Being somewhat green when it comes to this topic I could be way off the mark here, but a thought occurred to me about the Frege-Geach objection to expressivism which I felt worth writing a brief post about (if only so that someone better-versed might appear ghostlike from the intertubes and tell me to shut up).
Expressivism is a meta-ethical position which claims that moral judgements express attitudes rather than facts. On this view, when I say that murder is wrong I am not describing a moral aspect of reality (in some way that could be true or false), but expressing an evaluative attitude towards murder (perhaps an emotive attitude akin to disapproval, or an aesthetic attitude akin to distaste). Since it holds that moral judgements do not have truth-values, expressivism is a kind of moral anti-realism.
The problem described by Geach (drawing heavily on Frege) [1] appeals to the difficulty of accounting for certain moral judgements in expressivist terms. Moral judgements involving conditionals cause particular concern, for example:
If tormenting the cat is wrong, then getting your little brother to torment the cat is wrong.
Call this proposition FG. Propositions like this are the bread-and-butter of moral reasoning, and any theory of moral language which doesn’t account for them has surely failed. The expressivist struggles with FG because assenting to it does not require assenting to the first clause (or the second, for that matter). That is, no evaluative attitude need be expressed toward cat torment (or the instigation of cat torment) in order to assent to FG as a whole. This leaves them with the question of what evaluative attitude is being expressed by FG – a question which seems difficult to answer.
As far as I can tell, most if not all discussions of the Frege-Geach problem take it for granted that FG is a moral judgement, presumably because of the appearance in it of the moral predicate ‘is wrong’. But isn’t it possible that despite appearances it isn’t a moral judgement at all?
The way FG is phrased is slightly ambiguous. One could argue that in order to assent to it we would also be assenting to the judgement “getting your little brother to do something wrong is wrong” (I can’t think of any moral theory which would disagree with that, but it does seem non-trivial). So we might glibly contend that there are evaluative attitudes expressed by FG. But then this could easily be countered by drawing out the hidden judgement and folding it back in explicitly. Doing so (for the sake of removing ambiguity at the cost of some clarity) we get FG’:
If tormenting the cat is wrong and getting your little brother to do something wrong is wrong, then it is wrong to get your little brother to torment the cat.
The thing about FG’ is that no matter what your moral views are you’re going to agree with it. Of course, this is exactly what Geach was picking up on. But if there is no moral content to it (i.e. there are no moral disagreements to be had about it) then how can it be a moral judgment, whether it contains moral predicates or not? And if it is not a moral judgement, why should expressivists be expected to provide the evaluative attitude it expresses?
A critic might be concerned that the problem is being dodged here. Even if judgements like FG’ are not strictly speaking moral judgements, the expressivist will still have to account for their role in moral reasoning to be a successful theory of moral language. This is true, but the point is just that if FG’ and its ilk are not moral judgements, then the expressivist may account for them in ways other than by explaining the evaluative attitude they express. Doesn’t this leave them with options?
Notes:
[1] Peter Geach – Ascriptivism (1960).
The Platopus 