This is a paper about the problem of realism in meta-ethics (and, I hope, also in other areas, but that hope is so far pretty speculative). But it is not about the problem of whether realism is true. It is about the problem of what realism is. More specifically, it is about the question of what divides meta-ethical realists from irrealists. I start with a potted history of the Good Old Days.

Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this (...) argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. Deep and widespread moral disagreement or, rather, the mere appearance of such disagreement, strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error-theories, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism. (shrink)

Moral Expressivists typically concede that, in someminimalsense, moral sentences are truth‐apt but claim that in some morerobustsense they are not. TheImmodest Disciplined Syntacticist, a species of minimalist about truth, raises a doubt as to whether this contrast can be made out. I here address this challenge by motivating and describing a distinction betweenreduciblyandirreduciblytruth‐apt sentences. In the light of this distinction the Disciplined Syntacticist must either adopt a moremodestversion of his theory, friendlier to Expressivism, or substantially modify it, abandoning one of (...) its central conditions on truth‐aptness. One natural and promising such modification, thePure Discipline View, is described and its implications for an understanding of Expressivism briefly discussed. (shrink)

There has been much debate recently as to whether the notion of truth, as applied to one's home language, is metaphysically neutral, the interesting metaphysical questions arising elsewhere (in relation to such notions as mind-independence or objectivity or existence). ' On one side, the minimalists, as they have come to be known, favour deflationary accounts of truth such as the redundancy or disquotational theories and conclude that the notion of truth is applicable to declarative sentences in general - at least (...) where there are fairly definite standards of appropriateness for the assertion or denial of such sentences - irrespective of the metaphysical commitments of the propositions the sentences express. Opponents have criticized the minimalist account of truth or denied that it follows from this account that truth is metaphysically neutral. My sympathies in this debate lie with the minimalist but I wish to focus on a serious problem for the minimalist - that posed by the Liar paradox. This problem has featured very little in the recent debate but seems to me to yield the strongest objection to minimalism. I develop the objection in the next section, in §2 sketching what I feel to be the minimalist's best response, namely developing the position not in terms of Tarskian classical biconditionals but rather in terms of the naive rules for truth. It emerges, then, that the minimalist will be forced to repudiate classical logic. The last section, §3, deals with objections to the strategy of §2. (shrink)

This paper addresses the “creeping minimalism” challenge to quasi-realist forms of expressivism by arguing that the solution suggested by Dreier doesn’t work and proposing an alternative solution based on the different inferential roles of ethical and descriptive judgments.

This is a critical discussion of Habermas's conception of moral cognitivism. I explain how it fits in with his meta-ethical anti-realism. I place Habermas's Discourse Ethics in the broad field of analytic meta-ethics. I also look at the question of whether the Frege-Geach problem applies to Habermas's Discourse Ethics, and if so, how he should best reply.

Moral Expressivists typically concede that, in some minimal sense, moral sentences are truth-apt but claim that in some more robust sense they are not. The Immodest Disciplined Syntacticist, a species of minimalist about truth, raises a doubt as to whether this contrast can be made out. I here address this challenge by motivating and describing a distinction between reducibly and irreducibly truth-apt sentences. In the light of this distinction the Disciplined Syntacticist must either adopt a more modest version of his (...) theory, friendlier to Expressivism, or substantially modify it, abandoning one of its central conditions on truth-aptness. One natural and promising such modification, the Pure Discipline View, is described and its implications for an understanding of Expressivism briefly discussed. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that normative judgements do not aim to represent the world. In this paper, I argue that this view is incompatible with the thought that when two people make conflicting normative judgements, at most one of these judgements is correct. I argue that this shows that normative judgements do aim to represent the world.