should love, they're wrong. So they're, you know, they're not perfect. They're right in some respects and wrong in other respects. Just like, for example, I can say about myself that when it comes to matters of justice, I'm a pretty good person. I play fair by people. I'm pretty squared away when it comes to that. When it comes to managing anger, I'm not a good person. I lose my temper far too easily. I hold grudges, all those sorts of things. It's possible to say that a human being is good and bad just in different respects, right? So try to follow me on this. Sure. I hate something that's good. Yes. But if I'm good and I like something bad, if I'm good now, okay. You're generally good, right? I'm generally doing bad, right? You should hate something that's bad. I should not. I mean, I like something that's bad. Okay, yeah. Well, like me. Like being angry. Right. Does that make you wrong then? Yeah, wrong in so far as I lose my temper and enjoy losing my temper. I'm wrong. Yeah. It's not saying that I'm totally bad all across the board. I think that's where you're going, right? I'm not saying that I'm a totally bad person, but I could certainly be a better person if I didn't lose my temper. Good night. What if it's just one little aspect? I'm not talking about all. Well, then it's just like one little aspect. Then you're doing pretty good, right? Sure. I mean, that's a good thing. These are really good questions, though. I mean, think about this. How many things do we actually have to work on in our lives? It's not the only thing about myself that I need to work on. It's not the only way in which I'm if we abandon the motivus perspective, it's not the only way in which I am not as good as I ought to be. There's other things, too. Like being lazy once in a while and eating too much. Yeah. Let me put something on the board, too, will you? I think it's an interesting question, but I think more importantly, I think it's one of those who-in-my kind of questions, and that kind of journey that people very rarely take on very early in life. Yeah. You ask the question, I hate something that is genuinely doable, or that you like something that is genuinely bad in your frame of mind coming from your place. It's not a bad thing or a good thing. You just like it or dislike it. If you like it, you think it's a good thing. I mean, and it's one of those things where for maybe somebody objective perspective, it might be something that they need to work on. My subjective perspective doesn't feel that way. So you have this objective point of view and this subjective point of view. The subjective point of view is that this is okay. I like smoking crack, crack is good, I love crack, and I'm gonna keep smoking crack until I die. Yeah, readdiction winds up like that, right? It's a good thing. I don't see where the bad is. But I'm high. But subject, objectively, as a person who might be working with people, that's a bad thing. Look what crack has done to your life. And you can point towards criteria like that and say, hey, it's damaging to your relationships. Take a look at your lungs. Here, let me give you an intelligence test and see how quickly you fill these things out compared to before. And the reason why it doesn't matter is they could actually look at those criteria and say, oh, man, I better knock it up. But they say, well, I don't want to look at those criteria. And that's a subjective choice on their part. And working with people when you work with people, that leap between objective reality and subjective reality, that's where the work happens. Yeah, and to be fair, when it comes to moral matters, there's two points that I want to make about that. One is, when it comes to moral matters, they're by their nature pretty murky. So if you get those things wrong, you shouldn't feel terrible because if you look throughout all of history, people are arguing about these things throughout all of history because it's not that easy to figure out what's right and what's wrong in every case. The other thing is, if McIntyre is right, we live in a culture that's kind of pushing this subjectivist or what we're calling here, a motivist point of view, which says, hey, all there is is how you feel about it. And if you don't, it doesn't jive with you and your feelings, then that's it. I want to talk about this meaning and use thing. I want to go on from here. McIntyre says that one of the mistakes that a motivism makes is mistaking the meaning of moral language for its uses. The meaning of moral language would be what the expression actually says saying. So if you say stealing is wrong, that's not the same thing as the use that you might put to it, which is maybe making somebody feel bad who's been caught stealing. The thing about when you were a kid, I'm sure all of you did something wrong and your parents actually gave you any sort of explanation to say that's wrong. And they said it in a certain tone of voice that conveyed their anger or their irritation or their disgust or pick whatever. It's an experience you went through. I went through it many times. Sometimes about things that were genuinely bad, looking back at it and some things about very arbitrary. My mom had a thing about people spitting on the sidewalk. She went nuts. Spitting on the sidewalk isn't nice, but if you spit on the sidewalk, you're not murdering anybody and you're not actually stealing anything. I guess it could be a public health issue, but it's not really that big of a deal. But she conveyed by talking about she gave the expression a certain use and the use could be expressing personal preferences. You can make all sorts of uses out of things that you say. Just for one that actually conveys something about emotion, consider how many different uses you can make out of saying to somebody I love you. What's the meaning of I love you? You actually do love that person. Can we define love? Maybe not here in this class right now. We can teach a whole class about what is love. But let's say that we actually have some sort of coherent idea. All of you have a good idea about what love looks like. What love means? I hope so. You've experienced it. Taking? Now, how do people use that