Non-Cognitivism and the Classification Account of Moral Uncertainty

Abstract

Moral non-cognitivism faces the challenge of explaining fundamental moral uncertainty, wherein an agent’s doubt directly concerns which descriptive properties are right- or wrong-making rather than empirical ignorance about whether an action possesses those properties. This challenge can be resolved by modeling fundamental moral uncertainty as classificatory uncertainty. On this framework, moral evaluations depend on moral standards that function analogously to descriptive classificatory standards by regulating pro- and con-attitudes. Fundamental moral uncertainty arises from psychological mechanisms parallel to those producing descriptive doubt, including boundary indeterminacy within a standard, evaluations of peripheral cases, and epistemic opacity regarding the application conditions of one’s own evaluative dispositions. Because the formation of non-cognitive attitudes is systematically grounded in or accompanied by descriptive beliefs about the classified actions, non-cognitivists can locate degrees of certitude entirely within these associated cognitive states via standard degree-of-belief models. Consequently, certitude remains structurally distinct from evaluative importance, which is instead accounted for by the internal ranking of a standard, the affective vivacity of the attitude, or its motivational force. The classification account thus enables non-cognitivism to accommodate both fundamental and derived moral uncertainty without reducing moral doubt to simple empirical misinformation. – AI-generated abstract.