The Non-Cognitivist Goes to a Protest
Non-cognitivism, broadly speaking, is the meta-ethical position that moral statements are not truth-apt—that they are not the kinds of things that can be true or false, that express moral facts or properties, or about which we can have beliefs or other cognitive mental states. Rather, the non-cognitivist holds, moral statements express only distinctly non-cognitive mental states, such as approval, disgust, disapproval, and desire. Non-cognitivism is a position in meta-ethics, then, because it is concerned with the nature and status of ethical claims, not with the development of first-order ethical principles.
But why bring together meta-ethics and political activism? Although it is not unusual for social justice movements to claim the moral high ground, it seems to me that what is unusual is the degree of certainty with which protestors today assert their moral superiority, the absence of nuance and intellectual humility in their moral reasoning. If, following the outcries of those invested in Black Lives Matter and associated movements, the resignation of The New York Times’ Opinion Editor, calls to rename the prestigious R. A. Fisher Prize, and the placement of a UCLA professor on leave are any indication of the present modus operandi of political activism, then it seems safe to say that today’s activists demand of everyone nothing less than complete ideological conformity. That is, in the current climate, it’s become quite clear that there are no grey areas—and, perhaps even more troublingly, that it is by mob vote that lines of acceptability are drawn.
Although unfortunate in itself, this reality invites and makes incredibly relevant meta-ethical scrutiny generally. Are protestors, for instance, justified in treating their moral assertions with such certitude? On what grounds? What do their moral statements amount to? How are we to understand or make sense of a moral landscape the contours of which change yearly if not monthly?
One way to bring into focus some of the central questions at play here is to consider the difference between claims in ethics and, say, physics. At the most basic level, it’s quite clear that moral and physical statements differ at the very least in that they accommodate different kinds of verification. To determine that atoms have massive, positively-charged nuclei it is sufficient to shoot some electrons at a film of gold foil—and to confirm the results with follow-up experiments. But to assess whether a monument is immoral, a statute is racist, or a Tweet is morally reprehensible, we have to appeal to something more than physical experiment.
(For another fascinating comparison, see Columbia’s Justin Clarke-Doane’s recent book on morality and mathematics.)
Rather than directly motivating or developing the various flavors of non-naturalism currently available, however, I’d like in this short piece to take a somewhat different and perhaps unconventional approach, intended to pique the reader’s curiosity rather to convince them of any particular stance. To that end, I’d like to imagine the conversation that might unfold between the impassioned protestor and someone with non-cognitivist leanings. What is the non-cognitivist-type to say in the face of passionate moral speech? How might they think of or approach political activism more generally?
Protestor (P): No justice, no peace! Prosecute the police!
Jones (J): What are you protesting?
P: We’re here to protest the killings of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers. We’re here to protest police brutality and systemic racism.
J: Systemic racism. That phrase has been thrown around quite a bit lately. And with how widely it’s been used, one could be forgiven for thinking that everyone and everything under the sun is systemically racist. What exactly does it mean?
P: We define systemic racism as equivalent to institutional racism as equivalent to structural racism. If it’s a system and it treats black people as inferior, resulting in racial inequalities, we call it systemic racism.
J: So, these terms describe not so much individual or even organizational actions as certain structural arrangements. That is, much like only volumes of space can be full — we don’t speak of the individual objects filling such volumes as having the property of being full — only systems can be systemically racist. Or, put differently yet again, only systems can be put into the extension of the property, systemic racism. And according to you, this property picks out those systems whose “procedures or processes” disadvantage blacks. Is that the idea?
P: Sure. I guess that’s fine. Just be careful with that academic language here. We don’t much like the ivory tower.
J: Well, I’ll try… Now, I just want to confirm a point. It seems to me that your theory of systemic racism is essentially consequentialist: all it takes for any system S to be systemically racist is that the formal procedures of S produce racial inequalities that disadvantage blacks. Put formally, such outcome inequalities are both necessary and sufficient for a system to be systemically racist. The intentions or purposes or beliefs or motivations that informed the development of these procedures, on this view, are therefore irrelevant to our assessment of whether S is in the extension of systemic racism. Am I still tracking your original thought?