expression? Think about it in many different ways. I love cake. Let's just say that we're talking about a person. We'll come back to that because that's a really important point too. With respect to good and love and all these sorts of things. I love cake too. Right? My wife made me a special cake. That was chocolate and caramel and you know, flan. Yeah. I can relate to liking cake. I like pies too. Parts. Let's talk about I love you to a person. You could actually be genuine with it and you're expressing how you actually feel to that person. What are some other, go ahead. What do you feel like you use? I care about you. Oh, yeah. Now, is love and caring necessarily the same thing? This is where misunderstandings arise, isn't it? I love you. I love you but I'm not in love with you. That could mean I care about you but I'm really not romantically interested in you. I love you could be used to shut somebody up, couldn't it? Quit arguing with me. I love you. That would be a very different use, wouldn't it? Then expressing your care for another person. You might just want them to shut up. Maybe you don't actually love them. Maybe you just want them to knock it off. Any other uses of I love you that people could make that are not necessarily aligned with the more genuine use? Yeah. If you're out on a Saturday night it's not necessarily a short-term goal to go as you want. Yeah. It could mean something like I desire you. But that's not the same thing as love in a full sense. Notice the last two ones we looked at, those would be what Mac and Tara call manipulative uses of language. There's a difference between non-manipulative and manipulative uses of language. A motivism, as he says, breaks down that distinction. Because if a motivism is correct all we're doing when we say things are good, bad, you know, law of hate, any sort of emotionally morally charged words is expressing our emotions and trying to change the emotions of other people. Trying to change their behavior too without, you know, Saturday night and somebody says I'm falling in love with you and what they really want is to get you in bed. They're not trying to just you know, like turn on a switch. They're actually trying to influence how you feel about things. They're saying I love you because they want certain feelings to happen on your part which will result in sooner or later the two of you outside of the bar. Does he say naked? Maybe. I mean, that kind of goes with it, I think. I mean, this is really basic stuff because he has to do with their everyday lives. So there's a lot of difference between meaning and use and if a motivism is actually correct all we have are these sort of manipulative uses. Now Macintyre doesn't think that a motivism is actually correct. Why is he interested in talking about it? Just to, like, knock it down and now we're done with the motivism and we don't have to worry about it anymore? He's interested in it because he thinks that it's hooked into our culture. So the culture that we live in is thoroughly a motivist and it's always pushing this. You heard me talk about this last time with Sarte, I think, a little bit where I said it's okay to judge. People are telling you all the time don't be judgmental, right? It's okay to take a moral standpoint but you have to try to back it up. You have to give some reasons. That's to try to appeal to personal criteria. If a motivism is correct that's all bull, you know, BS, right? That's all just window dressing for us trying to push our preferences onto other people. Now let's put aside the question whether our motivism is or isn't correct. Are there people in our culture? Have you experienced people who act that way and talk that way? As if all that's going on when we say good or bad, right or wrong is just trying to control other people or express our feelings about things or get other people to see things our way. Sort of like to contaminate them with our emotions and get them to feel at ease at all. Have you run into people like that? We'll customize the whole abortion in the fact that pro-life or pro-choice because I feel like life and choice are things that people can agree are good things. Yeah, and you notice both both sides they actually call each other the aunties too, don't they? So if you're pro-life you call the other side auntie life and if you're pro-choice I've been outside of abortion class and heard people and heard people using that and they just they don't even say like auntie choice, they just say those aunties over there. If that's really the case if they think you can't possibly reason with these people they may well be a motorist. Are there any other people who are just like straight out motorists? There might be certain professions or classes that lend itself to that. What about somebody who thinks that everything is just mad at PR? You can spin anything. There's no right, no wrong just what works, yeah. I was going to say like if you're a lawyer you try to make everyone see things from the perspective. Yeah, it's interesting one of the one of the books that's still read in a lot of law schools is Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric. You might say well why do they read a book that's 2,300 years old? Because it's got stuff in there that actually works if you want to make people feel certain things. And Aristotle says what is rhetoric about? It's about rational persuasion but it's also about making people feel certain emotions. And if you get people to feel certain emotions Aristotle noticed this even back then. People don't see things the same way when they're loved or they hate and they're angry when they're not angry. It's about making people's emotions. And if that's all that there is it's just emotions, preferences, desires then you can achieve whatever ends you want. And there really can't be any debate about whether those are good or bad ends because any debate would just be a matter of me pushing my views onto you. My views that I hold why just because I feel that way. Why do you hold your views? Why do you just feel that way? What about other cases where people are manipulating other people? Good, extreme religious cases or acidic Jewish people? Usually