On Being Ideal

i. Many philosophers in the past few decades have been exercised over the question whether or how ethical expressions could be meaningful. In particular, many who accepted some form of verifiability criterion of meaningfulness have thought that either ethical judgments can have only meaning or they must be a subclass of empirical assertions. It is to be expected, then, that those empiricists who were dissatisfied with the emotive theory should try to show that, in fact, ethical judgments are empirical statements of some kind or other, i.e., that sentences containing the typical ethical predicates (right, wrong, evil, just, and so on) can each be translated into empirical sentences which do not contain any ethical predicates. I do not intend here to take any stand on the reasoning I have just sketched, which has led people to attempt such translations or to think that they must be possible. What I do intend to do is criticize one program for making such translations; and if my argument is sound, I think it tends to show that no such program can succeed. 2. The particular proposal which I will criticize is advanced by Professor Roderick Firth,' who claims that ethical judgments may be construed as statements of empirical (if highly theoretical) psychology as statements about certain possible attitutdes of an hypothetical ideal observer, who is to be characterized without the use of any ethical or evaluative terms. I think the rationale of Firth's proposal can be expressed in the following way. Our ethical judgments are intimately related to certain of our psychological dispositions. For instance (although Firth does not offer any sample analyses which are this specific), my judgment that some kind of conduct is wrong is certainly related to a disposition on my part to disapprove2 of that kind of conduct. But it would be incorrect to hold that when I say

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Ideal (ethics) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Ethics in medical practice · Philosophy · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment