Attitudinal Ambivalence: Moral Uncertainty for Non-Cognitivists

Abstract

Critics of metaethical non-cognitivism contend that conative attitudes lack sufficient internal structure to account for moral doubt, as desires supposedly vary along only two dimensions: strength and temporal stability. However, insights from social psychology demonstrate that non-cognitive attitudes also vary in attitudinal ambivalence—the degree to which an agent possesses conflicting evaluative attitudes or competing motivating reasons regarding mutually exclusive courses of action. Attitudinal ambivalence exhibits all the structural properties required to model moral certitude: it is gradable, varies diachronically, remains conceptually distinct from importance (attitude strength), and correlates inversely with motivational force and behavioral execution. Consequently, moral doubt can be understood not as epistemic uncertainty within non-existent moral beliefs, but as internal attitudinal conflict among conative states. Grounding moral doubt in ambivalence demonstrates that non-cognitivist accounts of moral judgments can accommodate variations in certitude, while recasting the central challenge of normative uncertainty from evaluating degrees of belief to deciding how to act under conflicting reasons. – AI-generated abstract.