when you've got something like that there's a robust religious tradition that'll be something different than what Macintay was calling emotivism. He's contrasting the emotivist self which is really it could be anything. There's no thing that it's particularly tied to. If you're a acidic Jew you're living a particular lifestyle that imposes a lot of demands on you way more than most things in contemporary society. And when you argue with people you might argue like an emotivist. You might say, hey I just like being acidic Jew, you like being this that's the only reason why I'm doing it but I don't know too many religious people who have those sort of commitments who actually say things like I just like being religious and that's all there is to it it's just my feelings. What about when people are trying to manipulate other people? Give what they want. Do they like salesmen? Yeah, I mean there are some salesmen who I would not walk down a dark alley with if I had pocket full of money because there isn't any moral restraint that's going to keep them from rolling me. Not just salespeople, by the way I don't want to just pick on salespeople there's plenty of other people who walk down a dark alley with On the other hand there's plenty of guys that I taught when I was working in the prison who I didn't have no trouble trusting my family because I know they have some sort of moral standards that they're living by even within a prison even some of them will never get out of these horrible things at one time. The real thing is whether you think everything boils down to these subjective preferences or not. Let's look at this description that McIntyre has of the emotivus self. This is in chapter 3, so he says the emotivus self ends up not having any sort of moorings I'm going to read you a passage he says, if the self is presented by emotivism we have to note this it cannot be simply or unconditionally identified as any particular moral attitude or point of view just because the fact that its judgments are in the end criterion-less. If you ask an emotivist why do you see things that way their only answer can be that's just the way I feel and they will project that onto everybody else why does Aristotle see things the way he does he just feels that way he doesn't really have any reason for it so you don't really need to read Aristotle because once you've actually got the bullet points if you don't feel that way why bother same thing with Kant or anybody else this is the kind of lonely way to be unless you can find everybody else to feel in the same way as you he says that specifically modern self finds no limit set to that on which it may pass judgment so along with this goes being able to judge anything that you like because all the judgments really just boil down with preference let's think about one of these issues why shouldn't I be obese maybe I should just eat all the time I know I like eating I like eating a lot more than I like exercising what could you point out to me that would show me that I'm wrong bad overall health maybe I like being in bad overall health maybe I enjoy that but it sounds silly but why does it sound silly to you because when I was your age I was in phenomenal shape I was right out of the army I was working out 3 hours a day every day doing endurance lifting and all sorts of martial arts things and rucksacks 75 pounds in it I liked doing that at the time after a while I quit liking doing that I remember what it was like to feel in that super good health you know I can understand what that's like but maybe that's no longer a value for me if it's not a value for me then really there's nothing you can do sort of like the person who is addicted to crack a more extreme example they really like crack crack is the reason why crack is addicting is because it is for those who smoke are very enjoyable it's got some side effects so does eating too much not exercising like you're pointing out bad health see here's the thing if we are emotivists then there's no traction there's no sort of anchor points for using any sort of rational criteria any sort of impersonal criteria let's say you actually wanted to make me start exercising more and curb my eating and have snacks before I go to bed how would you make me do it if you're an emotivist you're not going to argue me into it what do you do show you what could happen if you continue to do it maybe you appeal to my fears what you need to show me then is some really gross stuff not some facts and figures what else might you do well I think appeal to your emotions appeal to making you feel less than because you're that way shame is an emotion that we can use not fear or shame but more positively influenced I could be a part of the group there could be you find other hooks none of these hooks are rational they're all not necessarily totally irrational but they're not rational they appeal to our emotions and if you appeal to my emotions are you appealing to her emotions no you got to make a separate appeal to her emotions she's got a very different standpoint look around most of the people in the room nobody's old like I am well you're older but not as old as I am so you have to find different different ways to hook this in but it ultimately turns out just to be these one-on-one appeals to emotions McIntyre thinks that our culture has become very immoralist and I think you can see a lot of signs of this the way moral disagreement tends to break down is one way what he's going to identify as characters in our society is another way and one of the things that he says about motivism from a social perspective is that it destroys the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative types of social relations or ways of interacting with other people so it turns everybody not necessarily into a manipulator all the time but somebody who can't see any real difference between not manipulating people treating them as if they have something like inherent dignity or worth and manipulating people seeing them as just means to enact a tool something like that sometimes even seeing themselves that way so if a motivism gets into a culture McIntyre thinks that it has another