PROJECTIVISM

"Projectivism" has its roots in David Hume's remark in the Treatise about the mind's "propensity to spread itself over external objects." We sometimes speak of properties of objects where in fact the features we notice are "projections" of our internal sentiments (or other qualities of our experience). The family of metaethical views claiming that value is a projection of our conative and affective physiological states is called projectivism by Simon Blackburn (1984), and the name has stuck. Blackburn proposes that "we say that [we] project an attitude or habit or other commitment which is not descriptive onto the world, when we speak and think as though there were a property of things which our sayings describe, which we can reason about, know about, be wrong about, and so on" (1984, pp. 170–171). In ethics projectivism is popular because it provides an explanation of how it is that moral judgment can have the logical role that it seems to have in deciding what to do. Believing that something has some property typically provides me with a reason to act only in conjunction with the desire to promote (or oppose) the realization of that property. But believing that something is good is (or has been taken historically to be) sufficient by itself to provide a person with a reason to act. Nor is this a coincidence; it is not that we humans happen to like good things, as we happen to like to eat sugary things. Rather, it is part of the logic of judgments of goodness that they provide reasons. How can this be? Projectivists explain: the judgment that something is good is the projection of our affinity toward it, our "appetite," as Thomas Hobbes puts it.

There are three varieties of projectivism to distinguish. The most straightforward is the error theory, advanced by J. L. Mackie (1977, see also Robinson 1948), according to which our projection of value into the world is an illusion. Ordinary moral judgments presuppose an objectivity or independence of moral properties that is simply not to be had, and so they are in error. Mackie sees moral thought and language much as an atheist sees religious talk and language. The believers are not conceptually confused, but they are ontologically mistaken. The second sort of projectivism regards moral properties as Lockean "secondary qualities," not illusions, but real properties that consist in dispositions to affect human perceivers in certain ways. According to John MacDowell (1987), a leading exponent, just as we do not understand what the blueness of an object is except as the disposition to look blue to us, so we do not understand what goodness is except as the disposition to seem good to us. The projection involved in attribution of secondary qualities, including values, involves no error at all.

A third sort of projectivism is noncognitivism, or as it is more commonly called in discussions of projectivism, expressivism. The expressivist holds that moral judgments do not state propositions at all but rather serve to express some noncognitive mental state of the judge. Like secondary-quality theorists, expressivists deny that there is any mistake involved in moral judgment; true, there are no moral properties, and we speak as though there are, but this "speaking as though" is just a misleading feature of the surface grammar. In fact, according to expressivists, moral judgments do not serve the same semantic function as most declarative sentences, even though they look the same.

Blackburn's projectivist position (the most influential one of the 1980s) develops an expressivist analysis of moral language with enough logical richness and complexity to model real moral deliberation and argument. His idea is easier to make out against the background of common criticisms of expressivism. Richard Brandt (1959), among others, noted that people's ordinary thinking about moral judgments runs contrary to expressivism. We have generally believed that normative judgments are used to state facts, that they are true or false, and when we change our moral views we come to regard our earlier views as mistaken, not merely as different. (By contrast, when one's taste in dessert changes, one generally regards the old preference as merely different or, at worst, childish.) Brandt complained that expressivists had given no explanation of why we are so confused. Blackburn's theory is designed to meet such objections. While maintaining an underlying expressivist semantics, he tries to show why we speak and think as though moral judgments state facts, can be true or false, and so on.

Imagine that people initially spoke about ethics in a language like English but having a quite explicitly expressivist structure. Rather than saying, "Voting for this health-care bill is morally wrong," they said, "Boo, voting for this health-care bill!" Now imagine that these speakers valued a kind of consistency of sentiment, so that it was regarded as a confusion if someone said, "Boo, eating mammals, and hooray, eating cows!" And suppose they also believed that some moral sensibilities could never survive reflection by a rational person, so that expressing one of those sensibilities would be conclusive evidence that the speaker simply had not thought carefully about the subject. The expressivist community might "invent a predicate answering to that attitude, and treat commitments as if they were judgments, and then use all the natural devices for debating truth" (Blackburn 1984, p. 195). Since Blackburn's theory seeks to defend realist-style reasoning without realist metaphysics, he calls it "quasi-realism."

An important objection to Blackburn's quasi-realism is made by Crispin Wright (1988) and Bob Hale (1990). Our moral language has a realist surface structure, and quasi-realism seeks to vindicate this structure without giving in to realist metaphysics. But if quasi-realism is successful—if every realist-sounding thing we say can be endorsed in good faith by the quasi-realist—then how will a quasi-realist be distinguishable from a full-blooded realist? As Wright puts it, Blackburn's program confronts a dilemma: Either it does not account for all the realist logical features of moral language, in which case it fails, or it succeeds in accounting for all of them, "in which case it makes good all the things which the projectivist started out wanting to deny: that the discourse in question is genuinely assertoric, aimed at truth, and so on" (1988, p. 35).

Despite these difficulties, projectivism deserves to be taken seriously, not just in the metaphysics of value, but in other metaphysical domains as well. For example, there have been projectivists about mental states (Dennett 1987—judging that someone has intentional states is taking "the intentional stance" toward the person), causes (saying that one event caused another is projecting one's psychological propensity to associate events of the first kind with events of the second in temporal sequence), probability (Finetti 1972—judgments of probability project one's degree of credence into the world), and logical impossibility (Blackburn 1984—projecting a certain kind of inconceivability). With the exception of the first, all of these sorts of projectivism are plausibly attributed to Hume, who should be regarded as the prototype projectivist.

See also Error Theory of Ethics; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume, David; Mackie, John Leslie; Metaethics; Noncognitivism; Realism.

Bibliography

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James Dreier (1996)