P: You bet. We don’t give a fuck about your intentions.
J: Okay, good. But now, I’m a little bit confused. Originally, you said that systemically racist systems treat black people as inferior. But unless we’re employing radically different versions of the concept treat ___ as ___, and perhaps we are, I’m not sure I can square my reconstruction of your definition with this initial claim. For it seems to me that in order to treat someone as something one must have the right kind of intention—that’s just what it means to treat ___ as ___. And we just agreed that intentions don’t figure into systemic racism as you’re thinking about it. So, did you mean to say, “treat black people as if they were inferior?” That would offer us some distance from talk of intentions. Or are you suggesting that, contra to our above exchange, intentions actually do matter when evaluating whether a system is racist or not—that although racial inequality is necessary it is not sufficient? Or are you claiming that when a system’s procedures produce racial inequalities the intentions behind those procedures, the claims of their originators to the contrary notwithstanding, were racist, such that racial inequality remains necessary and sufficient but now retroactively bears on intentions? Or something else?
P: Look, if you’re going to pick apart my language, this isn’t going to work. We’re out here protesting, not writing a term paper. If it really makes a difference to you, I guess I meant to say “as if.”
J: That seems to me like the best resolution, given your cause here. For if the production of racial inequality is not sufficient to classify a system as systemically racist, and if intentions did matter, then, given how hard it is conclusively to determine the intentions of individual actors, it would be virtually impossible to substantiate the claim that our social systems in fact are systemically racist. And then you might as well be protesting official counts of how many blades of grass are on the South Lawn of the White House.
P: Whatever man. I know right from wrong and I know that our education system and our judicial system and our healthcare system and our financial system and a whole lot of other of our systems are all racist.
J: Well, according to the definition we’ve just agreed upon, all of these systems are verifiably systemically racist, so no contest there. But, for a bit more clarity, let’s call this definition SR. Now let’s also define the properties SR* and SR**. We’ll say that a system is SR* if and only if it is SR and the procedures that produce racial inequalities were passed into law or approved as regulations between the hours of 10:32am and 2:13pm, Eastern Standard Time. And a system is SR** if and only if it is SR and the procedures that produce racial inequalities were developed with the active and conscious intention of disadvantaging blacks, that they were developed “because of” not merely “in spite of” the disproportionate impact they would have on blacks. So here’s my question. Why should I care about SR instead of about SR* or about SR**? Or, put differently, why are you out here protesting SR instead of one of its neighboring alternatives? Don’t you realize that what you’ve just told me makes it look an awful lot like you don’t really care at all about, for example, SR**—that is, like you don’t really care about systemic racism**? In some circles, even the appearance of not caring about SR** is enough to get you cancelled and fired.
P: That’s absurd! I want to see systemic racism abolished!
J: And that’s all fine and good. But I want to see systemic racism** abolished and it looks an awful lot to me like you don’t much care about systemic racism**. What’s more, you’ve given me no compelling reason to think that I should care about systemic racism instead of about systemic racism* or systemic racism**. What I do know is that I don’t really like to be seen around racists**. So, unless you’ve got anything else to say, I’d better get going.
Jones’ friend Smith (S): How’d the protest go?
J: You were right; I shouldn’t have gone. It was just a bunch of racists** all up on their moral** high horses, thinking that they’re fighting for the One True Cause rather than engaging in mere interest-group politics. I’m pretty sure that all of them think justice is somehow metaphysically privileged, that’s it’s never even crossed their minds that all it is that any of us are doing when we use moral language is expressing certain of our non-cognitive attitudes like approval and disapproval.
S: I figured as much. On the bright side, this’ll be a great story to share at next week’s meeting of Political Activism for Non-Cognitivists.