that's one of the things that happens what he's calling characters are certain social roles and so let's talk for a minute just about social roles we have all sorts of different social roles and what do we mean by that I'm occupying one social role right now just in talking to you up here in front of the stage it was about some stuff that I put in I learned for you that I went to school and got a PhD in you get the idea right? you guys are occupying a social role by your behavior here right now is this the only social role that you have the only social role that I have I'm a father I'm a husband those are familial roles but those are also social roles if I don't send my kids anything on their birthday am I a good dad or a bad dad people are only whispering it go ahead and say it bad dad what are you talking about here not sending the kids anything on their birthday that'd be bad there's other things that go into being a good dad besides that but there's a social role we can say people are fulfilling their social roles well or not and do you have a lot of social roles and if you have a job there's a social role if you're a waiter what jobs do you guys have let's say you're a waiter you're coming to the table there's certain expectations of you there's certain expectations you have of the other people these govern our interactions they make things intelligible and you don't actually have to buy into your social role necessarily you can be just like putting it on or being kind of you can have doubts about it use as the example for example of a Catholic priest or a union leader they say the things that they're supposed to say but they don't really believe it you know the Catholic priest has lost faith or the union leader really hates working people and would like to sell them out if he could but he doesn't so there's certain social roles where a personality could be different than the role that we have a professor all the time it's not a bad role to have but it's not the only thing I want to do right there are certain social roles Macintay says that personality certain social roles where the personality is tied in with it where if you're having this kind of social role there's really a lot of pressure to conform yourself to it you have a certain kind of moral expectation to value things in a certain way and he talks about three maybe there could be more in modern culture that fit into this emotivist thing he talks about another one in another place and it calls these the the manager and the therapist now that doesn't mean that every time that you get involved with management you're necessarily the manager that doesn't mean that if you go and see a therapist they're a bad person, they're an involved therapist that's not necessarily so but there is something about these particular roles in modernity Macintay thinks that that tie in with emotivism but let's talk about this for a second what is an esthete? have you ever called anybody an esthete? oh you're such an esthete you almost have to be one to use that term what do you think this means? yeah is that the consumer? yeah I put that it's essentially being like a consumer yeah he is the rich esthete but you don't actually have to be rich in our society to fit the bill to be rich because that takes your mind off of a lot of things what does it mean to be an esthete? kind of like materialistic almost well it's base value not necessarily there are certain ways in which you could do it where you might be very materialistic what other word can you think of that has some sort of connection with that? esthetics now what is esthetics? beauty it is a philosophical when it's like what is beauty, what is art what is the sublime now think about the kind of valuation that goes into assessing something as beautiful or let's use some other aesthetic categories that we actually use in our own time something is cool that's an aesthetic category something is stupid where you contrast cool and stupid you're not actually saying something lacks intelligence if you call an album stupid you're not actually saying that the album is stupid you're saying it's aesthetically unpleasing in somebody aren't you? you lack certain aesthetic characteristics what are the sort of things that you might say this about? works of art how many of you go to the museum works of art every single week you don't get your art books open Matisse is that your aesthetic experience that you're making judgments about most of the time? yeah ok that's an important one Maris is nice because it's gotten quite a few I remember the last place that I worked I didn't realize how ugly it was until I wanted to give this friend a tour and I thought where would be a nice place on campus to take them and I realized there wouldn't be any not a single nice view so it was aesthetically unpleasing like advertising posters yes yes all those glossy magazines that are filled with ads people actually put those ads together I don't have money to put those ads together in aesthetically pleasing ways therefore products that may or may not be aesthetically pleasing hopefully you know when you put the product on if it's a clothes or something like that it actually looks good if it's cologne or perfume hopefully it actually smells good smells different in the magazine than it's going to smell on your body all of you know that what else do we get all aesthetic about in terms of what else do we get attractiveness of people what about food food is very much about aesthetics now can you look at the whole world in terms of just everything being an aesthetic phenomenon everything being there just for enjoyment for consumption for maybe talking about or tweeting about or facebooking about interest is an aesthetic on social media by its very nature are there people who live their whole lives and sort of submerge moral judgment into just aesthetic judgment that would be the rich estate they worry more about whether something is cool than whether it's good as a matter of fact they don't even worry about whether it's good or bad after a while it makes sense to them and if emotivism is right why wouldn't that make sense if good and bad is just how we feel about stuff