How Emotivism Survives Immoralists, Irrationality, and Depression

When someone thinks that it is morally wrong to cut social welfare while increasing military spending, that state of mind is, essentially, something akin to a desire for such changes not to take place. Or so versions of the metaethical theory known as emotivism have it, claiming that moral opinions are best understood as motivational states. Emotivism is hardly the received view of contemporary analytic philosophy, and much writing in metaethics seems bent on showing why and how this view is wrong and on producing something that has at least a hope of being right, that is, a theory denying that moral opinions are well understood as desires or motivational states. Perhaps the most popular objection to emotivism is the following: Immoralism: If moral opinions are desires or similar motiva-tional states, it is a mystery that there are what I will somewhat bluntly call ‘immoralists’: people having moral opinions but lacking the corresponding desires or motivation. (Some would prefer to label such people ‘amoralists’, but that label suggests someone who thinks that there are no moral obligations or refrains from making moral judgments: in any case, ‘immoralist’ should be taken in the sense given here.) An impressive number of critics of emotivism encountered in the literature and in conversation have thought that there are obvious cases of immoralism (Brink 1989, chapter 3; Campbel