Michael Ridge

Ecumenical Expressivism: Finessing Frege

Metaethical expressivism has many virtues. It can explain the depth of moral disagreement, fits easily into a naturalistic world view, and can explain how moral judgment guides action. Moreover, so-called quasirealist forms of expressivism can accommodate many of the realistsounding things we say. However, expressivism seems to have trouble making sense of utterances in which moral predicates occur in unasserted contexts. While we might be able to make sense of “torture is wrong” roughly along the lines of “Boo for torture!” it is hard to see how an account of this sort could deal with utterances like “If torture is wrong then Camp X-Ray should be abolished.” A speaker can accept the latter without disapproving of torture or Camp X-Ray. Moreover, any extension of expressivism to deal with such utterances must accommodate the validity of arguments in which they are premises. Since this problem comes to us through the work of P. T. Geach and is analogous to a problem Frege once posed for certain theories of negation, it is usually referred to as the “Frege-Geach problem.” In this article I articulate a new version of expressivism called “Ecumenical Expressivism,” which can avoid the Frege-Geach problem altogether. A crucial idea is that expressivism can and should embrace the thesis that moral utterances express both desires and beliefs. Before turning to the FregeGeach problem, we must first do some philosophical spadework to uncover the logical space Ecumenical Expressivism occupies.

The Many Moral Particularisms

What place, if any, moral principles should or do have in moral life has been a longstanding question for moral philosophy. For some, the proposition that moral philosophy should strive to articulate moral principles has been an article of faith. At least since Aristotle, however, there has been a rich counter-tradition that questions the possibility or value of trying to capture morality in principled terms. In recent years, philosophers who question principled approaches to morality have argued under the banner of moral particularism. Particularists can be found in diverse areas of philosophical inquiry, and their positions and arguments are of broad interest.1 Despite its importance, a proper evaluation of particularism has been hindered both by the diversity of arguments employed to defend it, and, perhaps more significantly, by the diversity of positions that can fairly claim to be particularist.

Non-Cognitivist Pragmatics and Stevenson's ‘Do so as well’

Meta-ethical non-cognitivism makes two claims a negative one and a positive one. The negative claim is that moral utterances do not express beliefs which provide the truth-conditions for those utterances. The positive claim is that the primary function of such utterances is to express certain of the speakers desire-like states of mind. Non-cognitivism is officially a theory about the meanings of moral words, but non-cognitivists also maintain that moral states of mind are themselves at least

Mill's Intentions and Motives

One might have thought that any right-thinking utilitarian would hold that motives and intentions are morally on a par, as either might influence the consequences of ones actions. However, in a neglected passage of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill claims that the lightness of an action depends ‘entirely upon the intention’ but does not at all depend upon the motive. In this paper I try to make sense of Mills initially puzzling remarks about the relative importance of intentions and motives in a way that high-lights the importance of other elements of his moral philosophy and action theory.

Agent-neutral Consequentialism from the Inside-out: Concern for Integrity without Self-indulgence

Consequentialists are sometimes accused of being unable to accommodate all the ways in which an agent should care about her own integrity. Here it is helpful to follow Stephen Darwall in distinguishing two approaches to moral theory. First, we might begin with the value of states of affairs and then work our way ‘inward’ to our integrity, explaining the value of the latter in terms of their contribution to the value of the former. This is the ‘outside-in’ approach, and Darwall argues that it is well-suited to defending consequentialism. Alternatively, we might begin with the perspective of a virtuous agents concern for her integrity, and then work our way ‘outward’, building a conception of the value of states of affairs from this perspective. On this ‘inside-out’ account there is a kind of agent-centred concern each agent should have for her own integrity simply because it is her own . The inside-out approach therefore suggests a possible rationale for a non-consequentialist moral theory, in so far as such a fundamental egocentric concern for ones own integrity seems alien to consequentialisms commitment to the agent-neutrality of value. If this is correct then the consequentialist should explain why we should prefer the outside-in approach to its rival. I argue that the consequentialist can meet this challenge.

Turning on Default Reasons

Particularism takes an extremely ecumenical view of what considerations might count as reasons and thereby threatens to ‘flatten the moral landscape’ by making it seem that there is no deep difference between, for example, pain, and shoelace color. After all, particularists have claimed, either could provide a reason provided a suitable moral context. To avoid this result, some particularists draw a distinction between default and non-default reasons. The present paper argues that all but the most deflationary ways of drawing this distinction are either implausible or else insufficient to help the particularist avoid flattening the moral landscape. The difficulty can be avoided, however, if we reject particularisms extremely ecumenical view of reasons.

Aesthetics and Particularism

We begin with a pair of scenarios: On Tuesday, Edgar is hosting an opening at his gallery. Art Maison, for his friend, the up and coming painter Andrew. Knowing that this is an important opportunity for Andrew, Edgar has assured him that he will do his best to bring off the event successfully. Edgar also knows that proper lighting is critical for art to look its best, and several bulbs at the gallery have recently gone dead and need to be replaced. But a trip to the store is inconvenient, and, for no better reason than that, he neglects to replace them. As a consequence, at the opening Andrew’s paintings are less impressive than they otherwise would be.

Normative certitude for expressivists

Quasi-realists aspire to accommodate core features of ordinary normative thought and discourse in an expressivist framework. One apparent such feature is that we can be more or less confident in our normative judgments—they vary in credence. Michael Smith has argued that quasi-realists cannot plausibly accommodate these distinctions simply because they understand normative judgments as desires, but desires lack the structure needed to distinguish these three features. Existing attempts to meet Smith’s challenge have accepted Smith’s presupposition that the way to meet the challenge is to show that normative judgments have more structure than they initially seem to have. I argue that accepting this presupposition is accepting too much. The orthodox view of certitude, insofar as there is one, understands certitude very roughly in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour. Counterfactual betting behaviour, though, is not in any useful sense a structural feature of a given judgment. It is rather a more holistic feature of a given agent’s cognitive system. Insofar as it can meet the other challenges it faces, quasi-realism can characterize credences in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour and effectively say exactly what many realists will want to say about credences, thus meeting Smith’s challenge much more directly.

How children learn the meanings of moral words: Expressivist semantics for children

Moral philosophy has long neglected children. This neglect has perhaps become most embarrassingly obvious in certain areas of first-order moral theorizing, but has also left its mark on discussions of moral psychology and metaethics. One facet of this neglect, admirably highlighted by Joshua Gert, is that debates over expressivism have ignored the question of how children could learn the meanings of moral words if expressivism were true. Moreover, this neglect has not been limited to philosophers. If experts in the field are correct, then the question has been neglected by developmental psychologists too: “A particularly interesting domain is the acquisition of moral terms like fair and wrong. An examination of how children learn such words would enlighten us not only about language development but also about the nature and development of moral thought. But with the exception of a fascinating discussion by MacNamara (1991), this domain of word learning has been ignored in the developmental literature.” Gert argues that the prospects for an account of how children could learn an expressivist semantics for moral words are not encouraging. Very roughly, Gert argues that the fact that ex-

Moral Realism: A Defence

Book Information Moral Realism: A Defence. Moral Realism: A Defence Russ Shafer-Landau, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 2003, x + 322, £35 (cloth) By Russ Shafer-Landau. Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. x + 322. £35 (cloth:),