how is that any different than I like cake you like pie like you know shrimps campy and you like some other shrimp dish it's all I like this music you like that music that is a type that as McIntyre says into this emotivist ethos let's look at the other two they're even more interesting the manager what's going on in bureaucratic organizations, in groups where you have to allocate resources doesn't every company have a mission statement Marist actually has a mission statement how many of you have looked at the mission statement good portion of you is it particularly meaningful it is it's an unusual mission statement I'm sorry, it's like in like sentence it outlines what it expects of the students like being over minded these are values that are supposed to be inculcated come in if you're closed minded we're going to fix that by the end right a lot of mission statements nobody pays much attention to though why? I mean the whole goal that we're after to deliver a quality product to the consumer at a good price that could apply to so many different ones and those are values but those are primarily values of efficiency there are companies who say they want to change the world and fix things but you could be involved in one of those organizations and not care about that at all you could be like so concerned with okay what are my goals how am I going to accomplish them what are my resources how am I going to as McIntyre says how am I going to connect means to these ends and you never think about the ends I mean it's interesting and I'm not actually knocking war or fighting or things like that myself right now people who worked at companies till we outsourced a lot of the stuff that produced munitions or bombers or missiles or things like that and it didn't matter to them at all that what they were producing were instruments of death and they might have actually been people who personally they felt that war is a bad thing or American wars or current regimes or whatever but they don't focus on that because what their job is to do is to make everything run properly and so questions of right and wrong can't really be dealt with because those are a matter of individual values those are subjective so we have to push those out of the process what can you focus on efficiency doing the most with the resources that you have that becomes the primary goal and that's the only part where they're being rational everything else is just a motivist for the therapist McIntyre says what the manager does in the life of organizations the therapist does with respect to health and personal well adjustment those sorts of things and he uses an old category that we don't use psychology anymore are neuroses now we talk in terms of disorders you know DSM DSM 4 or 3 there's some head sight people in here right they should know that 4 we change to disorders I think from neurosis the therapist like McIntyre says they're not primarily concerned with truth they're concerned with making people feel better happier fit in better with other people that's the primary goal and you can do that while thinking that value judgments are all just purely subjective just expressions our emotions or preferences that would actually make you a pretty good therapist wouldn't that you wouldn't be bothered by all these sort of worries about whether you're actually steering people in the wrong way so long as you can figure out how to get rid of their disorders and make them fit in better according to certain expert criteria that you can find in the DSM the diagnostic statistical you're doing the right thing so with the manager and the therapist worries about ultimate ends and whether they're actually good ends or not get rid of those just focus on the process with the rich estate you don't even have that you just have I'm just going to focus on whatever makes me feel good these are all types of motivist characters these are ways in which people you might say structure their lives and their activities and these define the ways in which we interact with each other in our culture quite a bit like we said with the drug addict if you're a drug addict and you get into a treatment program and you want to get better they don't care why you want to get better there's interest in getting you better by certain criteria they don't care whether that affects all these other things do they so long as they can produce you eventually as somebody who's cured you're that's fine notice too that the same things could be tied in with say the same organization some people adopt social causes almost like rich estates they just want to get involved with something that makes them feel kind of good and like they're contributing something and making a difference but they never actually worry about whether it's really good or bad the cause that they're tied in with they just want to have something to be tied in with that would be this at the same time who makes the cause actually work you could have some manager who is not interested in that cause whatsoever they're just interested in making those dollars that are contributed actually funnel to the right things and you know whatever it is that they're trying to distribute make it happen if you want to be an emotivist we all inhabit certain social roles what does Mac and Terra mean by that I'm inhabiting one right now by being up in front of the blackboard and talking to you and doing both the lecturing and you're inhabiting one by sitting back in the chairs and taking notes and thinking about what this might have to do with the readings what's the role student professor if I go and do this in the park they might lock me up somebody might come by and say what are you doing imagine no chalkboard just gesturing in the air if you're doing this say in a bar people look at you kind of weird wouldn't they there's a different social role involved bartender is a social role isn't it mechanic is a social role parents, children these are social roles there's certain expectations that come with them that people want to behave doctor, patient these are social roles are you your social roles are you just these involvements that you have with other people the emotivist really