Blackburn's projectivism ? An objection

Abstract

In his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J. L. Mackie outlines a picture of ethical thinking with two central elements. The first concerns the nature of 'value' judgements; he, like Hume, considers them to be a projection of the subject's attitudes onto the world. In other words a 'judgement' that something is (morally) good is just an expression of a favourable attitude that one has towards the object being considered. The second element concerns the phenomenology of value judgements. He supposes that, to the person making the 'judgement', it seems that she is responding to some feature that the object possesses independently of their interaction with it, and that their judgement is of a kind with judgements of objects that they possess a particular primary quality. So, simply, although value judgements are projective, to those who make them they seem objective. So Mackie's position is called, appropriately, 'error theory'. Of course anyone holding this position must show why value judgements cannot be objective in the relevant sense, and must show that this is the same sense in which we take them to be objective. The existence of the error must also be explained. But my concern here will not be with Mackie's error theory, but with a response to it which tries to avoid the imputation of error to English-speaking moral agents.! There are two possible responses which give up the imputation of error. One is to demonstrate that moral judgements can indeed be objective, at least in the way that the people who make them think of them as being objective. The other, with which I shall be concerned here, is to deny Mackie's claim about the phenomenology of value judgements, while accepting that they are in fact projective. This second response, which has been promoted by Simon Blackburn in his book Spreading the Word and in a series of recent articles, represents a return to the emotivism of the mid-twentieth century. In what follows I shall show