This paper argues that non-cognitivism about moral judgements is compatible with moral realism. In order to reveal the possibility, and plausibility, of this hitherto under-explored position in metaethics, it surveys a series of four increasingly fine-grained formulations of the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. It argues that all but the last of these distinctions should be rejected, on the grounds that they lead advocates of non-cognitivism away from what initially motivated them to advocate non-cognitivism in the first place. One significant (...) pay-off of this reconceived formulation of the cognitivism/non-cognitivism distinction is that it reveals what it would take to properly appreciate the place of virtue ethics in contemporary metaethical debates. (shrink)

It is possible to construct situations (with a suitable kind of setting) in which one speaker utters ‘This is tasty’ and another speaker responds with ‘That’s not true’. The aim of this paper is to motivate the idea that typical (broadly) expressivist accounts of taste disagreements are not in a position to explain such situations (although some of them can successfully explain disagreements in which another kind of dissent phrase—like ‘Nuh-uh’—is employed). This is because utterances of ‘That’s not true’ are (...) typically used to ascribe falsehood to propositions. Taste expressivism has it, however, that when one utters ‘This is tasty’, one typically manifests her evaluative attitude (which is non-propositional) toward something rather than describes what attitude she bears toward the thing. Another aim of the paper consists in proposing an alternative account of taste disagreements. It is close to taste expressivism when it comes to the explanation of disagreements in which speakers respond with ‘Nuh-uh’ to utterances of ‘This is tasty’, but departs from it in situations in which they respond with ‘That’s not true’. The account is developed within a contextualist framework according to which taste utterances express contextually enriched propositions that contain judges who evaluate things as tasty or not. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contextualism cannot explain (dis)agreements concerning matters of personal taste because it treats sentences involving predicates of taste as indexical. I aim to weaken this charge. Given the idea that people sometimes use indexical sentences to express (dis)agreements about taste, two kinds of (dis)agreement are distinguished, namely doxastic and non-doxastic. Taste (dis)agreements are better explained in terms of the later kind, in which case they become amenable to contextualist treatment. It is argued that if something instantiates (...) a taste property (like being tasty for A), it has to instantiate a corresponding attitudinal property (like being liked by A). Based on this, utterances of taste sentences express propositions that concern tastiness of something (e.g., that X is tasty for A) and these propositions entail other propositions that concern non-doxastic attitudes the speakers bear toward something (e.g., that X is liked by A). One speaker is claimed to (dis)agree with another speaker provided their respective entailed propositions feature (in)compatible non-doxastic attitudes. Although this explanation is similar to hybrid accounts that are currently growing in popularity, it departs from them in some notable respects. (shrink)

The critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an essentialist (...) view. In these replies, I respond to these challenges in ways that precisify the relevant understanding of ‘semantic rules' and the forms they can take, that make clearer the direction of explanation in modal normativism in ways that show the view doesn't rely on a more ‘robust’ form of modal realism, and that give reason for thinking that there is actually no conflict between modal normativism and truth-conditional semantics. I also aim to give a fuller assessment of how it compares to other approaches to modality, including an essentialist approach. (shrink)

In contemporary metaethics, various versions of hybrid expressivism have been proposed according to which moral sentences express both non-cognitive attitudes and beliefs. One important advantage with such positions, its proponents argue, is that they, in contrast to pure expressivism, have a straightforward way of avoiding the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper, I provide a systematic examination of different versions of hybrid expressivism with particular regard to how they are assumed to evade this problem. The major conclusion is that none of (...) these views succeeds to provide both a fully satisfying interpretation of moral sentences and a convincing response to the Frege-Geach problem. I end by briefly considering alternative hybrid views that employ the notion of conventional or conversational implicature. (shrink)

According to the established understanding of the Frege-Geach problem, it is a challenge exclusively for metaethical expressivism. In this paper, I argue that it is much wider in scope: The problem applies generally to views according to which moral sentences express moral judgments entailing that one is for or against something, irrespective of what mental states the judgments consist in. In particular, it applies to motivational internalism about moral judgments. Most noteworthy, it applies to cognitivist internalism according to which moral (...) judgments consist in motivating beliefs. Hence, in order for a metaethical view to evade the Frege-Geach problem, it should avoid stating that moral judgments are motivating. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that the face-value of moral practice provides presumptive support to moral realism. This paper analyses such arguments into three steps. (1) Moral practice has a certain face-value, (2) only realism can vindicate this face value, and (3) the face-value needs vindicating. Two potential problems with such arguments are discussed. The first is taking the relevant face-value to involve explicitly realist commitments; the second is underestimating the power of non-realist strategies to vindicate that face-value. Case studies of each (...) of these errors are presented, drawn from the writings of Shafer-Landau, Brink and McNaughton, and from recent work in experimental metaethics. The paper then considers weak presumptive arguments, according to which both realist and non-realist vindications of moral practice are possible, but the realist vindications are more natural. It is argued that there is no sense of ‘natural’ available that can make these arguments work. The conclusion is that all extant presumptive arguments for moral realism fail. (shrink)

