A review of Bart Streumer's "Unbelievable Errors.".

A core commitment of meta-ethical expressivism is that ordinary descriptive judgements are representational states, while normative judgements are non-representational directive states. Traditionally, this commitment has been understood as a psychological thesis about the nature of normative judgements, as the view that normative judgements consist in certain sorts of conative propositional attitudes. This paper’s aim is to challenge this reading and to show that changing our view on how this commitment is to be understood opens up space for attractive forms of (...) expressivism. The paper argues this by example: by presenting one of the possible expressivist views that can be developed on this reading and by arguing that this view has distinctive advantages over forms of expressivism that endorse the traditional interpretation of expressivism. (shrink)

This paper develops a new form of metaethical expressivism according to which the normative judgment that X should Φ consists in a decision that X Φ. When the judgment is first-personal—e.g., my judgment that I should Φ—the view is similar to Gibbard’s plan expressivism, though the state I call “decision” differs somewhat from a Gibbard-style plan. The deep difference between the views shows in the account of third-personal judgments. Gibbard construes the judgment that Mary should Φ as a de se (...) plan on the thinker’s part to Φ if she turns out to be Mary (the Subtle View). I construe the judgment as a decision for Mary that Mary Φ (the Simple View). The main argument for Simple Plan Expressivism is that it solves problems for Gibbard’s approach, resonates with a new and interesting moral psychology, and better makes sense of certain independently plausible constraints on normative judgment. In the end I argue that this account of normative judgment has implications for first-order ethics, implying in particular that rational egoism as standardly formulated is incoherent. (shrink)

This paper argues that practical reasons are essentially “public” in the following sense: If R is a reason for X to Φ, then R is also a reason for other people not to interfere with X’s Φ-ing. The paper derives the Publicity Thesis from an independently motivated non-cognitivist account of normative judgment that covers both should-judgments and judgments about reasons. This account “explains” the publicity thesis in the sense if the non-cognitivist view is correct, anyone who judges that R is (...) a reason for X to Φ is thereby committed to regarding R as a reason for others not to interfere. Hence practical reasons must be regarded as public by anyone who thinks about them, and so are essentially public, though in a sense somewhat different from Korsgaard’s (1996) or Nagel’s (1970). -/- . (shrink)

This thesis motivates a novel account of desire as the best explanation of an intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will immediately, outright know that she has a reason to bring P about. Existing explanations of the intuitive datum cannot simultaneously satisfy two desiderata. We want to explain how desires enable outright knowledge of reasons and also explain the fallibility of desires. Existing views satisfy the first desideratum at the expense of the (...) second, or vice versa. I propose an epistemological disjunctivist account of desire that satisfies both. On this view, a desire for P represents the value of P in a manner analogous to perception. Desires come in two distinct epistemic kinds: an awareness of value or an illusion of value. An awareness of value enables outright knowledge of reasons and allows the agent to tell by reflection that she has such knowledge. An illusion of value merely seems to provide grounds for knowledge, which explains the fallibility of desires. The proposed account is a strong candidate for the truth because it best explains central features of our practical agency. (shrink)