has nothing other than those social roles and he points out two guys we're talking about Sartre and he talks about this Goffman kind Goffman is a psychologist and he's looking at how people take on these roles almost like masks that they're putting on now you take all the masks away what's left according to Goffman nothing same thing with Sartre why is there nothing left because there couldn't be anything left just raw preferences and emotions and those things are going to change from moment to moment so with the emotivist there's really nothing other than these social roles that you can count on independent if you want them to stay the same continually try to influence them continually use moral language to try to make them feel a certain way and continue to feel that way think about the abortion thing how much whipping up of emotion there has to be on both sides to get them to stand out there escorting people in or holding up picket signs many of those people might be there from principle but many of them may just be emotivists he also talks about he says the emotivist self can have no rational history this is something we're going to look at next class session each one of you has a history I don't just mean like your documents that you carry around with your grades or transcripts or stuff like that each one of you has a moral history each one of you has made some changes has improved or declined in certain ways and these could be up for debate there are some problems with saying good in what perspective so I am conscious of the problem that you brought up before but each one of you has some sort of idea of where you've been and where you're going and what kind of person you want to be and whether you're measuring up to that if you're a thoroughgoing emotivist you can't actually make that rational bunch of stuff that's happened and why did you change your mind about things why do you no longer do the things that you do that you recognize were bad maybe bad for you or bad for other people no reason you just feel differently about it you don't have any reasons for it if you're not an emotivist then you can say yeah I actually recognize this is the wrong thing to do I'll give you an example from my life so I've mentioned that I do have a not particularly good temper I used to argue with people and I used to be really ruthless in arguing and I was sort of a good example of this meaning use thing the stuff that I was saying was completely true I was really smart in grad school and I could read other languages pretty easily and go to the original texts and so I could usually in argument deep other people on their own grounds on the grounds that we were picking if they were other grad students or sometimes even other professors and I was a real jerk alienated quite a few people I drove another kid I'm actually coming to grad school he was coming to visit and I got into a big argument with him about sarts and Marxism and stuff like that and just crushed the guy it was so bad that people started avoiding getting into arguments which wasn't good either because then I would here's what's being said sometimes I was wrong it would have been nice for somebody to actually come on and say no you're wrong about that that's changed thank god I don't sort of try to demolish opponents and arguments anymore why did that change now if I was just a motivist there's no explanation for it I just feel differently about it I didn't like other people looking at me like a jerk that could be that could be it is that a real reason for changing anything not really maybe some other people in the same situation just didn't care about what other people thought they're going to keep doing the same thing what else could motivate me to change that let's say you were that way maybe a few of you are yeah I think that maybe there you sort of come to a realization of what's the purpose of arguing and why argue yeah that's a good one that there is some purpose beyond just winning or demonstrating your knowledge or dominating other people I also started to realize how much I was hurting other people by doing that how much I was suppressing their own sort of activity as students in learning and trying things out then I felt bad but I wasn't just feeling bad because people were saying hey you're doing the wrong thing you're a jerk I was feeling bad because I recognized objective harm that was coming to other people as a result of it and so I changed that that's part of my history so at least in that respect I'm not saying I'm a completely good person or anything at least in that respect I went from being a bad person in that respect to a better person and you can try to know why that happened there's a rational set of choices that got made choices that you could make if you were in a similar situation if I was mentoring you and I saw that you had those sort of tendencies I might tell you that story and I might bring up the reasons why I changed why not just to make it feel bad but to actually say here's some reasons why you ought to go this way if somebody is an emotivist that's not accessible for them and they think that that's not accessible for anybody else so like he says inner conflicts are just confrontation of one contingent arbitrariness by another so when you're conflicted about something you're an emotivist you got no way to resolve it if you get into arguments with other people you're just trying to sort of reduce everything to everybody's feelings their opinions as we often put it I'll leave you with this does our culture push that kind of view onto us? think about a lot of television shows particularly reality shows when people get into conflict with each other I think about housemates right these ones where they crown a bunch of people who they know are not going to get along with each other because they have different values different viewpoints, different feelings how many of them do you think are emotivists? think about that next time you're watching one of those shows if you watch that kind of stuff this is a real issue McIntyre is bringing this up so we can get a good handle on it and try to get past it that's where we'll leave it off for today