ABSTRACT
The arguments that noncognitivists give that there must be some solution to their problems, even if they haven’t been able to develop one yet are what the author have called arguments for license for optimism. Rather than showing directly how to solve the problems for noncognitivism, arguments for license for optimism try to show that there is some other uncontroversial phenomenon that behaves much like the noncognitivists believe that moral thought or moral language behaves but must be able to overcome the problems somehow. So, for example, when Hare argued that there must be some way for noncognitivists to account for the meanings of complex sentences and the logical relationships between them, because there are complex imperative sentences and there are logical relationships between them, he was offering an argument for license for optimism.
