The Problem of Other Attitudes

Non-cognitivists are known to face a problem in extending their account of straightforward predicative moral judgments to logically complex moral judgments. This paper presents a related problem concerning how non-cognitivists might extend their accounts of moral judgments to other kinds of moral attitudes, such as moral hopes and moral intuitions. Non-cognitivists must solve three separate challenges: they must explain the natures of these other attitudes, they must explain why they count as moral attitudes, and they must explain why the moral attitudes are systematically correlated with ordinary propositional attitudes. After presenting the problem, this paper examines several contemporary theories with some initial promise for solving it, and argues that they are insufficient.