Expressivists have a problem with collectives. I initially illustrate the problem against the background of Allan Gibbard’s expressivist theory, where it is especially stark. I then argue that the problem generalizes. Gibbard’s account entails that judgments about what collective agents ought to do are contingency plans for what to do if one is in the circumstances facing the relevant collective agent. So, for example, my judgment that the United States ought not to have invaded Iraq is a contingency plan for (...) what to do if I find myself in the circumstances facing the United States on the eve of the Iraq war. I argue that, given plausible functionalist assumptions in the philosophy of mind expressivists would struggle to reject, such contingency plans are impossible for individual agents. Since normative judgments about collectives are possible, Gibbard’s theory is unacceptable. Having demonstrated the basic problem for Gibbard’s view, I then argue that the problem has a much wider scope. In particular, I argue that traditional forms of expressivism cannot simultaneously provide a plausible account of both agent-relative normative judgments and judgments about what collectives ought to do. Fortunately, all is not lost; hybrid or ‘ecumenical’ forms of expressivism can disarm the dilemma, or so I argue. I conclude by briefly sketching some further challenges ecumenical expressivism must overcome for its treatment of judgments about collectives to be fully satisfactory and indicate possible lines of argument to be pursued in future work on these challenges. (shrink)

O programa semântico do expressivismo surgiu como uma tentativa de fundamentar a visão não-cognitivista do discurso ético, mas logo foi generalizado de forma a cobrir a linguagem normativa em geral. Ele promete desenvolver uma alternativa global à abordagem clássica da semântica das condições de verdade: uma teoria não factualista, baseada na pragmática, do significado linguístico. Os expressivistas veem o conteúdo das sentenças normativas como determinado por seu uso primário, que é não-descritivo. As versões tradicionais da semântica expressivista procedem associando sistematicamente (...) às sentenças normativas as atitudes mentais que elas convencionalmente expressam. Elas assumem que, se as sentenças simples expressam atitudes, a aplicação a essas sentenças dos conectivos da lógica proposicional ou da ligação de variáveis resulta em sentenças complexas que também expressam atitudes. O núcleo do presente trabalho avalia algumas tentativas influentes de desenvolvimento do programa expressivista, focando em um problema discutido com veemência na literatura: o “problema da negação para o expressivismo.” Algumas abordagens propostas nos últimos anos, baseadas na rejeição da assunção central do expressivismo tradicional, são consideradas em detalhes. Embora uma avaliação definitiva dessas abordagens inovadoras como explicações satisfatórias do funcionamento da linguagem normativa não possa ainda ser alcançada, o trabalho afirma que há razões para otimismo. (shrink)

Despite the efforts of meta-ethical expressivists to rebut such worries, one objection raised over and over again against expressivism is that, if the theory is true, matters of morality must be mind-dependent in some objectionable way. This paper develops an argument which not only shows that this is and cannot be the case, but also – and perhaps more importantly – offers a diagnosis why philosophers are nevertheless so often led to think otherwise.

This paper explores in detail an argument for epistemic expressivism, what we call the Argument from Motivation. While the Argument from Motivation has sometimes been anticipated, it has never been set out in detail. The argument has three premises, roughly, that certain judgments expressed in attributions of knowledge are intrinsically motivating in a distinct way (P1); that motivation for action requires desire-like states or conative attitudes (HTM); and that the semantic content of knowledge attributions cannot be specified without reference to (...) the intrinsically motivating judgments that such attributions express (P2). We argue that these premises entail a version of ecumenical expressivism. Since the argument from motivation has not been explicitly stated before, there is no current discussion of the argument. In this paper we therefore consider and reject various objections that one might propose to the argument, including some that stem from the idea that knowledge is factive, or that knowledge involves evidence that rules out relevant alternatives. Other objections to (P1) specifically might be derived from cases of apparent lack of epistemic motivation considered in in Kvanvig (The value of knowledge and the pursuit of understanding, 2003) and Brown (Nous 42(2):167–189, 2008), as well as from general forms of externalism about epistemic motivation. We consider these and find them wanting. Finally, the paper offers some critical remarks about the prospect of denying (P2). (shrink)